Name: May 1972.
Age: 47 years and one month old.
Appearance: When history became boring.
I’m pretty sure you are wrong. I’m pretty sure you are wrong.
Loads of interesting things have happened since May 1972. Rubbish. Name three.
OK: the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of Grumpy Cat. What is a Grumpy Cat?
Ah, right. There’s a fourth thing, then: the birth of Grumpy Cat. I’m so confused.
You’re confused? I’m not the one insisting that history suddenly stopped being interesting nearly five decades ago. But it’s what the American crime writer James Ellroy insists, too, and I love James Ellroy.
What did Ellroy say? Shall I look it up on the internet? What’s an internet?
Shut up. Look, I’ll save you the trouble. Ellroy was speaking at the Hay festival this weekend, and he said that he stopped being emotionally and intellectually curious about the world in May 1972.
Is that really what he said? Yes, and then he said: “Nothing after May of 72 vibrates my vindaloo.”
James Ellroy sounds like hard work. Nevertheless, we must take him at his word. In the world of Ellroy, the last major world incident must logically be the conclusion of Nixon and Brezhnev’s Moscow summit that resulted in the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
But why? Who really knows? My guess is that, as a prolific novelist, Ellroy has to hold an unbelievable amount of information in his head. His stories must take up the entire capacity of his mind, which is why he has essentially spent his entire adult life protecting himself against the suffocating tide of news that swamps the rest of us.
And he loves Chandler, too, and Chandler exists in the past. He doesn’t love Chandler. He told Hay: “Raymond Chandler is the most overrated writer in the American canon.”
So what prompted this whole “May 1972” outburst? By all accounts, it seems to be his way of wriggling out of any audience members asking about his feelings for Donald Trump.
Why? Is he a Trump supporter? It’s not out of the question. This is a man who, after all, told Rolling Stone that he spent the 1960s and 1970s as a rightwinger, and also denied that the police officers in the Rodney King scandal “did anything wrong”. So, you know, Donald Trump probably fits his personal brand.
So why not just admit it? Come on now. Ellroy might be a famed anti-liberalist who owns dozens of guns and writes books about murder and immorality, but he’s not an idiot.
Do say: News ended in May 1972.
Don’t say: So did James Ellroy’s relevance.
