Letter from LondonI’ll admit it: I’m an Anglophobe. I have an abiding resentment for English depredations against the colonials over 200 years ago. I hold the British monarchy in utter contempt. I think Eric Clapton sucks. Chalk it up to democratic prejudice: I dislike the British because they sometimes rest easy with the whole notion of an upper class, which I have no use for unless it is on the receiving end of class warfare. And I’m not apologizing for it. It’s part of my broader unthinking rebellion against all things, minor and major, undemocratic. A healthy loathing for the idea of tipping. Resentment at expensive cars. Disdain towards USA Today. So why am I in London? Mostly to visit Tonia’s father—but also to search out a Britain I do admire, to reconnect myself to that subterranean current of Anglo-Saxon democratic culture, the one expressed during the American Civil War, when the sheer force of British labor unions kept the blue bloods from backing the slaveowners. I’m not sure that culture is there anymore. Ever since Thatcher tied the pompous inanities of their landed gentry to the corrupt rationalizations of our Reaganites, the British have been at the forefront in aping the stupidest aspects of American culture; they have, furthermore, been pimping that benighted dreck all over Europe. Earlier this year, when I was in Germany, I noticed the British have started broadcasting the Piccadilly version of NBC (I immediately wondered how the ever-obedient Germans would respond to imperative of "Must-See TV"). The portents were not good. I’m not given to portents, but in the history of London, there are two devastating incidents, a plague in 1665 and a fire 1666, which occurred after the regicide of Charles I and the English Civil War and I can’t help but think that the good Pilgrim Londoners saw them as punishments and portents of divine wrath. So I’m given, as a tourist exercise, to discerning omens on this trip. And, as I said, the portents are not good. At the airport newsstand, the magazine covers all featured that paragon of British aristocracy, corpse-of-the-year, Princess Diana. Well, I’m not one to piss all over the public’s shadenfreude. Let’s face it: she’s pop-pop-popular because she’s dead-dead-dead. Diana’s proof once more that high birth and taxpayer subsidies really don’t get you much more in the end than is gotten by the lowliest baggage handler at Heathrow. At least the airport PA featured "Sun King" by the Beatles. Not a bad song to have playing in your head as you travel. Besides which, the Beatles were one of the best things ever to come out of England, and that counts for a lot when you tally it up. Because the Brits have given to the world gin, tea, sugar, cigarette smoking, coal smokestacks, colonialism and tanks, just to name a few. They’ve peddled most wretched soporifics and stimulants—hell, they even fought a war for the right to addict poor Chinese to opium. And democracy? It used to be, one hundred years ago, that every Anglo-American hack busy proving what shits the immigrants were claimed England as the ancestral birthplace of liberty and democracy. Or, since the English gave the world democracy, their American ancestors had every right to deny it to those who weren’t descended of Englishmen. The British, on their own, used the same thinking to strip liberty from the Arabs, the Zulus, the Indians, the Malaysians, the Aboriginals and the Maori—a sunset of self-rule that accompanied the creation of the Empire upon which the sun never set. A lot like the way Americans are spreading democracy across the globe with free markets today. British imperialists are everywhere in London. Their statues adorn the city like a gray frock: Cecil Rhodes, Jan Smuts, Lord Nelson, The Viscount Slim, countless Her Imperial Majesty’s governors, admirals, generals, bagmen and enforcers. They set out down the Thames to parts distant and killed with impunity and earned the everlasting gratitude of their countrymen. And waxed nostalgic, there in the sun-drenched and easy-living tropics, for the drizzling mists and coal smoke of their miserable little island. That is devotion. Writers and poets are the only other class of people to get statues in London. Pepys and Jonson and Shakespeare and everywhere Dickens. They get their own corner in Westminster Abbey, directly across from the statesmen and imperialists. A culture that admires simultaneously the active glories of soldiers and the reflective insights of writers is somewhat incongruous. But the Brits showed the world how to square the circle: they were the first to produce the soldier-poet, Lord Tennyson and Kipling and Rupert Brooke and other singers of the victories of the Crimea and Flanders, given to long, deep meditations on valor, honor, and the white man’s burden. They have statues here too, on the Victoria Embankment, a walk along the Thames, near Cleopatera’s Needle, a 3500-year-old obelisk pock-marked and scarred by shrapnel from a bombing in WWI. There are statues in London I like. There’s a hilarious chalk cenotaph in the middle of Parliament Street inscribed plainly and simply with "Our Glorious Dead." Oliver Cromwell is right in front of Parliament, ironic given that the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth got so tired of the legislature that he whittled it down to a rump, and finally abolished it altogether. But still, it’s hard to dislike a man who showed the aristocracy what for, and gave Charles I such an extreme haircut. And tucked into a corner of Parliament Square is a statute of Honest Abraham Lincoln. Of course, he faces the backside of Disraeli and Peel and Canning, but still, it surprised me. It shouldn’t have. There is a common historical narrative linking Britain and America. It goes like this: Both nations are born in inequality and brutality, but gradually the light of reason and democracy prevails, and slowly, event by event, occurs the expansion of rights and liberties from the narrow province of the nobility to all men, and eventually, to men of different races and to women. Thus King John is forced to concede to the barons; Parliament gains rights for the nobility from James I; the reform Parliament of 1833 and the Reform Bill of 1867 extends power to the commons; The Commons gains ascendancy in 1911 and a Labour government, female suffrage and the welfare state soon follow. It’s more complex than the American evolution of liberty from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to Roosevelt, but it’s nonetheless a grand tale, one that used to be common when I was a schoolboy. Like all historical tales, it loses much in the telling. What wasn’t taught me in school (and, I suspect, was also omitted in British schools), was that at every stage of progress, the expansion of rights and liberties was determinedly opposed by groups of people who gained much by the status quo, Lords and Tories and members of the Chamber of Commerce, who never cared too much for reason, democracy and progress. They’ve been at it since before the Enlightenment, and have been hacking away at the Enlightenment—at the intellectual rationale for reason, democracy and progress--ever since. Burke started chopping during the French Revolution, but the most powerful blows have come since by intellectuals and politicians who oppose reason, democracy and progress on the grounds that people just aren’t made for it. The intellectual precepts of the Enlightenment, they insist, are random beliefs, none more sure than any other, none sanctioned by any more noble cause than sheer self-interest. Never mind that James and Dewey made hash of this argument at the turn of the 19th century—it’s a notion that’s made a roaring comeback in our time, riding a wave of greed over the shallow intellectual depths of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. The tide is tending towards it in New York and in London: it’s the creed of the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, and orthodoxy to the novitiates on both shores cloistered for their MBAs. It’s an attitude that’s profoundly Victorian, and one obvious in Victoria’s capital. Even as, in Victorian times, British labor demanded fair wages and collective bargaining, public sanitation and national health, and most importantly, universal education, the leading men of the day, paragons of respectability all, thought these things best confined to people of character, and Devil take the hindmost. Their apostle, Herbert Spencer, denigrated all that progress as folly, out of step with human nature and abominable. He had his education; no need for his stableboy to have the same. After all, had the stableboy been a man of character, he would have gone out and got an education, regardless. Picked himself up by his bootstraps. Worked extra hard. Today’s advertisers on the London Underground echo that mantra. A billboard for cold medicine proclaims: What kind of person goes to work ill?—The one after your job. An ad for a vitamin tablet insists that It’s true successful people are on something. And so on and so forth, each poster blaring at the overworked commuter that he or she isn’t really putting in the hours, or that a discretionary purchase can help you get a leg up on the competition. It’s a new global economy: anyone can get rich if only they work hard enough and buy the right consumer products. The converse is also true: if you’re poor—hell, if you’re even middle class—it’s because you can’t cut the mustard, don’t have the goods, or are morally impaired. Never mind that inherited wealth can get even the dumbest fool a fair education and good business connections—especially if they golf well. Wealth, as Spencer was quick to point out over 100 years ago, is a sign of evolutionary favor, and inherited wealth is like passing on the right kind of genes. In Victorian society, you were supposed to play the hand you were dealt, even if the deck was stacked against you. It took the concerted efforts of scientists and socialists to put such shibboleths to rest, and build good schools, sound sewers and social security. The sign of their failure is how omnipresent such Victorian arguments are in our time. In fact, in this ancient city, it’s obvious that the trends are retrograde and that our new, global, technocratic elite is determined to take us back into the future. Back before the New Deal and the economics of that obnoxious Londoner, John Maynard Keynes; back before the triumph of Labour and the Progressive era; back into the day of the class divide, the Robber Baron, and Mr. Gradgrind. Already London is filled with the homeless, a Dickensian echo of the era of the Poor Law and the workhouse. They sit on the steps of the Theater district and beg for pence from the well heeled who’ve had a wonderful evening out. In this, London is the equal of post-Reagan New York in post-Thatcher misery, and, if the Blair government has its way, it will become worse: on the day Tonia and I visited the House of Commons, they were debating the Blair government’s "Welfare to Work," program. It’s the same program Clinton offered as part of "welfare reform" in America; that is, in a time of tight labor markets, the best way to lower wages is to throw as many people off the dole and into the unskilled ranks as possible. Thus, under the rubric of reform will the wages of workers in industrialized nations be forced to approximate those in Indonesia. Thus does Blair, the proconsul of Wall Street, reform and extend the immersiration of working people begun by Thatcher. Back to the future. In Victorian London, upper and middle-class women were forced into corsets and bindings and affected a wan, sickly and neuraesthetic comportment in their isolated parlors. Tonia pointed out that in neo-Victorian London, models in shop windows and young women in the streets affect a thin, sickly and heroin-addicted visage, their bodies as bound by anorexia and fasting as were the Victorians by whalebone and lace. One ad in the Underground featured a skeletal model, hair finely coiffured and ribs sticking out from her tight dress, with the tag line "Put Some Weight On"--the product sold being a heavy wristwatch featured in the photo high on the woman’s birdlike arm, about where a heroin addict would tie the vein for a quick fix. And on the other side of the class divide, the girlie magazines all feature large bosomed, hale working women, the very image of the working girl enshrined in Victorian culture, those halcyon days when assignations with prostitutes were every gentleman’s prerogative. By the way, as it was in Victorian London, prostitution is everywhere, with the hookers, in discreet British fashion, leaving their "calling cards"—small posters featuring a phone number and a photo (usually of a large bosomed, hale woman)—pasted to the walls of London’s famous red-painted phone booths. Back to the future. But in a city with London’s depth of history, marked by the medieval glories of Westminster Abby and the Tower of London, we can progress back further than the Victorian age, especially given that the intellectual foundation of our retrogressive time is rooted in a rejection of the reason, democracy and progress of the Enlightenment. Why not return to a pre-enlightened age? What was once called by scholars (before they began their postmodern revisions) the Dark Ages? It was a time when the known world was united by a nominal Christian creed but power was concentrated in the hands of ruthless, powerful nobility, who controlled the prerogatives and dominated the lives of their subordinates. A time when the lives of serfs were bound by their labor, whose existence was brightened by the occasional pilgrimage, the Carnival, the identification with the celebrated and godly and supernatural. In our age of triumphal, if nominal, global democracy, who would be so rude to suggest that real power is concentrated in the hands of the Bill Gateses, Richard Bransons and Rupert Murdochs of the world? Or that the lives of average people are bound increasingly to harsh toil, lessened by the occasional pilgrimage to EuroDisney in Paris, or the carnival of the Virgin Superstore, or identification with the Spice Girls, Princess Diana or the omnipresent angels celebrated in The Daily Mail? Such a suggestion makes hash of our schoolboy narratives of democracy, of that statue of Lincoln the Great Emancipator in Parliament Square, of our comfortable assurance that, on the cusp of a new millennium, we are progressing to a new and more vibrant future. But this is what New Year’s Eve, 1998, in London on the cusp of the millennium, was like: Tonia’s father, who is temporarily living in London, took us to a New Year’s dinner. He’s an extremely decent man and thought he would take us to a special meal, one that would spare no expense, and treat us to something typically British. He had done it earlier in the trip, treating us to the archetypal establishment British lunch at Rules. So he asked around and his English colleagues told him to take us to the Green Room, a restaurant in an old hotel near Trafalgar Square. He thought, I’m sure, he was buying a quality meal with quiet ambiance. He’s got that kind of a temperament. But he’s new to London and what we got was a not-especially-good meal and a garish floorshow featuring an Abba cover band named Fabba. Which turned out to be fun anyway, and Herb and Jane’s company was so fine that we enjoyed ourselves immensely. What they weren’t aware of, I’m sure, was something Tonia and I picked up on immediately: the place was swarming with prostitutes, with young, high-class call girls of every ethnicity and nationality accompanying decrepit, old rich men. And not to put a provincially American moralistic bent on it, but the corruption was palpable. Which is to say, from a perfectly neo-Victorian or neo-medieval perspective, perfectly natural. Why shouldn’t doddering old geezers avail themselves of the finest impoverished and desperate flesh from every point of the empire? In the new global economy those girls were making a perfectly rational economic decision, one that they seemed quite comfortable with after several stiff drinks and a trip to the bathroom to shoot drugs. So we set aside any moral qualms and, as I said, enjoyed our evening.
And emerged, around one, into a Trafalgar Square teeming with celebrants
and carnivalists, so much so that we couldn’t find a cab, so we took
off by foot down Regent’s Street. And on New Year’s Eve, 1998, in London
on the cusp of the millennium, it began to rain, hard and cold. Followed
quickly, by hail.
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