Britain to America: ‘Don’t Let This Happen to You!’

by Charles Winecoff

When I was a kid, American Idol wasn’t even a twinkle in Simon Cowell’s eye.  No, instead of Adam Lambert’s girly warbling, we listened to wrinkled pacifist Walter Cronkite rattle off the US body count as we ate our TV dinners.  (Thank God for I Love Lucy re-runs.)

But Vietnam wasn’t the only war raging.  There was a culture clash going on too, right in the privacy of our own home: the ’60s counterculture – seen in everything from Easy Rider to The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour - versus our deeply ingrained Anglophilia.  In other words, a tug of war between “social justice” and the Social Register.

Decades before it became cool to diss the Queen with an iPod, the Royals represented everything Americans were not, and never could be: educated, sophisticated, multi-lingual, above carrying cash – and worldly enough to know one doesn’t clean one’s antiques (think no housework).  Growing up in our comfy, middle class, anti-war household, I never knew if I was supposed to say “burn, baby, burn!” or “sod off, yank.”

This dichotomy took a psychic toll, which came to a head when I did my part for the revolution by proudly shoplifting a ballpoint pen from our local Lamston’s (”the establishment”).  To my amazement, my parents were not pleased.  Instead of a gold star, I received a verbal barrage of uncharacteristic cliches (”Do you think we send you to the best schools so you can steal?” ) that left me even more confused.

As I came of age, I often felt like an unsocialized, feral child who had been raised by animals, left to learn civilized human behavior on my own, from scratch - a nice, white casualty of the rootless, rudderless, barbaric peace movement.

A few years later, when I was old enough to know better, President Bill Clinton was caught with his pants down; it never even occurred to me that the public outcry might have something to do with the fact he had lied about his abuse of power.  I believed as I was taught, that it was “just about sex” – those evil Republicans again, trying to stop ”the first black President” from, as one friend put it, “being himself.”

I assumed the Clinton scandal was a purely American phenomenon, just another sleazy export of our junk culture that was (I was told) the cause of so much violence and hatred around the world (from the innocent peasants who chose to import it).  We had always been, and would always be, the proverbial “ugly Americans.”  How our classy progenitors over there on the British isles must be shaking their heads.  In 200 quickie years, America had amounted to little more than a wasteland of cheeseburgers and fat asses.

But after I entered the work force, I began to see, little by little, chinks in the mythic armor.  British tabloids, for instance, were far more salacious than our National Enquirer (which, at this point, boasts a higher record for accuracy than The New York Times).  And wasn’t it the UK that unleashed frumpy, passive-aggressive Neely O’Hara wannabe Susan Boyle on us?  This was a far cry from the days of Noel and Gertie – or even Tom Jones and Petula Clark!

No, my fellow Americans, the British Empire ain’t what it used to be.  The tables have turned.  As British film critic Cosmo Landesman puts it in Peter Whittle’s new book, Private Views: Voices from the Front Line of British Culture, ”In the old days the Americans would export rubbish to us, now it’s the British who export rubbish to the Americans.”

Citing “the whole Pop Idol thing” that brought American Idol to our shores – insensitively (to Muslims, that is) right after 9/11 - Landesman blames the herd mentality of today’s reality TV generation on ”an attempt to democratise culture that began in the 1960s, generated by people of the Left.  And many of those people on the Left are now horrified.  Big Brother is their child….”  (But I thought Leftists were supposed to be so “smart.”  Janeane Garofalo, are you listening?)

Rest assured: Private Views is about cultural decline in England, not the USA.  The book offers 17 refreshingly articulate interviews with writers, artists, and even a politician – but, thankfully, no actors or singers - that prove you’re not dreaming.  All conducted by Whittle, the founder and director of a London think tank called The New Culture Forum, these lively chats explore the current crisis of British national identity, which has been gradually undermined by multiculturalism, and examine the UK’s own rift between Left and Right, particularly in the arts.  (BIll O’Reilly, eat your heart out.)

Private Views gives a much-needed morale boost to Americans struggling with their own national inferiority complex.  As North Carolina-born, expatriate novelist Lionel Shriver points out, “Europeans use the United States to feel morally superior.  They’re under the illusion that what drives European politics is virtue, and what drives American politics is self-interest.”  That’s a lie our own media drives home every chance it gets – capitalism has failed! – in the ongoing effort to bludgeon us into national healthcare submission.

But is it true?  Shriver thinks not.  “Europeans are great on talk,” she says, ”but they don’t put their money where their mouth is.  They don’t put their troops where their mouths are.  They’re big on diplomacy, because diplomacy is cheap.”  Ouch.

Meanwhile, even in erudite England, it’s not the trailer trash who are turning into pod people; it’s the privileged spawn of the Orwellian university system.  Leftwing groupthink is just as prevalent and palpable in the rarefied art galleries and theatres of London as it is in New York or Hollywood.  Just like us, Britain’s lads and laddettes are media-driven lambs, addicted to texting, Twitter and “telly.”

According to Landesman, “the dumbing down isn’t among the masses: the dumbing down is among the smart people, the cultural people, who should know better.”  Standards?  Don’t kid yourself.  Says Landesman, “the new criterion is no longer good or bad: it’s what’s hot and what’s not.”

So, to recap: cultural Marxism, like Communism itself, has backfired – on the very same self-loathing, cerebral snobs who promoted it.  Jolly good!  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Scottish composer James MacMillan, an open supporter of Catholicism and a believer in the spiritual component of music, takes it a little deeper.  He blames British cultural decline on “a fetish with ideology…. A lot of the conceit in Europe is that they have this intellectual centre; but actually, it’s an intellectual culture that has been hijacked by a very stern intellectual Puritanism, which springs from Marx.

“Liberal elites,” he adds, “have been mugged by history.  Because their view of the history – that the future is secular – hasn’t happened…. So they are flailing around, attacking people like me and many others.”

How the Left hijacked the fine arts in the first place is an intriguing question.  Once upon a time, classical music, ballet, and opera were considered blueblood pastimes – or country club hobbies of nouveau riche American conservatives.  But now, at least in the States, all Republicans have left is country music.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But how did the hippies become culture vultures?

Call it complacency, or apathy – or a Western death wish.  “Shock jock” Jon Gaunt, England’s answer to Rush Limbaugh, explains that ”the Left just took over” – and he shoulders some of the blame.  A political apostate, Gaunt admits that, like many of us, ”I was one of them… I thought that was what you had to be.  I don’t think it was even a conscious thing.”

But, as is becoming clearer everyday, mass-producing artistic agitprop in a comfy liberal vacuum doesn’t leave much of lasting value.  (Will anyone be listening to the opera of An Inconvenient Truth 100 years from now?  Doubtful.  But you can bet Rigoletto will still be around.)

“The problem,” says West End playwright Richard Bean, “is that some people who think they’re cool and rebellious and oppositional – all they’re doing is writing plays against America, which is the most tedious and boring and brainless that you can do…. If what keeps you awake at night is how terrible George Bush is, that’s not going to make you a great playwright.”

Meanwhile, Hollywood remains the biggest offender when it comes to disseminating insidious liberal messages of self-hatred.  Many intelligent and talented conservatives I know actually go out of their way to avoid exposure to acclaimed TV series like 30 Rock and blockbuster movies like Angels and Demons - because they don’t want to risk anymore left-wing brainwashing than they have to.

And Masterpiece Theatre alone can’t save an entire empire.  The Brit media, with its frenzied focus on celebrity, is like TMZ on steroids, a nonstop, mind-numbing propaganda factory - as punk rocker-turned-conservative activist Dame Vivienne Westwood puts it, “to stop you thinking” so that you “go along, with no criticism of the world you live in, just accepting and lapping up all the stupidities.”

Hence, cultural illiteracy is all the rage for the Susan Boyle generation, who, by and large, have no knowledge of, or curiosity about, films made before E.T. or books written before The Da Vinci Code.  They’re content being spoon-fed bland, derivative pabulum that makes no mental demands – the pop equivalent of junk food.

“We live in a culture that doesn’t encourage passion,” notes black stand-up comedian Reginald D. Hunter.  “And it is a factory mentality…. Everyone has shared perceptions.  And our shared perceptions are shaped by reading and watching the same things.  It’s become homogenised.”  Here in the States, despite her much-touted book club, Oprah Winfrey has been killing us softly for decades.

According to Daniel Johnson, editor of the center-right cultural and political monthly Standpoint, “books about everything are very popular at the moment.  And the Internet is another very powerful tool, which again gives people a smattering of knowledge – a kind of illusion of knowledge…. They don’t really need to have much first-hand acquaintance with the past.  They don’t need to actually learn anything.

“We are producing generations of children now, who are going to be very shallow human beings, who are not going to resist when they’re confronted by a threat to the West.  Because they are not going to realise how precious the things are now that they have to defend.  If you don’t know what you’re losing, then why should you fight to defend it?”

Johnson certainly isn’t alone in his concern.  Writers from Oriana Fallaci and Mark Steyn to Melanie Phillips and Bruce Bawer have weighed in on the seemingly unstoppable Islamic conquest of the developed countries of Europe, including the UK.  In 2007, the member nations of the EU signed something called the “Lisbon Treaty,” which allows for the official implementation of a “European Arrest Warrant.”  Starting this year, one can now be automatically arrested and extradited for thought crimes such as ”racism and xenophobia.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has declared that “Islamization is inevitable.”  And in Britain, too, dhimmitude is “in.”  Last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, told BBC radio that he believed (misogynistic, homophobic) Islamic sharia law should be formally introduced in Limeyland.  And earlier this year, in an unprecedented move, (soon-to-be-ex-) Home Secretary Jacqui Smith barred Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering Great Britain for a screening of his unflinching and unapologetic film about Islamic supremacism, Fitna.

“Now we’re all becoming much better educated about Islam and what they believe, and how easily offended they are,” says Lionel Shriver.  “We talk about Islam all the time, and Islamists, and the Middle East, and we concern ourselves with their concerns.  Not because we’re tolerant, but out of a sense of fear…. we’ve been bullied into being interested in Islam.”

The same kind of passive, mental torpor has begun to snuff out American verve and self-respect as well.  Hence, few blink – or dare to dissent – when celebrity President Barack Obama rewrites history in Cairo, drawing moral equivalence between the Jewish Holocaust and the self-inflicted suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli “occupation.”

Of course, part of the problem is modernization itself; we’re so distanced from the reality of barbarism with our Blackberries and iPhones, we think savagery died out with the dinosaurs.  Instead, we bask in Obama’s calculated good vibes, unwilling to question why a superpower liberal democracy is bowing to tribal totalitarianism.

“It is self-hatred,” adds Shriver.  “And also a warped sense of chic.”

Fortunately for America, Europe’s way ahead of us – so we can watch them self-destruct first, and hopefully avoid their mistakes.  But that’s being optimistic.  Many Americans, resting passively on the assumption that our First Amendment is forever, dismiss the Islamic threat as mere right-wing “fear-mongering” – yet another distraction to be Tivo’d, or simply turned off.  When it comes to sharia’s clear and creeping global aspirations, Americans have a lot to learn.

“Totalitarianism is not dead,” Johnson reminds us.  “The desire to control everything is still very much around.”  But times heals everything – even our memories of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.  “Insofar as people know anything about Communism, they know that it was supposed to be all about sharing, and goody-goody things; whereas Nazism was all about racism, and we know that’s meant to be bad.  That’s about as far as most people get with the moral dimension of this.”

“The anger has gone from our generation,” 26-year-old playwright James Graham tells Whittle.  ”It’s just accepted that the left wing… is the right course.  I just don’t think that, in our minds, as a generation there are many debates to be had.”

Hence, the paucity of masterpieces coming out of the late great United Kingdom.  Artistic genius, notes sculptor Alexander Stoddart, “actually has the effect of stopping the dialectic – stopping speech.  This is why there’s a leftist antipathy to that kind of art.  The Left is predicated upon the dialectic imperative – that is People Making Speeches.”  (Remind you of anyone?)  “Putting a sock in it, and paying attention for once, is what makes some loathe both the opera and Sunday School.

“Conservatism, on the other hand,” he asserts, ”has a capacity to brave all sorts of silences – and stiff, studded collars, too!”

Several of Whittle’s participants believe the last chance for hope lies in unfashionable, ol’ time religion – the USA’s saving grace.  While Europe has traded in its sacred robes for a secular nanny uniform, America still cleaves to its humble trust in Natural Law and Divine Providence.  But thanks to Whittle, at least the Brits are talking about all this (and talk they do in Private Views - eloquently).

So the next time you feel a wave of “ugly American” insecurity start to wash over you – or a sudden urge to commit a petty act of PC kleptomania - turn off the TV, close your eyes, and think of England!

In the passionate words of Dame Westwood: “Follow culture, because otherwise you’ll be so easily disillusioned, you’ll feel so inadequate in front of this terrible thing [the future], that at least in your own life you’ll start to understand something about the whole history and the genius of the human race, and what it was, and hopefully what may still be.”


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Posted Jun 12th 2009 at 5:03 am in Entertainment, Featured Story, Media Criticism, Politics | 76 Comments