As the Germans and some other people have learned to their displeasure, Britons respond with stubborn ferocity when confronted with a head-on assault. On the other hand, their attitude toward daily life is annoyingly passive. They prefer waiting for a challenge to making one. Scratch an ordinary American, and you find a man with a dream, a scheme, a plan. He will save the world or get filthy rich or, usually, both. Generally, of course, his scheme is crackers, but isn't that part of the fun? Ordinary Britons, by contrast, prefer to go from one day to the next. This is not to say that some of them, indeed many of them, do not dream grandly and scheme absurdly. But the schemer, as a type, is not an icon; the survivor is.
Grandiose daydreaming is silly. It is also economically indispensable. Look around the world. In Hong Kong and China and Hollywood and Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial vigor is the generator of cultural energy. Now, it is true that the Victorians were fantastically energetic. No society ever achieved so much, so quickly, as they. But their achievers were an elite class which crumbled. In today's world, it is the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people that make societies sparkle. The raw greed of the man in the street is today's grand engine of social progress.
Americans both adulate and abhor the businessman who is wildly successful, and thus brilliantly greedy: Bill Gates is both dazzling innovator and fiendish monopolist, Sam Walton both retailing genius and downtown destroyer. The British, for all of the Labour Party's class-warfare rhetoric, seem rather bored with tycoons. Brilliant businessmen either exist or they do not; where they come from is not particularly interesting, and where they arrive not wildly enviable. Has Rupert Battleax become chairman of Glaxo? Yawn. That's nice. Ah, but he has also been created Baronet of Frognal--now that is impressive! Sir Rupert, to you! This, a great many Britons notice and care about.
I exaggerate, but to make a point. To me, that a grown person in 1996 might in all seriousness go about calling himself Lord So-and-So is vaguely pitiable. That it goes on today says something, I believe, about the misapplication of British greed. Personally, I have more use, and thus more esteem, for a plumber than for a duke, and still more esteem for the plumber who becomes a big plumbing contractor and then diversifies into real estate. Whereas, according to opinion surveys, the British rank entrepreneurs no higher than plumbers as contributors to society. A very sorry regard, when you consider the state of British plumbing. Indeed, the low state of British plumbing and the low status of British entrepreneurship may have something to do with each other.
Whatever else she got wrong, I think, Mrs. Thatcher was right about this: What Britain needs is visionary greed. But then, she is Baroness Thatcher now. Lady T., to you.
Mad Uncle Sam
Well, enough finger-wagging. The British do all right. They have strong and decent core values, and maintain them without the bluster and insecurity of Americans. British politicians are honest enough so that scandals are typically about sex rather than money (of how many countries can that be said?). Notwithstanding the soccer yobs, domestic peace and tranquillity generally prevail. The crime rate has risen, but most people are physically quite safe. There is nothing like the routine savagery of America.
Something else is greatly to be prized: From an American's point of view, race relations, specifically black-white relations, are enviable. Not perfect, certainly, but better, by a long shot, than in America, which is supposed to be a melting pot but which cannot, and may never, retire its racial debts. One does not feel, in Britain, that blacks and whites speak past each other across a cultural divide that deepens even as it narrows. One does not feel that every conflict between a black party and a white one must sooner or later erupt into molten insinuations about race. Britons manage to be remarkably tolerant, and what is even nicer is that they do it with so little fuss. They do not make a fetish of "multiculturalism" and "diversity" and the rest of the sensitivity industry. They just get on with getting along. That comes from what is worst but also ultimately best about them. The Brits put one foot ahead of the other. It is true that they are not disposed to dream and scheme; that is why their culture is so terminally dull and pervasively mediocre. But they also are not lunatic. And there is something to be said, in the end, for not being lunatic.
American culture is vibrant because it is mad. Possessed of a good idea or a worthy impulse, Americans invariably drive it to ludicrous extremes, until it breaks down, runs out of control, or curdles to toxicity. We are a people dedicated to the proposition that any sound idea can be transformed into dangerous craziness, if one only tries a bit. Should justice be scrupulously fair? Then let there be the O.J. Simpson circus. Should youth aspire to fly? Then put a 7-year-old in the cockpit. Should biodiversity be preserved and the handicapped helped? Then let the law say that not a single species may ever be allowed to die off, and not a single theater seat or city bus or public toilet may be inaccessible to wheelchairs. Should women be accorded equality and respect? Then proclaim that to kiss without asking is rape, and turn eye-color compliments into "workplace harassment." Is self-defense a worthy right? Then let everyone own semi- automatic rifles and buy handguns by the carton, preferably through the mail. Is ethnic sensitivity a good thing? Then scour the language to get rid of all such words as gyp and welsh. Should people be free, high-spirited, pious? Then let them also be libertine, wanton, cultist.
In America, nothing is finished until it has been rendered absurd. Show an American an interesting idea, and he runs away waving it and touting it and wearing it on his head till you only wish he would, for God's sake, drop dead. America is a land of dreams, and also of dreams run amok. That is why, so often, American wackos are not mere crazies, but crazies in the grip of a theory. The cultist David Koresh with his millenarian ravings, the terrorist Unabomber with his 30,000 word Luddite Theory of Everything, the right-wing "militiaman" who rails against infernal United Nations conspiracies: What makes them so distinctively American is not their dangerous nuttery, but their devotion to some not altogether crazy idea pushed far around the bend.
Dull John Bull
The Japanese are not besotted with theories or driven to every extreme in the American fashion, but they are a bit crazy too. Groups of them will do any conceivable mad thing, so long as they do it together: anything for the team. Every so often, the newspapers turn up something like the Japanese elementary school that requires its students to go naked in the snow, the better to toughen them up. One thinks of Japan and America as opposites, but they are alike in their penchant for weirdness.
The British, by contrast, have about them a quality of flat-footed, truculent empiricism which makes it quite difficult to convince them of anything very stupid. Show them an edge, and they instinctively recoil. Largely as a result, their culture lacks sizzle. Although London is a newspaper town without peer, the British intellectual press, such as it is, is flaccid and lazy. The BBC is a wasteland of mediocrity and tedium, occasionally enlivened by bursts of mediocrity and pretension. Even when American television is ditzy or vulgar, which is often, it understands that its job is to tickle the eye and to entertain, whereas the BBC's theory is that TV is radio with pictures attached.
British cinema lacks passion on the one hand and entertainment value on the other. West End theater, though admirable in its catholicity, has traded much of its former adventurousness for a slick proficiency akin to Broadway's, but without Broadway's past- jewel dazzle. London is a big and important city, but by the side of New York or L.A. (or Tokyo) it has the feeling of a slowpoke: Except arguably in finance, it is rarely at the cutting edge. Culturally, Britain resolutely refuses to fizz.
And that, you see, is because Britain is not insane. It does offer, I admit, the odd bit of agreeably crazy news. There is the occasional murderous middle-class couple burying cut- up corpses in the basement, and the odd monster sighted on Bodmin Moor (a pussycat, as it so Britishly turned out to be); and, it must be said, the British do a sex scandal with panache. There is mad-cow disease.
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