Days after declaring that he was going on holiday, Mr Oliver Kamm popped up on a Left blog message board in the dead of night to argue over the translation of the word ‘fraktion’ into English. I suppose it beats lying on the beach.
I first came across Kamm’s name a few years ago at Amazon.com. where he would write long and detailed reviews of books, or ‘screeds’, he deemed ‘worthless’ or ‘egregious’ . I did at one point wonder whether ‘Oliver Kamm’, like George Kaplan in North by North West, was simply a non-existent person, an empty name, behind which there lurked only a CIA committee for the defamation of Noam Chomsky. Anyway, a second ‘Oliver Kamm’ then appeared, claiming to be married to a Norwegian tree surgeon, apparently inhabiting the same pneumatic lexical world as his namesake, only pumped up a few notches. Lampooner Kamm ii then had some of his reviews removed, presumably after protestations from the 'lampoonee'. Not long after this, Kamm i’s output seemed to dry up entirely. Indeed, it stopped. The CIA committee had done it’s work, perhaps. I thought no more of it..
Cut to a few years later. Doing some research on the net I find that the (one time?) Marxist Norman Geras has a web-blog. Reading it, I am intrigued by a name in the links column. ‘Oliver Kamm’. I am then transported through the ether to that same inimitable world, a world of ‘canards’ and ‘tergiversations’, where people invariably ‘promulgate’ ideas, ‘screeds’ and 'tracts' roll off printing presses, states are replaced by ‘polities’ , words like ‘jemmy’ are charitably rescued from the more obscure pages of the thesaurus, and the vernacular is confined to its quarters below stairs while, above it, gentlemen engage in rhetorical spats.
Anyway, I conveniently find on Mr Kamm’s site, an explanation, albeit not by him, but by one of his court eunuchs, of his ‘self appointed task [indeed]’
“ His self-appointed task (if I may presume to have sussed it out) is to disassemble and expose the shoddy and potentially harmful political philosophy of some of our more prized intellectuals, as well as that of high-profile fringe characters, in hopes that the democratic argument will not be waylaid by proposals that a meticulous analysis and faithful memory can show to be wanting.” [by the way, what's that Latin phrase that means 'in the style of the master'?]
Yes, although I suppose for the sake of balance, I should quote another perspective on Mr Kamm's output: “a jumped-up bank clerk forever reliving the ephemeral triumphs of his youth in some sixth-form debating society.”