Holidays in Heck (8 page)

And that, in America, would be all the apologizing needed. I mentioned how different America was—how Senator Kerry hadn't been able to get through his presidential campaign without going on a goose hunt, so there'd be a photo of him holding a gun.

“But not a goose,” Mr. Hobday said.

Mr. Hobday told me an anecdote, though he said he couldn't vouch for it personally. Someone on the League's staff had told it to him. At a protest against foxhunting, before the ban, one of the protesters had gone up to a hunter and said, “We're going to make what you do illegal.”

The hunter looked down from his horse and said, “People like you obey the law. People like us
make
the law.”

This is an anecdote contradicted by what I saw in Exmoor, and exactly opposite to what has happened legislatively, but it still makes good telling. If you understand it, you may understand what's going on in Britain. I don't.

I walked from the offices of the League Against Cruel Sports, in Southwark, to the nearby Tate Modern, to look at the works of Damien Hirst. He is the artist who has floated a sheep in formaldehyde and sliced a cow into sections and so forth for the sake of sculpture. He is a today's-urban-elite kind of artist—cutting edge, one might say. Unfortunately, the Tate Modern had only one piece by Hirst on display: some seashells with a curator's commentary on the wall beside them:

“You kill things to look at them,” Hirst has said. In this work he arranges a selection of ornate shells, purchased in Thailand, inside a glass cabinet. Resembling a museum display case [for Pete's sake, it
was
a museum display case], it alludes to the 19th century tradition of collecting and classifying natural specimens. Inevitably, the approach involves removing plants and animals from their natural habitats, killing them in order to preserve them . . .

But Hirst was not buying seashells for sport.

In the grassy median of Park Lane, near Hyde Park Speakers' Corner, is the Animals in War memorial—“Unveiled 24 November 2004 by Princess Anne.” Its two sweeping curves of concrete wall resemble parts of a non-Euclidian traffic barrier. On the inside of one curve is carved
THEY HAD NO CHOICE
. Bronze pack mules march toward the gap between the walls. Beyond the gap a bronze dog and a bronze horse
walk away, metaphorically in heaven, though actually farther up Park Lane. A eulogy mentions even pigeons. No need to cast one in bronze, though, with so many live ones alighting on the monument.

Here are some British newspaper items I collected on my visit:

A leading cancer charity has rejected a £30,000 donation from the organizer of sponsored bird shoots because it does not approve of the way the money was raised.

—
The Sunday Telegraph
, March 20

Professor John Webster, emeritus professor at Bristol University, discussed the intelligence of chickens at a conference organized by Compassion in World Farming. . . . They are intelligent, sensitive characters.

—
The Times
, March 31

Nine New Forest firefighters were involved in freeing a frog from the spout of a watering can. A gardener took the trapped frog to the fire station. . . . It was released after half an hour's vigorous cutting with a hacksaw.

—
The Times
, March 28

As for the well-being of people:

A middle-aged teacher is starting a six-month jail sentence today because she decided to fight back against “yobs” with a pellet gun. Linda Walker, 47, . . . was being driven towards breaking point by groups of youth “terrorizing” her neighborhood. . . . She rushed out of her house at night to confront a knot of teenagers. . . . After an exchange of abuse . . . Mrs. Walker squared up to one 18-year-old, firing off several rounds from the [compressed air-powered] pistol into nearby
ground. . . . Mrs. Walker was found guilty of affray and possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

—
The Times
, March 30

Of course, there's always the possibility that barmy Britannia—or a certain political part of her—is crazy like a . . .

The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics. Politicians don't exactly want to ban hunting or forbid shooting teen goons with BBs. Politicians just want to turn everything, right down to what the dog chases, into a political matter. And they've succeeded. The day I arrived in Britain Tony Blair was beginning his run for reelection. The campaign issue making headlines was school lunch menus.

Ordinary people have ordinary knowledge: how to make things (including lunch), grow things, fix things, build things, and, for that matter, kill things. Politicians have extraordinary knowledge: how all things ought to be. Never mind that politicians do not, as it were, run with the hare
or
hunt with the hounds.

All things ought to be, as far as I'm concerned, the way they were on Michael Thompson's farm. When the dinner after the stag hunt was over, at one in the morning, Michael got up from the table and said, “I'm going to change my trousers and have a look at the lambing.”

More than 1,000 of his ewes were giving or about to give birth. A vet comes with a portable machine and gives them sonograms—better service than yuppie moms get. If a ewe is having one lamb, she can be left on her own in the fields. But twins can confuse a ewe, especially if it's her first
lambing. She may not know if both or either is hers. Michael went into a shed the size of a modest railroad station, where hundreds of sheep were in twenty or so pens. Then he climbed onto a wooden railing separating two banks of pens and, though he is seventy and had done as much justice to the wine at dinner as I had, walked the rail's length looking for newborns. When he spotted a pair, Michael would jump among the sheep, hoist each lamb by a leg, and begin backing toward the pen's gate. This would cause at first a few, then a couple, then, usually, just one of the ewes to follow him—the others dropping back with, frankly, sheepish looks as they (I guess) realized they hadn't had any lambs yet. Then mother and children were put in a stall to bond.

The lambs were still damp from birth, making their first steps, quad-toddling with each little hoof boxing the compass. They were adorable. Also, rather frequently, they were dead. Scores of dead lambs lay in the aisle of the lambing shed, nature being profligate with adorability. As man is. The living lambs would be dead soon enough. Delicious, too.

Tempting to meditate on how vivid and real the lambing was compared with politics. Except that Michael's farm is itself a political construct. Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real estate developments. There's room for any number of charming weekend getaway homes where the tired politicians of London could get some relaxation and perhaps provide their constituents with a bit of sport—of a noncontroversial kind. According to the Hunting Act, “The hunting of rats is exempt.”

Reading the European Constitution on a
French Beach, Guadeloupe, May 2005

T
he French referendum on the EU Constitution was a story that demanded to be viewed and understood from a thoroughly European perspective, so I went on vacation.

Guadeloupe is a full-fledged
département
of metropolitan France. Here the European Union could be contemplated as the sociopolitico-economic masterwork of a civilization, an edifice of human hope. And never mind that previous attempts to unify Europe by Hitler, Napoleon, and Attila the Hun didn't work out—it had been a cold, rainy spring in New England.

At passport control there were two lines. One official sat complacently in a booth doing nothing until all the EU citizens had been processed at another booth by a second
official, who, in reciprocation, sat complacently doing nothing while the first official took his turn. When, at last, the first official deigned to examine a non-EU passport he walked across the aisle to the second official's booth, borrowed the visa stamp, walked back, stamped the passport, and returned the stamp to his colleague. He did the same thing for each subsequent passport. At customs, on the other hand, there were no officials.

All around the island billboards read “
OUI
” or “
NON
.” They were equal in number and identical in color and typography. The fairness doctrine debates of the U.S. election must have hit home in the EU. Obviously rigorous, uniform rules on campaign media had been instituted. I mentally composed several indignant paragraphs about how John McCain will be advocating this soon in the United States before I noticed that the billboards were advertising a cell phone company. Say “
NON
” to service charges, “
OUI
” to free minutes.

Real pro and con referendum posters had to be looked for. They were on special hoardings outside schools and municipal offices where the pasting up of expressions of free speech was officially sanctioned. Campaign rhetoric had a certain subtle European sophistication. At least I guess so. The slogan on one “Oui” poster was “
L'Europe—à besoin de notre
.” According to the dictionary I bought for high school French, this translates as “The Europe—to, at, in, on, by, or for need, want, or necessity of ours.”

Guadeloupe is a volcanic island of soaring, majestic beauty upon which the French have turned their backs to build everything as close as possible to the damp-spritzed, wind-butted beaches with sand the color of Hyundai fake
wood trim and a profusion of foot-piercing volcanic rocks. Also, what's French for “Every litter bit hurts”? Some of the older buildings have a limbo-party-at-the-Phi-Delt-house charm. They will be torn down as soon as the French economy finally revives and more reinforced concrete is poured in the European Bauhaus style. Form follows function. The function is to grow tropical mold.

That said, Guadeloupe's main city, Pointe-à-Pitre, is nice enough, with no glaring slums, no glaring locals, and only the Caribbean minimum of starving stray dogs. Plenty of new Citroëns, Peugeots, and Renaults grace the traffic jams, although Guadeloupe's per capita GDP is only $8,000. The people are sleek and fashionably dressed. The streets are well-swept by the standards of the tropics and well-paved by the standards of New York. Some gang graffiti are visible but only in easily reached places where paint can be sprayed without ruining school clothes. Guadeloupe seems like a swell place to be poor—if poor is what you like to be.

Perhaps the benign and comfortable atmosphere is a result of French culture and values, such as those the French imparted to Haiti. More likely it's the result of the large subsidies evident in the excellent road system that extends to every place on the island including places no one goes. And Guadeloupe has more impressive government buildings than an overseas
département
with a population of 450,000 could need, enough for a minor European country (which France, now that it's rejected the EU Constitution, has arguably become).

As beach reading that constitution fulfills one criterion—it's 485 pages long. And Danielle Steele could not worsen the prose style: “The institutions of the Union shall apply the principle of subsidiarity as laid down in the Protocol
on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.” Every aspect of European life is considered in exquisite detail; vide Annex I, pages 403 and 404, clarifying agricultural trade regulations for “edible meat offal” and “lard and other rendered pig fat.”

I slathered myself, instead, in Bain de Soleil and spread my towel between pumice and discarded Gauloises packs. Timing ten pages of attentive reading, I calculated that it would take seventeen hours and three minutes to peruse the full document, by which time I should be quite tan.

According to its constitution, the EU is (or was) to have five branches of government: the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, and the Court of Justice of the European Union; plus two advisory bodies: the Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee; and four additional independent institutions: the European Central Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Court of Auditors, and the European Ombudsman. Here we have a system of bounced checks and vaudeville balancing acts.

Part II of the constitution, “The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union,” gives us an idea of what “rights” are supposed to mean in Europe: “Everyone has the right to life.” This, on a continent where there's more respect for Dick Cheney than for a fetus. The charter prohibits “making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain.” No more French actresses showing their tits on the movie screen, and Botox injections will be available only through National Health. There is a “right” to “an annual period of paid leave.” (I was having mine.) And a declaration that “The use of property may be regulated by law insofar as is necessary for the general interest.” Lenin couldn't have put
it better. What there was in this constitution that a subtle, sophisticated European could object to eluded me, as did reading the rest of it.