Across the Pond (14 page)

Grumbling in Britain is a mild form of social dissidence. It is a way of rebelling against the current order of things without the bother of having to do anything about it, thus blunting the edge of one’s protest with a very British stoicism. It also involves a kind of negative solidarity: one grouses to others who in turn bellyache back, in an anthropological ritual whose gambits and conventions are intuitively understood. Discussing one’s physical ailments in gruesome detail, another time-honoured British pastime, is a similar form of negative solidarity. People take it for granted that doctors are useless and hospitals criminally incompetent, and compete with each other to produce the most blood-chilling medical anecdotes. Accidental amputations, hearts removed but not replaced, eyes left dangling on cheeks, cell phones, pork pies and cigarette lighters sewn up inside patients by mistake: all have been known to figure in this lugubrious one-upmanship. You can be obsessed with illness, however, without being neurotic about it, as some Americans are. The British assume that the body will break down from time to time, and would feel deprived of an agreeable topic of conversation if it did not. A super-efficient health service would plunder the nation of precious grumbling resources, thus leaving people with a lot less to say to each other. Contracting syphilis may be the only way to get to know the people next door.

Many of the British have an unerring conviction that the future will be different from the present, namely, worse. There are always fresh catastrophes just round the corner. For some Americans, there is also an unimaginable catastrophe just round the corner, but it is known as the Apocalypse and will have a positive outcome, at least for those who believe in it. Even the end of the world is not the end of the world. Some British attitudes to the future could be described as apocalypticism without the religion. History has been in steep decline ever since some indeterminate golden age. The nation’s best days have always gone. To adopt a phrase of Oscar Wilde’s, the British have a great future behind them. Even the golden age was not all it is cracked up to be. Even then, people glanced back nostalgically to some previous paradise. And even in Eden there was a snake in the garden. In the States, by contrast, one frequently hears that the nation’s best days lie ahead of it. In fact, this has probably been a constant refrain since the Pilgrim Fathers. It tacitly acknowledges that the present is not exactly brilliant, but does so in a way that avoids dwelling too despondently on the fact.

The attitude of the stereotypical British workman illustrates the nation’s generic glumness. Confronted with a blocked pipe or a broken radiator, he will stare at it in gloomy silence for several minutes, hand on hips, shake his head slowly and finally come out with a deep-throated “Nah.” There is, he will imply with funereal satisfaction, absolutely no way in which this disaster can be repaired. After a lengthy period of anxious questioning, in which one is obliged to participate as in some vital ritual at a voodoo ceremony, he will grudgingly admit that there might just be a way of fixing the problem, though it will be fiendishly complicated and insanely expensive. Ten minutes later, the repair will be complete, a modest amount of money will have changed hands, and the workman will have moved on to another bout of Nah-ing and head-shaking elsewhere.

Nothing could be further from everyday America. The United States is a land where for the most part things work. It is streamlined, efficient, labour-saving and economical. Service in bars and restaurants is prompt, cheerful and efficient. In Europe, by contrast, waiters can go to extraordinarily ingenious lengths to avoid serving you. One suspects they engage in competitions with each other over who can delay delivering food the longest. When they finally appear with your meal, they sometimes look rather older than they did when you ordered it. Efficient service is not a British priority. Indeed, in some pubs and cafés it is regarded as a kind of moral defect. I once knew a Manchester bus driver who devoted his life to seeing how many people he could leave behind at bus stops. He was inordinately proud of this achievement. When I caught sight of him across a crowded pub, he would gleefully hold up a number of fingers to indicate the latest toll of abandoned passengers. British workers do not typically take pride in the outfits that employ them. Not many of them would refer to their companies as “we,” as American workers tend to do. Attempts to induce them to identify with the company as a whole might be greeted with ridicule. They are not especially impressed by Employee of the Month schemes, or chief executives who wear “Rage Against the Machine” T-shirts and ask to be called Sweetie Pie.

Failure and Success

Unlike the British, Americans do not generally take a doleful delight in breakdown and failure. This is because they are trained to admire achievement. They can thus be less envious and begrudging than those for whom good fortune is as rare as humility in Hollywood. At the same time, societies like the United States which insist on success are bound to produce large amounts of human wreckage. This, however, has been efficiently taken into account. There is a dynamic, fabulously profitable machine for mopping the damage up, all the way from psychotherapy to the churches, mystic mud baths to Indian healing rituals. One part of the system reduces people to burnt-out shells by seeking to pump too much profit out of them, while the other part reaps a profit out of trying to stitch them together again.

The behaviour of a nation is influenced by how big it is. When it comes to a civilisation, size matters. One can speak freely of one’s triumphs in the States because success is generally applauded, but also because there are so many Americans that a lot of other people are likely to have chalked up achievements as well, and envy is thus less of a problem. In small nations like Ireland or Norway, backbiting and resentment are rife, since there are not enough people around for many of them to stand out as exceptional. The few who do excel are thus at dire risk of being cut briskly down to size. Egalitarianism in the States is a virtue, and so it is in Sweden, but in smaller societies it can be a negative value as well. It means that nobody should have the nerve to get above anybody else. Getting on is regarded as rather suspect, and if you are ill-starred enough to be a billionaire banker or world-class clarinet player you would be well advised to conceal the fact. The more you soar, the more you should keep your head down. The best policy is to rise without trace. Familiarity breeds scepticism: people know their neighbours too well to believe that their good fortune is truly deserved. You should fit in with your fellows, not seek to outshine them.

The British habit is to efface the ego, whereas the American one is to assert it. This, at least, is what the formal ideology of each nation requires, however remote it may be from the behaviour of their citizens. There are plenty of arrogant Brits and self-lacerating Texans. De Tocqueville remarks that Americans have turned egoism into a social and political theory. In Britain, self-effacement is bound up with the ethic of service. You are not to consider your own selfish interests, but to subordinate them to the Crown, the Empire, the defence of the realm or the common good. Those who do so are a privileged elite, and the ethic of service, while real enough in one sense, is also a way of masking this privilege behind a cloak of selflessness.

The aristocrat, rather similarly, justifies his august status by devoting himself to the well-being of his tenants and lackeys. He makes a point of being pleasant to his servants, whereas vulgar upstarts of stockbrokers make a point of being rude to them in order to demonstrate their superiority. Only low-bred types are snobs. The word began as a term for a shoemaker, and was then used to refer to the socially inferior. It meant not upper-class people who despise lower-class ones, but lower-class ones with a grudge against upper-class ones. Because he can do what he pleases, the aristocrat is a kind of anarchist, and thus has more affinity with the poacher than with the gamekeeper. He understands that genuine power does not need to make a display of itself, any more than real men are constantly fretting about their sperm count. True authority is so firmly entrenched that it can take itself for granted, like so many of the things the British regard as precious.

The United States is neither a particularly comic society nor an especially tragic one. It is too affirmative to be tragic, and too much in love with heroism to be comic. When it comes to affirmation, the can-do spirit is one of the great divides between the United States and Europe. At my son’s American school, there was a poster on the wall that read “Success Comes in Cans.” In some quarters of the States, the word “can’t” seems as offensive as the word “Communist.” Success in the States also comes in CANIs, which for one American self-help writer means Constant, Never-Ending Improvement. Since there are always more goals to strive for, what he is in fact promoting is a life of perpetual dissatisfaction.

Failure is not an option, as the typically American word “challenge” suggests. Being buried up to your neck in excrement while famished crows peck at your eyeballs is not a problem but a challenge. “Challenge” suggests that problems exist to test your mettle, and are thus to be regarded as positive rather than negative. Problems are not a problem. It is not a problem if chemical warfare breaks out in Mississippi, but a God-sent opportunity for you to “come out of it stronger.” The current British equivalent of these pious clichés is “learning lessons,” which is a coded way of admitting that you have committed some atrocious blunder. If the police have shot dead a whole class of kindergarten children under the impression that they were a gang of armed drug dealers, there are “lessons to be learnt.” The passive voice is compulsory. That you may have something to learn is the closest you can decently come to apologising in an age when nobody apologises much any more.

Any society which calls its prisons “correctional facilities” is excessively optimistic. Prison hardly ever corrects anyone. Wherever possible in the States, you are expected to affirm. When asked how your holiday was, it is not really done to reply, “Dreadful.” My daughter once attended an American pre-school in which the teachers were trained never to speak negatively to the children. When asked how they responded to bad behaviour, they replied piously, “We don’t react.” A small boy who was punched in the face by a fellow pupil received the compliment, “Thank you, James, for not reacting.” The way to handle trouble, in other words, was to pretend that it wasn’t happening. My daughter, being of a mischievous turn of mind, instantly exploited this permissive spirit by letting off all the fire alarms. Her teacher’s response was “My, Alice sure loves to learn!” There are other ways to describe the havoc she created.

In one sense, however, this endemic upbeatness is all to no avail. One index of national happiness ranks the United States at a paltry number 150 among the world’s nations. Americans are less likely to move upwards from their social class of origin than a whole array of other countries. Since these are discouraging statistics, they are best ignored. Brooding on them will make your hair fall out. In fact, for some Americans this is a genuine risk. Being negative generates vibes which can give you cancer, scupper your chances of financial success, and drive your spouse to commit adultery with a whole soccer team.

Illness, however trivial and curable, is a foretaste of death, and thus a souvenir of our ultimate powerlessness. There are two ways of handling that impotence, the first of which is to repress it. Reminding people that they are frail, vulnerable creatures is not the best way of squeezing a profitable day’s work out of them, or having them confront enemy bullets in defence of the realm. The other way is the path of tragedy, which draws its power not from sidestepping human frailty but from confronting and embracing it. It does not regard suffering as positive, any more than the New Testament does. Instead, it holds that if one has the misfortune to be visited by some affliction, one must try not to disavow it but to pass all the way through it, in the hope that one might eventually emerge somewhere on the other side. One must try to let go of oneself in the faith that one might find oneself again. This is not the same as seeking out suffering in order to improve your character or enhance your virility. People who do that are not tragic but absurd.

Cultures that can maintain a pact with failure are those than can thrive. Civilisations are to be judged by how far they honour their father and their mother. The Biblical injunction has nothing to do with the family. It had to do in its day with how one treated the old and useless of the tribe, those who were unable to labour. The United States, unlike the writings of Samuel Beckett, is not especially enamoured of pacts with failure. It is a profoundly anti-tragic nation, which has recently lived through one of the darkest episodes of its history. It is besieged by those who feel themselves to be on the sticky end of its formidable power, and who are now striking murderously back. Militarily speaking, the country is superbly well equipped to deal with these dangers. Spiritually speaking, its anti-tragic view of existence leaves it peculiarly disarmed.

Not that the States is without its tragedies. I was once in a bookstore in the Midwest when it was proudly announced over the public address system that the author of a book entitled
Barns of Indiana
was present in the store, and was willing to sign copies of his book. I emerged from around a bookcase to see a small, crumpled, shy-looking man sitting at a table, pen poised hopefully in hand, beside a pile of books that seemed to stretch to the ceiling. Not a soul was within twenty yards of him, though the place was fairly crowded. After lingering in the store for another hour or so, I made my way to the entrance only to catch sight of the author still sitting at his table, visibly more crumpled in appearance, pen still poised, the pile of books still in place, and the area around him still utterly deserted. I turned my back on this poignant sight and strode quickly away. The phrase “Barns of Indiana” is still capable of waking me up at night with a guilty start. In my dreams I rewind the spool of history, return to the bookstore, stride genially up to the little man’s table and buy a dozen copies of his book. But the truth is that I shamefully backed off, and will never be able to undo this despicable act.