Pinter exits stage left

I dunno, maybe it’s me — I’ve never gotten the works of the recently departed playwright Harold Pinter, but then I’ve never gotten John Coltrane, either. So maybe it’s me.

But I can’t stand him. Yes, I hate torture, and I thought the invasion of Iraq a huge mistake, and I hope that the Guantánamo prison camp is closed as soon as possible — all positions that concur with Pinter. But he struck me as a pompous blowhard, the 21st century equivalent of Col. Blimp as he cuddled with Castro, embraced Milosevic, and trashed the United States.

“You have to hand it to America,” he said in accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature. “It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love.”

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