Larry King’s Blog
Larry D. King 1952-2021
Introduction
In the mid-1980s, Larry D. King (not that Larry King) worked with me at InformationWeek, where we became good, albeit long-distance, friends. He moved to London and worked for Bloomberg, Reuters and in PR for HSBC. We stayed in touch, and he regularly contributed to my column, under the rubrics Letters from Europe and Letters from Great Britain. I created a self-published collection of his essays and sent him a copy, as well as keeping several for myself.
His obituary described the Larry I knew to a T.
“He was delighted to be back doing what he loved most: working with language, exercising his finely-honed detector for doublespeak, and thoughtfully sharpening copy. He unfailingly treated colleagues with equal respect, regardless of hierarchy or job title,” Alessandra Galloni, now editor-in-chief, and global news desk head Nick Tattersall, wrote in a note to staff.
“Reuters colleagues would have easily recognized Larry back in the mid-1990s, said friend and colleague Swaha Pattanaik, who worked with him at both Reuters and Bloomberg. “The twinkle in his eye, laconic humor, and kindness to reporters – none of that changed over the years.”
“Larry’s generosity of spirit and heart were evident to all,” Galloni and Tattersall wrote. “His death comes as a terrible shock to his colleagues, family and friends around the world.” It certainly did to me. We were the same age.
I realized that print, or even my column (there are several more Letters from Britain that I am too lazy to move here) was not enough to preserve the trenchant wit he saved for P.S. Column On Things.
You may notice these essays are in no particular order, and include dead links as well as some off wording, given Larry’s goal of making them sound like letters. They comprise 30,000 words, the size of a novella. I am not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. If I do nothing (having proofread them the first time, 25 years ago) it is better to get them out than to get them flawless. Also, the items are dated the day I posted them, not the day they appeared.
Why, you might well ask, did he write all this? He had a full-time job writing for one wire service or another in London. As a former wire service reporter myself (AP and UPI during 1974 -1976) I can tell you that eight hours of pushing copy doesn’t feel like writing. If you have something to say, you can’t say it on the wire. So you have fun writing opinion and droll wit it in mock-letter form that you then send to a friend, whose blog will be read in London just after the first snowball fight in hell.
–Larry’s Friend, Paul Schindler
Posted at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Big Newspapers vs. Small Newspapers
06/20/2025
Larry King began the exchange:
By the way, your latest column mentions that you think The Paper is the all-time best journalism movie. I’d agree, although it necessarily omits the bonecrushing boredom of much newspaper work and truly awe-inspiring stupidity and cowardice of a lot of newspaper editors.
From time to time, I’ve idly wondered who wrote the screenplay — too idly to look it up. Have you any idea? I assume it was somebody who once worked at the New York Post.
My favorite scene comes in that exchange when Spaulding Gray, playing an editor at what’s clearly meant to be the New York Times, tells Michael Keating he’s just blown his chance to cover the world. Keating screams back that he doesn’t care, because he doesn’t live in the world, he lives in New York City.
According to the Internet Movie Database, your favorite line (and one of mine) goes like this:
“Oh yeah? Well guess fuckin’ what? I don’t really fuckin’ care. You wanna know fuckin’ why? Because I don’t live in the fuckin’ world, I live in New York City! So go fuck yourself.”
Writers are David Koepp and Stephen Koepp. The Paper is the only thing Stephen has ever written; David has written 15 films, most notably Toy Soldiers, Jurrasic Park 1 and 2, and the forthcoming Spiderman. Stephen must have gotten the feel of The Post from hanging around with reporters, or else newspapering in Waukesha is a lot more exciting than I imagined, because here’s his bio:
Koepp, 42, a Wisconsin native, received a B.A. degree (journalism major, German minor) from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 1978. After graduation he joined the Waukesha Freeman, a daily newspaper in Wisconsin, where he worked as a news reporter and city editor. At the Freeman, he won a statewide wire-service award for investigative reporting.
Koepp joined TIME magazine in 1981. He started in letters to the editor, spent the 80s writing business, and is now Deputy Managing Editor.
Larry responded:
I would guess the non-screen-writing Koepp learned all he needed about newspapers from the Waukesha Freeman. One of the depressing things about newspapering is how little changes going from a fifth-rate rag in a one-horse town to the New York Times. You get some smarter people in the newsroom, and a lot more of them, at a big-city daily. Generally, management is a bit less miserly about things like travel. So the product improves. But the day-to-day grind of being a reporter or working editor looks and feels much the same, I think.
[Come to think of it, you’re right about newspapering. While I only worked one daily (the Oregon Journal), and you worked several, I have seen enough newsrooms to know that you are speaking the truth. The workload, the physical surroundings, the average IQ–these things can all change. But the basics of the business do not. Well, except for one other thing: in large cities, novel and interesting things happen. In smaller towns, even a city the size of Portland, Oregon (500k), the traditional definition of news leaves you covering the same events over and over, especially if you’re a beat reporter (I worked in the business department).]
Larry got the last word:
You’re right, the one really significant difference between big dailies and small ones, besides the money, is that big ones are in big towns and small ones are in small towns, and things happen in big towns that don’t happen in small ones, despite what thousands of novels and movies have had to say about “ripping the veil off the quiet complacency of a small town to reveal the passions and scandal gurgling underneath.” Or words to that effect.
But there’s a disadvantage to that, if you’re working at a big-city daily. The news-hole at the New York Times is not vastly larger than it is at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, or for that matter the (Portland) Oregonian. The guys at the Times have got a lot more to stuff into it, though. So you can have a pretty good story, one that would get a real splash back in the Lake Woebegone Herald Star, and it gets turned into a brief or lost altogether at the Times.
And I expect that gets held against you. I’ve never worked at the Times or the Post, but I’ve got some friends who have, and they say you run a risk there of getting a bad reputation through sheer bad luck. If you’re on the Brooklyn cop beat and a few big crime stories happen to break in Manhattan over a couple of months, the boss editors start looking at you with a jaundiced eye, wondering why you’re not “producing.”
You are producing, course. It’s the local bad guys who aren’t producing, or at any rate not producing the kind of eye-catching atrocity that makes for a nice headline and a snappy lede. Boss editors at that point always forget that they were the ones who sent you to Brooklyn when all the bad guys were romping through Manhattan. It’s not their lack of judgment but your lack of industry that comes in for discussion.
Posted at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Larry King on Photographers Redux
06/20/2025
You run off at the mouth long enough, it’s going to catch up with you. I’m not sure under what circumstances I wrote that ill-humored paragraph about art directors, photo editors, and photographers, and I’m not sure I want to re-think my position on art directors or photo editors. But I would like to retract anything grumpy I had to say about photographers.
Not only is David Tenenbaum right — photographers are journalists, too — but in my view photographers are generally more useful in getting across to people who weren’t there what it was like for people who were there, which is a fairly good working definition of what journalism ought to do.
To any writing hack inclined to argue, I’d say, how many people remember anything written from the Pacific front during World War II? Now, how many people remember Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the six marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima?
Or, to take an example closer to hand, who remembers a word written about the 1980 hockey match between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? How many remember Tenenbaum’s photo?
Okay, I’m overstating the case. The written word can do a lot a photograph can’t — let’s just not get into television, all right? — and a misleading photograph can arguably be more inaccurate than a sloppily reported, badly written, ineptly edited (that last one may be redundant) story. But all things considered, I think the best photos are in several respects slightly superior to the comparable written journalism.
[Which reminds me of two quotes from my Journalism Quotes page:
“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”
–Gandhi
“Some of my best friends are newspaper photographers… and yet I feel that when one or two are gathered together for professional reasons you have a nuisance, and that a dozen or more constitute a plague.”
–Murray Kempton]
Posted at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Larry King On Broadcasting (US and British)
06/20/2025
(I wrote to Larry:
You can get by with free, if you’re the kind of person who listens to public radio in the US without becoming a member. I know, in Britain becoming a member of public TV and radio is mandatory by law–is there an exclusion for foreign citizens? Or do you pay your annual license fee along with everyone else?)
I never joined public radio or television, largely because I usually found the news so precious and politically correct I listened to it with my teeth gritted. I thought it was the other side of the coin from the knuckledraggers like Rush Limbaugh.
Some kind of pinnacle, or nadir, was reached during its coverage of the opening hours of the Gulf War, when they devoted more time to the little pockets of 60s-wannabes trying to gin up a peace movement than to what might actually be happening in the Gulf. Something snapped inside me when they devoted quite a long time to an interview with a sailor who’d gone AWOL rather than sail for the Gulf. The sailor explained he’d joined the Navy to get computer training, and he never, like, KNEW they might want him to, you know, like shoot at people and get shot at and stuff. The interviewer murmured along sympathetically, instead of asking one of the many, many obvious questions available to him, such as, what did you think all the big guns were for, you idiot?
Then I moved to the U.K. and found out what really precious, politically correct news could sound like. And they charge me for not only that but for every other moment of the idiotic programming that dominates television here. Americans remember Masterpiece Theater and a few jewels like that and think everything on Brit television glitters. Expatriates here laugh hollowly when American visitors gush about it.
Remember, Britain is the land that gave you `Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ and `The Weakest Link’ and `Survivor’ and `Big Brother’ and all that sort of thing. What you probably don’t realize is, those really are the highpoints of the average viewing evening. The low points are things like the gardening shows and wildlife documentaries and the endless, endless, endless rehashes of World War II, all of which give the impression the Brits won the Big One singlehandedly, aside from the occasional diversionary maneuver by the Soviet Union and some logistical help from the U.S.
Posted at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Depend on the Greeks to deliver a little chaos?
06/20/2025
I was a little disappointed to read yesterday morning that the prime minister of Greece had survived a vote of confidence. Now the European Union can get on with the tedious business of saving its economy, instead of collapsing into a chaotic bunch of barely functioning states oozing animosity and hurling recriminations at one another. Something’s wrong in Europe when you can’t depend on the Greeks to deliver a little chaos.
You see, we try not to let this get out, but journalists sort of like it when everything goes to hell. Conflict is easy to cover and fun to write about. Each side is happy to tell you about all the awful things the other side has been getting up to. You just keep writing those awful things down until some kind of resolution occurs, then sit back and wait for everything to go to hell again.
So I was having a good time watching while the Greeks, who invented Western civilization, did their level best to destroy it. I wasn’t exactly cheering them on, you understand. Western civilization has been good to me, and I’m not sure how well I’d make out in some kind of Mad Max dystopia where I couldn’t get the prescription for my glasses changed because my optometrist was hunkered down behind his eye charts reloading an AK-47 so he could fight off the next attack by the baristas from the Starbucks across the street. Although I would like to talk to the baristas about all the awful things the optometrist had been getting up to.
No, I was just hoping for days or weeks of instability, uncertainty, and hostility among the countries that use the euro. With any luck, Greece would get kicked out of the single currency, the debt and currency markets would collapse in turmoil, and bloodsucking bankers would lose their jobs and a whole lot of money. Greece would go back to its old currency, the drachma, and each drachma would be worth slightly less than a used Kleenex. A two-week holiday on the Greek island of Lesbos would cost me maybe ten or twelve pounds. I’ve always wanted to see Lesbos.
Last month, all that looked possible. The Greeks, as you may recall, were over their heads in debt and going down for the third time. Bankers and finance ministry officials around Europe figured the country would run out of cash by the middle of December. Greece wouldn’t be able to pay any of its creditors, including the hordes of state employees. It would end up in a “disorderly default,’’ the rather prim term bankers use when they mean to say everything is going to hell.
The European Union was trying to prevent that. The EU, after all, is a large collection of politicians. Politicians don’t like conflict, but they love a problem. Politicians without a problem have nothing to do but keep the streets clean and the hot water running. They’re just janitors in pinstriped suits.
But politicians know their only real approach to problems is to take money from voters and spend it on whoever is causing the problem. They are painfully aware voters have limited patience and, for that matter, money. As the speaker of the Slovak parliament, Richard Sulik, put it, “How am I supposed to explain to people that they are going to have to pay a higher value-added tax so that Greeks can get pensions three times as high as the ones in Slovakia?’’
That was an excellent question. The EU politicians were pondering it when they gathered in Brussels late in October to take another whack at solving the problem of Greece. They’d already handed over a large chunk of money in July, which had failed to solve the problem, and the bailout in July had come after they’d handed over a similar chunk in May 2010, with similar results. Every elected official in Europe was painfully aware voters were getting tired of giving money to Greeks.
But the politicians came through. They added about a trillion euros to the European Financial Stability Facility, which is essentially a big pot of money they’ve taken from voters so they can give it to whoever’s causing a problem. They agreed Greece’s debt would be devalued by fifty percent, so anybody dumb enough to buy Greek bonds now looked even stupider, because those bonds were worth just half their face value. Various other financial shenanigans were engaged in. By the last week in October, yet another Greek bailout was ready.
For their part, the Greeks promised to keep doing what they had previously promised they were already doing. They would collect taxes. They would no longer put damn near every Greek on the state payroll at an inflated salary. They would stop letting people retire at ridiculously young ages on astonishingly generous pensions. They would sell off some of the six thousand state-owned companies.
Whether the Greeks were actually doing any of that was open to question, of course. They had lied lavishly and brazenly about their finances so they could join the single currency in 2001. But the Greek people seemed to believe it was being done, and they didn’t like it one bit. They had taken to the streets and burned things down and broken things up and even killed a few people, among them a pregnant bank teller, whose role in Greece’s financial collapse seemed tenuous at best.
In Brussels, the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, took a brave stand. He promised the EU he’d make sure Greece put its fiscal house in order, regardless of how all those other Greeks felt. He was going to run right back to Athens and tell parliament to approve the terms of the bailout. Going into the last weekend in October, the EU politicians breathed a sigh of relief.
On Monday, Papandreou took their breath away. Instead of asking parliament to approve the bailout, he said now that he’d thought about it, he’d rather hold a nationwide referendum, so every Greek would have a say in the EU plan. Since Greeks were already so mad they wanted to go out and kill pregnant bank tellers, nobody thought their opinion on the plan would be favorable.
The de facto leaders of the seventeen countries that use the EU’s single currency, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, were due in Cannes for a meeting of the Group of 20, an organization of rich countries. Merkel and Sarkozy were expecting to tell the other rich countries how’d they’d prevented Greece from causing first Europe’s and then the world’s economy to go to hell. Papandreou’s announcement ended those plans as effectively, and as gracefully, as a drunk ends a wedding reception when he knocks over the buffet table, vomits on the groom, and grabs the bride’s butt.
Merkel and Sarkozy were no happier than the bride’s parents, especially Merkel. She’d had to fight to get her own parliament to approve the bailout, and the victory had come at no small political cost. Papandreou apparently hadn’t realized it, but he’d violated the first rule of European politics, as proposed in 1870, seconded in 1914, and terrifyingly ratified in 1939: don’t piss off the Germans.
No one thought German troops heading for the Balkans again. But no one was sure they wouldn’t, eventually. When Merkel was twisting the arms of German lawmakers so they’d approve the bailout, she’d said a united Europe had insured half a century of peace and prosperity. Somewhat ominously, she’d then added, “Nobody should think a further half century of peace and prosperity is assured.’’
Instead of invading, Merkel and Sarkozy asked Papandreou to come to Cannes to explain his thinking. It was a request in the same sense a cop is asking politely when he says would you please step out of your car, after you’ve veered across a median strip and crashed into a school bus full of kids in wheelchairs attended by several elderly nuns. Papandreou trotted up to Cannes.
What Merkel and Sarkozy said to him was not disclosed, but he trotted back to Athens and said, after some hemming and hawing, that he’d thought better of the whole referendum thing. Instead, he’d ask parliament for a vote of confidence. If he won, that would be tantamount to approving the terms of the bailout. If he lost, his government would fall, and somebody else could form a new one and deal with all those pissed-off Germans. He won.
And that’s where we stand now. The Greeks seem a little disappointed not to have thrown all of Europe into chaos, but they’re settling for churning up chaos at home. Papandreou says he wants to form a national unity government, a wildly inappropriate description of any Greek government. The opposition lawmakers say he’ll have to quit before they’ll join any new government. Papandreou says he won’t. The opposition is probably yelling, Nyah, nyah, will to! even as we speak.
Merkel, Sarkozy, and the rest of Europe are maintaining a discreet silence, at least for now. They’re probably just relieved that they’ve wrestled the monster of Greek debt back into its cave, for now. And me, well, I’m a little disappointed. For now.
Posted at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Scrapping Primogeniture
06/17/2025
No doubt you were stunned to hear the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and fifteen of its realms had voted to scrap the laws on male primogeniture. Those were the laws that said the British throne went to the male heirs of the current monarch in the order of their birth. We also got rid of a related bit of religious bigotry that forbade anybody who was married to a Catholic from ascending to the throne. It was a big deal here, really.
Up till now, the British throne had gone to the first-born son of the current monarch. Unless the boy married some papist wench, or had the decency to just die. Then it went to the second-born son. Not until the monarch had run out of sons could his first daughter take a crack at ruling the kingdom, assuming that hanging around waiting for her brothers to die hadn’t left her so unbalanced she’d gone off and married a Catholic, too.
We’ve fixed all that. Now the first child gets to be monarch, regardless of gender. And that child can marry whomever he wants. Or she wants. Whatever. As our current queen said, ‘It reminds us of the potential in our societies that is yet to be fully unlocked and it encourages us to find ways to allow all girls and women to play their full part.’’
Actually, it doesn’t. One particular girl will be all that she can be, and she’ll need the right parents. As great victories in the fight for equality go, this one doesn’t go very far. And come to think of it, I believe the queen is herself a girl, and she’s been on the throne for fifty-nine years and counting. You’d have thought whatever potential she might have had, she’d have fulfilled by now.
At least we’re rid of that distasteful prohibition against marrying Catholics. Memories of the Spanish Armada, which sank in 1588, and the Jacobite supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who died in 1788, have receded. Somewhat. Catholics are still prohibited from actually becoming king or queen. Since the Bonnie Prince was the last Catholic with a serious claim to the throne and he had no legitimate children, the threat of domination by Rome seems remote. But remember, the current pope is a German. You know how pushy they can get. We don’t want to rush into anything.
And in fact, we’re not. We’re preceding at a measured, stately pace. The new rules only go into effect starting with descendants of the current heir to the throne, Prince Charles. And Charles only has sons. So the first girl who could take the throne in her own right would be the first-born daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, otherwise known as Will and Kate.
Of course, she would first need to be born, which she currently is not. Then a lot of her relatives would have to die. They show little inclination to do so. Her great-great-grandmother lived to be one hundred and one. Her great-grandfather is ninety and the queen, her great-grandmother on her father’s side — the only one that counts in this game — is eighty-five. Her grandfather, still patiently waiting for his chance, is a sprightly sixty-three. Her father is a mere sprout of twenty-nine.
And her mum and dad just got married in April. They might want to make sure of his prospects before they start a family. We live in uncertain times, although probably not that uncertain.
But let’s assume Will puts off procreating until he’s thirty-three, his father’s age when he was born. Let’s further assume his first issue is a girl, and that he lives to be eighty, which by Windsor standards would mean he’s cut down in his prime. Then our theoretical first-born daughter would arrive in 2015 and ascend to the throne in 2058.
Barring some truly startling medical advances over the next few years, I don’t think I’m going to make it to her coronation, much as I’d like to shout, “God save the queen, the first one to make it onto the throne even though she had some brothers born after her who didn’t die early.’’ As I said, we don’t want to rush into things. God may save the queen, but He can take his time about it.
Posted at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Fashion and such
06/17/2025
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
All these considerations had distracted me from my original intention, which was to take pictures of how well people wear their clothes. But that raised other questions. By whose standards, using what criteria? The gentleman above wore his suit nicely, to my eye. He had even managed to find decent socks. But the suit was gray — and his shoes were brown!
The fashion diktat “don’t wear brown in town’’ used to be embedded in the English male DNA. It applied specifically to business wear: suits were gray or dark blue; shoes were black. My former boss told me that well into the ‘90s our bank would send a man home to change if he showed up wearing brown shoes. He said another bank sent men home if they wore loafers. God knows what the penalty was for wearing brown loafers. And he was talking about the 1990s, just to be clear.
Someone who cared deeply about fashion would have to develop a position on brown shoes. (Let’s leave the loafer question out of this, all right?) I’d be torn. I do think black shoes look better with a gray suit. On the other hand, wearing brown shoes shows a healthy disrespect for archaic notions of propriety. Rebellion against stuffiness should always be encouraged, especially in England.
But that’s why I can’t take fashion too seriously. Consciously breaking rules about the color of your shoes is almost as silly as making rules about the color of your shoes. And it amounts to the same thing. You are granting the same importance to shoe color as the people who make the rules. You’re also just another radical who’ll end up a reactionary. Encouraging people to wear brown shoes is a short step from requiring them to wear brown shoes.
I don’t see how you can expect to be taken seriously in either case. It’s hard enough to be taken seriously when you’re rebelling against something that seriously requires rebellion, as the “Occupy Wall Street’’ crowd is finding out. More about that next time.
The “Occupy the London Stock Exchange’’ crowd is still occupying the pavement outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral, somewhat to my surprise. They’ve put up tents, brought in some portable toilets, organized a food service, and set out rubbish bins. I suspect the bulk of them are slipping away from time to time to shower, shave, and otherwise attend to their personal hygiene, as well, because they’re remarkably fragrant for a crowd that’s been camping out for going on two weeks.*
How long they’ll be there seems open to question. The chancellor of the cathedral, the Reverend Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, had welcomed them last weekend and asked the police to step back and leave them alone. But then the dean of the cathedral, the Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, began to consider what might happen in the event of fire or some other disaster.
I would have thought a church was uniquely prepared to deal with fires, plagues, pestilence, and other acts of God. The threat of fire seemed especially remote. German incendiary bombs couldn’t set the cathedral aflame in World War II. It was hard to see how a gas grill and a few bongs in the courtyard would do the job.
The real danger was that the cathedral hierarchy would get entangled with a gang of British health and safety bureaucrats, an officious bunch of pests who have been known to ban a woman from tending to flowers in her village square unless she wears a reflective vest, erects three warning signs, and posts a lookout. Rather than endure an unending series of meetings with professional wimps, the Right Reverend Knowles asked the protesters to leave, or at least move over a little. When they wouldn’t, he closed the cathedral, and the cathedral hierarchy began to consider legal action to move the crowd.
Evidently alarmed, the protesters jiggered the layout of their tents and field kitchen and Port-O-Loos, and the Right Reverend Knowles announced his health and safety concerns had been met, so the cathedral should re-open soon. He and his fellow holy men wanted to resume spreading the Gospel. Also, collecting the twenty thousand pounds a day in donations and admission fees they were losing as long as the cathedral was closed.
The dean left his options open, though. He kept talking to his lawyers, and to the cops. The Right Reverend Fraser, who had more or less invited the protesters to hang around the cathedral, brooded over what would happen if the police tried to evict them. Appalled by the prospect of violence, he resigned.
I doubt he needed to worry too much. The protesters had ended up outside Saint Paul’s because they couldn’t muster the nerve to occupy the London Stock Exchange or Paternoster Square outside the exchange. The police had declared the square closed, then lined up to block the sidewalks leading into it. Some of the protesters had walked around the perimeter of the square chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!’’, but once they’d made the circuit, they meekly gathered next to the cathedral and stood around talking to each other. Considering the ecclesiastical setting, the phrase “preaching to the converted’’ seemed apt.
Charging a line of mounted cops would have been asking quite a lot of a bunch of neo-hippies armed with nothing more serious than cardboard signs stapled to a length of balsa wood. By this past weekend, though, the cops had largely abandoned Paternoster Square, and their blockade wasn’t very imposing. A more rambunctious crowd could have pushed through without much effort and probably not too many arrests.
But that would have caused a confrontation, and in England, whoever starts a confrontation is assumed to be wrong. If you confront someone, he might turn out to belong to the ruling class. By definition, a member of the ruling class is entitled to tell you what to do, and he’s got the title to prove it: duke, earl, sir, or right reverend.
That cultural residue of the class system has helped keep England society peaceful, cohesive and largely inert. It will be interesting to see whether it still infects the protesters, who are in theory rebelling against the ruling class, or at any rate the class that has a God-awful amount of money. My guess is they’ll docilely fold their tents and quietly slip away. And I’ll be a little disappointed. They’re going to have a hard time smashing the bloodsucking capitalist patriarchy if their first impulse is to do as they’re told.
* This sentence was written on Monday, 24 October. The next day’s Telegraph reported that the bulk of the protesters apparently were going home for the night, or at least going somewhere else. Not only had they failed to occupy the London Stock Exchange; they were failing to occupy their own tents.
Posted at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Occupy the London Stock Exchange
06/17/2025
London got its own version of “Occupy Wall Street’’ this past weekend, called “Occupy the London Stock Exchange,’’ and I went along to see how things worked out. They worked out not so well, if you took the name literally. The police kept the protesters out of Paternoster Square, where the stock exchange is situated, and then penned them up in front of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, annoying the tourists but not the bloodsuckers of the financial world they were targeting, who don’t work on Saturdays and weren’t around anyway. The cathedral is just south of the stock exchange, so I suppose the demonstration succeeded figuratively or metaphorically or something, although “Occupy the pavement outside Saint Paul’s’’ doesn’t have the same bite as “Occupy the London Stock Exchange’’ or “Occupy Wall Street,’’ does it?
Like a lot of protest marchers, the occupiers lacked focus. People milled around, talked on cell phones, took pictures of each other, and held up signs they seemed to feel made some telling point. Those points were often hard to argue with but only distantly related to the actual protest. In fact, the idea of occupying the stock exchange was somewhat misdirected in the first place. The stock market has a lot to answer for, but the economic meltdown of the past three years isn’t one of them. It was largely an innocent bystander when the debt markets ran amok and sprayed the financial system with rapid-fire derivatives. But the markets for stupid loans to ignorant people, deceptive collateralized debt obligations, and dodgy credit default swaps are not confined to one convenient location with symbolic heft, and “Occupy whatever space you can find in front of banks, mortgage brokers, pension funds, insurance companies, money managers, and miscellaneous financial professionals’’ would never fit on a tee shirt.
In effect, that would be the main criticism you saw of the protesters in the next few days: they didn’t know what they were talking about. Most of them didn’t, although my random conversations and those I overheard and some of the signs indicated a few had a pretty good grasp of the situation. They even had some suggestions for what ought to be done about it.
The Tobin tax, incidentally, was originally proposed by James Tobin, a Nobel Prize winner in economics. He hoped it would smooth out volatility in the foreign-exchange market, not increase government revenues, and claiming his tax would raise a hundred billion pounds or more a year is just idle speculation. As a general rule, if you tax something, you end up with less of it, and hence with less tax revenue than you hoped for. But the Tobin tax is a genuine idea with a respectable provenance, and you can’t dismiss anybody who proposes one as somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In any case, demanding the protesters provide detailed policy proposals for ending or alleviating the financial crisis missed the point. The point was, the protesters were mad as hell, and they were proposing not to take it any more. They were providing a place to start the discussion, not a way to end it.
The protesters had learned what anybody who’d spent time in an investment bank already knew: finance is full of people who are supposed to know what they’re talking about, and don’t. They are often wildly, spectacularly wrong. And those who aren’t wrong don’t have your best interests at heart. If you got the average trader drunk enough to speak freely and asked him what his priorities were, he’d tell you he wanted primarily to make money for himself, secondarily to make money for the bank, and teriarily, who gives a shit?
The protesters outside Saint Paul’s grasped that point quite well. They might not have known the difference between equity and debt or basis points and percentage points. But they understood that the people who did know about those things were the ones who got us into this mess. They were saying to those people, we want somebody to listen to us for a change. You had your chance, and look what happened.
Posted at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 2010 P. 2
06/17/2025
One of the blogs I read when I’m supposed to be working is The Sartorialist, although “read’’ is not quite the right word. The site usually consists of just three or four photographs taken by its proprietor, Scott Schuman, of people he’s seen on the street who are wearing clothes he thinks look good. The Sartorialist is popular enough for Schuman to earn a comfortable living from it, which makes me deeply envious. Walking around photographing attractive strangers sounds like a pleasant way to spend your working day.
So I decided to give it a try. Schuman makes it look easy. His photos seem like quick shots that just happen to be well-composed and artfully lit. I’m here to tell you, it’s not as easy as it looks.
I realize Schuman started out with a few advantages. For one thing, he’s actually interested in fashion. He worked at various jobs in the industry before he began The Sartorialist, and he can talk knowledgeably about things like fabric and sewing. I, on the other hand, put on my off-the-rack suit each morning about as enthusiastically as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay puts on his orange jumpsuit. We both know we’re wearing a uniform that indicates we’re inmates held against our will.
But I am curious about fashion. For example, I’ve always wondered how women in Paris and New York often manage to be very attractive without being especially pretty, while women in London are often very pretty without being especially attractive. Women in New York and Paris seem to think it’s fun to look good. Women in London seem to think it’s a duty, or a means to an end. The British edition of Cosmopolitan once ran a story with the cover lines, “Got the husband, got the kids, got the house — is it time to let yourself go?’’
And despite the inflated reputation of Saville Row for men’s tailoring, men in London appear to take even less pleasure in their clothes then women. I suspect that has something to do with the English horror of attracting attention to one’s self and the equally intense English horror of appearing to try too hard.
Even men in well-cut suits, shirts that fit, and ties that match seem compelled to sabotage their own efforts, usually by refusing to buy decent socks. In 1998, I saw Tony Blair and Bill Clinton sitting side by side at the Group of Eight summit meeting in Birmingham. Blair wore a pair of typical British socks that puddled around his ankles and exposed what looked like a yard of pale, hairy shinbone. Clinton had on socks that stretched up under his trouser cuffs and over his calves and for all anybody knew kept going to the tops of his thighs. Seldom have I felt prouder to be an American.
It occurred to me Schuman probably uses only three or photographs most days because most days he only gets three or four shots he thinks are worth using. He spends the bulk of his time looking for them.
So I kept looking, too. And I did find some people wearing stylish stuff who looked good wearing it. I was happy to see my first real subjects either didn’t notice or didn’t care that I was standing a few feet away taking their picture. I gather Schuman generally asks permission and poses his subjects, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. Posing people gives you control over lighting and composition, but it takes away the spontaneity that’s part of the appeal of street photography. Also, when you ask strangers if you may take their picture, a certain number of them react as if you’re some kind of weird deviant pervert.
These girls didn’t seem to mind. Then I saw why. They were used to being photographed. Apparently, the street-fashion-photography scene is getting seriously over-crowded.
Frankly, I thought my competition was being kind of a wimp, standing behind them like that. But I had to admit creeping up from the rear provided some advantages. It obviated any need to explain I was engaged in a socio-cultural exploration into the role of fashion, for example, not merely ogling. In other words, it kept me from looking like some kind of weird deviant pervert. Although sometimes it felt like mere ogling.
That made me uncomfortable. All straight men look at random women with lust in their hearts. Most of us have learned to keep it there. We understand that women don’t like us to stare, point, drool, and shout “hubba hubba!’’ On the other hand, the whole point of street-fashion photography is to photograph attractive people. And attractive people tend to attract, if you understand what I’m saying. Schuman often photographs women who look sexy without giving the impression he’s leering. How to maintain that distance between aesthetic appreciation and simple lechery was never clear to me.
On a simpler level, shooting from the back meant giving up the subject’s face. Photographs of people that don’t show their faces are like photographs of sailboats with their sails reefed. They ignore the feature that defines the personality of the subject.
For a time, I thought I’d stumbled across a class of subjects who were in no position to misunderstand my intentions: unconscious people. They had the further advantage of looking relaxed and natural.
But even the unconscious sometimes refuse to cooperate, to the best of their limited ability.
Other problems cropped up. An inordinate number of people out on the street who have stopped walking long enough to have their picture taken are eating something. Eating distorts the face, and eating outside somehow amplifies the effect. It robs the young of their animation and energy.
It diminishes the dignity of the mature.
Posted at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 2010
06/17/2025
May 2010
The United Kingdom held an election the other day, as you may have heard. We ended up with no government and we got rid of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That strikes me as a pretty good result. Governments have always done as much to me as they’ve done for me, so I figure without one, I’ll at least break even.
And in fact the useful bits of government are still around. The military still defend the kingdom, the police patrol the streets, the fire brigades stand by with their hoses coiled, teachers instruct young Brits, and street cleaners sweep up the broken bottles and hose down the puddles of vomit young Brits leave in their wake on a weekend night.
What we haven’t got is a legislature. Legislatures are admirable in the abstract but often repugnant in operation. Their main function is to pass laws, which means they exist to tell the rest of what we can and can’t do. I like to make up my own mind about that.
And we no longer have Gordon Brown. The British electorate couldn’t agree on what it wanted, but even large swathes of his own Labour Party agreed what we didn’t want was Brown. When he went to Buckingham Palace to ask the queen to dissolve Parliament so he could call an election, the queen agreed so fast he was out of the door in 22 minutes. She was probably afraid he’d change his mind.
Brown was one of those rare creatures, a politician who seemed to hate politicking. His face and body always seemed to be under the control of somebody else, and not somebody who had Gordon Brown’s best interests at heart. When he was in the middle of a crowd, he stiffened and twitched and gestured like a man who’d learned how to move his arms by reading instructions. He could look self-pitying, paranoid, and deeply insincere during a photo opportunity with the Belgian trade mission. The one thing he couldn’t do was smile naturally and shake hands as if he were thinking, Oh, look, how nice. Belgians.
Brown’s apparent distaste for the people whose votes he was soliciting seemed to be confirmed when he was caught on a live microphone calling a woman he’d been talking to a bigot. Personally, I thought we learned more about Brown’s character when the same microphone overheard him demanding to know which of his aides was to blame for setting up the conversation. A politician who blames an aide for putting him in touch with a voter is a politician who fundamentally misunderstands his own job. A boss who blames his subordinates for his own missteps is a lousy boss.
Brown got to be prime minister only because Tony Blair stepped down in 2007 as both prime minister and leader of the Labour Party and let Brown take over both positions, much as a man might bequeath a family business teetering on the edge of bankruptcy to a son-in-law he never liked all that much. No one had cast a ballot for Brown, except the 24,278 people who had voted for him in the general election of 2005 in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, his Parliamentary constituency. Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath is a collection of smallish towns in the Scottish council area of Fife, near the Firth of Forth. We have no reason to think its residents are representative of the population as a whole, or of anybody else, for that matter, unless it’s people who are inordinately fond of the consonant F.
Before that, Brown served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. For four years, it must be said, he performed brilliantly. Unfortunately, he held the job for six more years, during which he progressively abandoned the fiscal policies that had worked during the first four. By the time he became prime minister, he had helped set up the economic sinkhole into which we have now fallen, and which pretty much assured he wouldn’t stay prime minister for very long.
The election itself, though, was an an interesting example of cognitive dissonance. Everybody hated the Labour government. But a lot of people still liked their local Labour MP. They blithely ignored the fact that their MP was part of that government and went ahead and voted for him, evidently trusting the rest of the electorate to throw their MPs out and let them keep their own.
They might even get their wish. We ended up with a hung Parliament, a situation that sounds vaguely pornographic, and almost certainly will end up with somebody getting screwed.
More precisely, the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, won the most seats, 306. Labour trailed with 258. Cameron is now negotiating with Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, who came in third with 57 seats. A government needs 326 seats to have a majority. Simple arithmetic shows the Conservatives and the Lib Dems together have a majority. The Lib Dems and Labour don’t.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems don’t agree on much. So we’ve ended up in a situation that seems to likely to be resolved in one of two ways. Either a bunch of politicians will stand by their principles and decline to collaborate with those who staunchly oppose them. Or they’ll cheerfully abandon their principles and grab the chance to get themselves into power. You can decide for yourself which is more likely. I know which way I’m voting.
———————————–
That was fast. Just a few days ago, I predicted the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats would cheerfully jettison any principles that proved too inconvenient and grab the chance to form Britain’s next government. Hours later, the Oscar Madison that is the Conservatives got together with t
he Felix Ungar of the Liberal Democrats and found out they had a lot more in common than anyone would have thought. Britain skirted the looming disaster of a hung Parliament. The famously hot-blooded, uninhibited Brits poured into the streets to celebrate.
Actually, they didn’t. Brits don’t celebrate when disaster is averted. They start looking forward to the next disaster, with the gloomy relish of a hypochondriac who may have grudgingly accepted that his doctor was right and he hasn’t got cancer, but who has found encouraging symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, or at least shingles.
This weekend, the Lib Dems voted to approve the agreement with the Tories. In keeping with the spirit of things, the Lib Dems forgot all about various pledges to make politics fairer and more transparent. The vote was held behind closed doors and the exact tally was not disclosed. It was also meaningless, because the party’s executive committee had already backed it.
I could compile a point-by-point comparison of where the two parties differ, but I don’t see any use in that. Others have already done so in minute detail. And others have already noticed that despite some surface dissimilarities, the two parties always had a great deal in common — not least the startling resemblance between the Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg and the Tory chief, David Cameron. Both are smooth-cheeked, television-friendly young men with an air of schoolboy insouciance, and schoolboy naivete. Both are from that echelon of British society that goes to private schools and the best universities and has piled up enough money to let the occasional wayward son wander off into a vulgar business like politics.
In any case, where the parties agree and where they disagree seems to me purely theoretical. Those are just things they’ve said. And we have convincing evidence that we can’t really believe a word they say.
_____________________
I was all set to revive Boot Hall with a few whimsical paragraphs on the royal wedding. But while I was writing them, Osama bin Laden got killed. That seemed too big and important to ignore but impossible to treat whimsically. I sat back and waited for something big and important enough to comment on but trivial enough to warrant a certain light approach.
The Brits obliged with an upheaval in Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire, a scandal that is deeply, profoundly trivial. Then a substantial number of Congresspeople went insane and pushed the United States to the brink of bankruptcy. That frightened Standard and Poor’s so much it downgraded U.S. debt, causing stock markets to tank around the world. In an unrelated spasm of irrationality, London and then all of England erupted into the worst riots since the 1980s, or the 1920s, or the eighteenth century, depending on which overwrought journalist was describing them.
Confronted by such a wealth of potential material, I decided to lump all these ungainly events into one portmanteau post and hope I could find a unifying theme. I was tempted to use that cliche about the Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times, but it didn’t really fit. Interesting times may be nerve-wracking to live through, but at least they’re interesting. Serious people are doing serious things. We’re seeing a perversion of the Chinese curse. The events aren’t all that interesting, and they’re being caused by people impossible to take seriously.
England’s riots may be the exception. They looked pretty interesting, or at least exciting, for anybody who was close enough to see them. I myself was not. In London, the rioters considerately kept to their own neighborhoods, where they burned down buildings, torched cars, and looted many, many stores. Some commentators sounded puzzled that people would assault their own community, but it made sense to me. If you lived in a slum, wouldn’t you want to burn it down?
If the riots weren’t boring, the events preceding them followed a pattern so predictable they might have been choreographed. The police shot and killed a black man named Mark Duggan, whose past was perhaps not entirely uncheckered. He was originally reported to have shot at them first. But he probably didn’t. In any case, his friends and neighbors organized a peaceful protest, apparently on the grounds that Duggan had been a really nice guy once you got to know him. The protest turned violent.
Explanations for the riots were just as predictable. Some were straightforwardly racist — the kids rioted because they’re black. Others did a quasi-Marxist remake of West Side Story — the kids acted depraved because they’re deprived. That is, a greed-infected capitalistic society kept taunting the kids with gaudy electronics and cool sneakers they couldn’t afford. So they stole them.
Both explanations were wrong on their face. The coverage of the riots showed a fair number of white kids were involved. So were Asian kids, “Asian’’ being the preferred euphemism here for Pakistani. London is so post-modern, even our race riots are multicultural.
And since the shops getting looted were situated in their neighborhoods, you have to assume people in those neighborhoods could afford and did buy stuff from those stores. Greedy capitalists don’t put their stores in places where nobody buys what the stores sell. They’re greedy, not stupid.
Personally, I suspect the riots were caused by boredom. I’ve never been truly poor, but I’ve been out of work and short of money. The condition intensifies itself. You haven’t got a job, so you haven’t got anything to do. You haven’t got any money, so you can’t afford to do anything else. A riot would spice up your life considerably, especially if you got a new 52-inch flat-screen television as a bonus.
I like this explanation because it confirms my thesis that the riots were the only recent event that could be called exciting. The others were either expected or contrived. Nothing that’s expected can be truly exciting. Anything that’s contrived will end whenever the people who contrived it decide to end it, and it can’t be that exciting if you know how it’s going to end.
The debt-ceiling mess in Congress takes some kind of prize for being both expected and contrived. Europe watched it coming with disbelieving dread, the way you’d watch somebody hopelessly drunk get into his car and drive slowly and carefully toward a freight train barreling down a set of railroad tracks.
The Europeans I work with wanted me, the resident Yank, to explain just how the hell people like Michele Bachmann could hold hostage the economy of the United States, and for that matter, the world. And I had no idea. I ended up telling them you have to expect this kind of thing when you elect people to Congress who don’t even know how to spell their own first names.
The more interesting question to me was whether Bachmann and her ilk understood what they were doing. She kept arguing that raising the debt ceiling meant President Barack Obama would get to borrow and spend more. It did not. It authorized the government to pay for borrowing and spending that Congress — not the president — had already mandated. In other words, it didn’t mean running up bigger bills in the future. It meant paying bills that had already been run up.
Bachmann may actually believe that raising the debt ceiling applies to future borrowing and spending. If so, she’s too ignorant to hold public office. Or she may know better but thinks she can fool a fair number of people into believing she’s taken a bold stand against going deeper into debt. In that case, she’s too dishonest to hold public office, much as that sounds like a contradiction in terms.
It’s also possible her problem is neither ignorance nor dishonesty but simple illiteracy. She claims Standard & Poor’s lowered the credit rating of the United States because Congress raised the debt ceiling. Maybe she just couldn’t read Standard & Poor’s own statement on its decision, which says quite clearly it acted because “ … the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges … ’’ In other words, because of the fuss people like Bachmann kicked up.
I think we can agree that whatever motivated the folks at Standard & Poor’s, we needn’t take them too seriously. They’re just pencil-necked bean counters who can’t even count beans without making mistakes amounting to two trillion dollars. They’re the same people who helped turn the world’s economy into a Monopoly board that’s just been kicked over by an eight-year-old. They accomplished that by looking at a bunch of securities based on subprime mortgages held by toothless meth heads who were refinancing double-wides in the Ozarks and deciding, hey, that deserves a triple-A rating.
Even the stock market couldn’t take the downgrade seriously for very long, which was entirely predictable. The stock market takes everything seriously but can never decide what most needs to be taken seriously right this minute, so it’s always rushing off to take something else seriously.That’s why they say trading stocks is like trying to catch a falling knife.
It can be done, but things turn messy when you get it wrong.
In Europe, once the stock market stopped taking Standard & Poor’s seriously, it remembered what it had been taking seriously before it got serious about Standard & Poor’s: Greece. It remembered Greece is broke.
That’s nothing new. Greece has been broke since the Peloponnesian War. Nobody cared until 2001, when Greece joined the European Union’s common currency, the euro.
The criteria for joining the euro were very strict. To meet them, Greece had a choice. It could cut spending, push up interest rates, and raise taxes, or more accurately, start collecting taxes instead of letting everybody cheat. Then it could use the money to reduce its debt and its deficit. Or it could just promise to do all those things, and lie.
Ten years later, the European Union and the rest of the world have realized the Greeks lied. During those ten years, Greece blithely borrowed money on the strength of its membership in the euro and used it to finance a very pleasant life for itself. As I understand it, all Greeks are entitled to a free education until the age of forty-five. Then they’re guaranteed a job with the government for life. They retire at fifty and get a pension twice their salary during their highest-paid year on the job. Or something like that.
The financially unsophisticated tend to ask at this point: who cares? Let the Greeks go broke. Unfortunately, it’s not Greece that will go broke. It’s the banks that lent it money, which Greece now can’t repay. And the shareholders and depositors in those banks, who had the wildly unrealistic idea that banks weren’t stupid enough to lend money to a country that lied a lot about its finances. As an aside here, let me give you some advice: never trust a bank not to do something stupid.
While the banks in the United States were loaning vast sums in the Ozarks, the banks in Europe were loaning similar amounts to Greece, the Ozarks of Europe. When it became clear to U.S. banks that meth heads were not, in fact, triple-A credit risks — no thanks to you, Standard & Poor’s! — bankers took fright and huddled in their vaults and stopped lending money. The credit crunch of 2007-2009 ensued. The world’s economy went to hell. As it becomes clear Greece is no better a credit risk than the Ozarks, banks are getting nervous about lending, and the economy is about to go …
Or maybe not. The European Union shows some signs of functioning rationally, or at least coherently. In effect, it’s standing behind the Greek debt, while demanding the Greeks get their financial act together. It helps that many of the banks that lent money to Greece are based in France and Germany, the effective leaders of the European Union. Never underestimate the power of enlightened self-interest. Or wild-eyed and desperate self-interest.
What we’ve got now is a race. We’re hoping Greece will stabilize its finances and quit lying about them before Germany runs out of money and patience. The Germans have a lot of money and are a notably patient people. The Greeks have a mountain of debt and an infinite capacity for dishonesty. It’s going to be close.
With all those trivial people doing dull but risky things — and there’s a combination that’s hard to pull off — Britain has largely lost track of the scandal sucking in Rupert Murdoch. But the scandal is still sputtering along, and whenever we get a minute here, it’s likely to flare up again, because it involves the only subject the British press takes seriously — itself.
Just to recap: The scandal got under way in 2005, when Murdoch’s News of the World ran a short item saying Prince William had hurt his knee while he was kicking a football around. The royals wondered how the newspaper — I guess we have to call it a newspaper — found out about the dodgy knee. They called in Scotland Yard to investigate.
You can’t get much more trivial than that. Nor could you over-react more thoroughly. If one of your neighbors asked about that ankle you twisted playing tennis, would you call the cops to investigate how he knew about it? Would the cops listen if you called?
No, is the answer to both questions. But you are not Prince William, which is also the answer. The cops were called, they investigated, and in due course the newspaper’s royal editor and a private detective he’d hired went to jail for a few months, because they had hacked into the voice mail of somebody who worked for the royals.
Let’s savor for a moment just how trivial a scandal must be if it involves somebody whose job title is “royal editor’’. For that matter, let’s savor the triviality of somebody whose job title is “prince.’’
Right, moving briskly along: The News of the World said it had no idea such things were going on and piously denounced its bad-apple royal editor. The police said all they’d found was this single, isolated case of hacking. Nothing to see here; move along, move along. The wide-eyed innocence of the police would later be regarded with some skepticism, and the commissioner and an assistant commissioner of police would end up spending more time with their families.
Because incredible as it seems, the people who ran Britain’s trashiest tabloid had lied. The royal editor was not the only hacker and Prince William was not the only hackee. All over the newsroom, people had been listening in on actors, athletes, pop singers, and the stars of reality television shows. And they had tapped the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old girl who was abducted and murdered on her way home from school in March 2002.
The British are oddly indulgent of tabloids like the News of the World, with their foul brew of sleaze, scandal, and mendacity. But screwing around with the investigation of a missing schoolgirl — the hacks apparently deleted some of the messages on her phone, leading police and her family to think she might still be alive — revolted even the phlegmatic Brits. (Lee Bellfield, a former nightclub bouncer, eventually was convicted of killing Milly Dowler and two other women and trying to kill a fourth.)
A hue and cry went up. Parliament hauled in Murdoch and various of his minions for questioning and rebuking. Several minions were subsequently arrested. Among them was Rebekah Brooks, once the editor of the News of the World and later chief executive of News International, the British branch of the evil empire, whose conduct seems to prove my point about what happens when you hire people who can’t spell their own first names.
Murdoch reacted with a quintessentially Murdochian move. He shut down the News of the World. That eliminated the jobs of two hundred people, several of whom probably hadn’t done anything too illegal lately and might, under the circumstances, be considered innocent. Cynics pointed out the News of the World just came out on Sundays and Murdoch’s other tabloid, the Sun, had no Sunday edition. They wondered if we might have lost the News of the World but would soon gain a Sun on Sunday. Murdoch’s remaining minions refused to dignify the cynics with a response. The cynics noted the minions had avoided denying the Sun would start to publish on Sunday.
If Murdoch thought eliminating the News of the World would eliminate his problems, he was wrong. New revelations keep popping up. A recent one was a letter from that royal editor who went to jail. He said he’d been promised his job back when he got out of the clink if he kept his mouth shut, but he hadn’t got it back, and he implied strongly he wasn’t going to play the martyr much longer. His attitude can’t have helped those of Murdoch’s minions who haven’t been arrested yet to sleep any better.
One entirely predictable result of the scandal has been a debate within the press about what all this means for the press, reinforcing my thesis that the only thing the British press takes seriously is itself. The American press stares at its own navel just as intently — look at how the The New York Times reacted when it found out Jayson Blair was stealing quotes and facts from other reporters‘ stories, claiming he’d interviewed people he had never spoken to, and pretending to write stories from places he’d never been. (And note once again the consequences of hiring somebody who can’t spell his own first name.)
But the British debates tend to occur on a slightly less elevated plane. One local columnist remarked at the time that Britain couldn’t have a Jayson Blair scandal, because in Britain stealing quotes and facts from other reporters‘ stories, claiming you’ve interviewed people you have never spoken to, and pretending to write stories from places you’ve never been were pretty much business as usual.
The umbrella under which the local hacks shelter when they’re accused of acting like jackals is, of course, the public’s need to know. Several rebuttals to their argument are available. The most conclusive is Anthony Weiner.
Yes, that Anthony Weiner — the Congressman from New York who was forced to resign after first denying, then admitting that he had e-mailed a photo of his thinly veiled penis to a young woman he had not met. In fact, he’d sent raunchy e-mails to several young women he had not met, most of whom seemed puzzled by his attention. To use a line I’ve been hoarding, if they weren’t nonplussed, they were certainly far from plussed.*
The British press covered Weiner’s fifteen minutes of fame like Watergate.The web site of the Guardian, one of our more stiffly-upper-lipped newspapers, lists twenty-four stories about Weiner. Twenty-two of them are about Weiner in his underwear.
Only his wife and his urologist need to know that much about Weiner in his underwear. The British public certainly don’t. Nobody here had ever heard of him. He’d been a loud-mouthed, largely ineffectual member of the New York City Council and then a loud-mouthed, largely ineffectual member of Congress, but “loud-mouthed’’ and “largely ineffectual’’ are not distinguishing characteristics in either institution. I’m from New York, and I barely remembered who he was.
More important, Weiner was a congressman in the United States. People here didn’t need to know about his character flaws so they could make a fully informed, carefully reasoned decision about whether to vote for him. They couldn’t have voted for him if they wanted to. His little kink was not woven into the fabric of our public life. Unraveling it served no purpose.
The British newspapers covered Weiner a lot more thoroughly than he covered himself only because it gave them a chance to talk about something that fascinates them: underwear. Women’s underwear, men’s underwear — it’s all big news in Britain, no matter how peripheral the knickers may be to the subject at hand. When Osama bin Laden got shot, what made the headlines was the fact that he’d only been wearing his underpants at the time. And those of you who remember all the way back to the first paragraph were probably wondering how I’d work him in, weren’t you?
I have no idea why British journalists are obsessed with underwear. Nor do I understand why Brits are so eager to read about it. Obviously, underpants are related to sex. Brits are as interested in sex as normal people, but a lingering Puritanism makes them embarrassed to admit it. So any talk about sex alternates between giggling, schoolboyish smirks and purse-lipped, schoolmarmish disapproval. Never forget that the Puritans might have ended up in America, but they started out in Britain.
I do understand that when British journalists act like schoolboys who’ve just realized they can see a girl’s underpants as she’s climbing a Jungle Gym, it’s not because the public has some high-minded need to know about their discovery. It’s because they’re pandering to one of their audience’s weirder proclivities. Never forget that Freud might have started out in Vienna, but he ended up in London.
Oddly enough, on one of the few occasions in public life where some interest in sex was not only permissible but warranted, the subject never came up. That occasion was the marriage of Prince William Arthur Philip Louis to Catherine Elizabeth “Kate’’ Middleton.
Because Prince William is the son of the heir to the throne, he is duty-bound to have sex. Preferably twice, so he can produce an heir and a spare, as his father so sensitively put it after the birth of William’s younger brother, Harry. But not a salacious word emerged in all the commentary I heard and read. Nobody even mentioned that Kate Middleton had breasts, and in Britain, women’s breasts are like underwear: headline news. Less explicably, so are men’s breasts.
What we did hear and see was a lot of snark about Kate Middleton’s middle-class origins. We saw venomous sneering about how Kate conspired with her social-climbing mother to snare the prince. We saw unctuous tripe that managed to combine sucking up and sneering, a difficult maneuver for a garden-variety snob but something a certain kind of Englishman learns at his mother’s breast, when he’s not ogling and smirking. (The trick was to defend the Middletons against all charges of committing any social faux pas, while reiterating every such charge and ideally adding a few new ones.)
English snobbery is beyond the comprehension of anyone who wasn’t born and reared in the neurotic stew of England’s class system. To an American, the Middleton parents looked like wholly admirable people. They’d founded their own business, made a fortune, sent their children to the best schools, and generally built an enviable life for themselves. To that certain kind of Englishman, Mrs. Middleton’s family tree included dreadfully common coal miners, carpenters, and general laborers, and, really, one hardly need say more, need one?
I have been studying the English concept of class for over a decade now. Like a latter-day Margaret Mead, I live among the natives, study their customs, and wonder why they paint their faces in the presence of their priest-kings. And I have come to one conclusion: the class system is like British food. It’s not awful because they don’t know any better; it’s awful because they like it that way.**
Why else would a million of them crowd the streets around Westminster Abbey for the royal wedding? Objectively speaking, what we had here looked like a routine case of a young man’s panicking and marrying the most attractive woman who’d have him before he lost the rest of his hair. But gather they did, and most of them gathered long before I showed up. I walked down toward the abbey about 8 a.m. but only got within ten blocks or so. Nor could I get close to the route the happy couple would take from the church to his mother’s house. I talked to somebody who wasn’t having any more luck than I was, and he said he’d been there since 5 a.m.
No surprise, really. It was the kind of event that touches some chord deep in the English soul, a ceremony encrusted with history and tradition, conducted with pomp and pageantry. It was an opportunity for the lower orders to bask in the reflected glory of those who had chosen much better ancestors. It was a chance to wear a silly hat.
Putting on a faux top hat made of cheap felt and emblazoned with the Union Jack during public events is a tradition at least as time-honored here as the monarchy. Something primal may even link the two. The symbol of a monarch is his crown, and what’s a crown but an extremely expensive and very silly hat?
The same link may also explain why women wear big, fancy hats to formal British weddings. Women in Britain don’t usually wear hats any more than women in the rest of the civilized world. But they go to great lengths to find wedding hats that attract attention without crossing the line and looking downright idiotic. (A strong consensus developed that this time Princess Beatrice had not only crossed the line but galloped several miles over the border.)
Posted at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Of Lords and Dukes and Journalists
06/17/2025
February 4, 2002
Paul:
Lord Wellington? I assume you mean the Duke of Wellington. Dukes rank well above lords. In fact, dukes top the hierarchy of the British aristocracy, which has done so much to disprove the theory that intelligence, talent, personality, physical competence, and mental stability are inherited characteristics.
The Iron Duke, as he was not so affectionately known, may or may not have said the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. But he is reliably reported to have described his troops as “the scum of the earth” and to have said, concerning those same troops, “I don’t know whether they frighten the enemy, but by God they frighten me.” I suspect it’s a good thing the Duke lived before the era of the fragmentation grenade and the practice of rolling one into the tent of any officer who showed too little regard for the men serving under him.
Incidentally, the web site you use as a source for doubting the provenance of the “playing grounds of Eton” remark is itself somewhat suspect. The reasoning behind that doubt makes sense. Like so much else the English would have you believe is a tradition older than Hadrian’s Wall, the public school myth dates back only to Victoria’s reign, or starting about the time of the American Civil War. So the glorification of English public schools was at best just getting under way when the Duke died, in 1852. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did Eton and the like gain their reputation as the crucible in which the character of Britain’s youth was forged, along with an obsession with bowel movements and a taste for sodomy.
However, also concerning the Duke, that site says:
“Up Guards and at’em” attributed to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo.
It is doubtful whether Wellington ever used this phrase. One of his contemporaries, J.W. Croker, reported in 1884 that he had written to the duke asking if he really did give this command at the Battle of Waterloo. In an undated letter, the duke replied: “What I must have said and possibly did say was, ‘Stand up, Guards,’ and then gave the commanding officers the order to attack” – so repulsing the last attack of the French Imperial Guard.
J.W. Croker was a politician and journalist who was indeed a contemporary of the Duke of Wellington. He died just five years after him, in 1857. Now, British journalists are justly famous for their ability to report marvelous things from places where they have never actually set foot. But so far none of them has reported anything thirty years after he died.
I suspect the citation refers to Croker’s voluminous diaries and letters, publication of which took up much of the nineteenth century, probably continued into the twentieth, and for all I know may still be going on. What Croker lacked in talent, insight, knowledge, integrity, and taste, he made up for in sheer bulk.
Little of his output has survived except for those diaries and correspondence. They’re useful to historians of his era, since Croker knew everyone. He was active in the politics of his time — among his many dubious achievements, he was the man who persuaded what was then formally the Tory party to rename itself the Conservative party. A reasonably objective biography of nineteenth century figures describes him as an “MP, political manipulator, and propagandist,” and notes “he lost political influence later in his career when he became the toady of the man in power.”
The neglect into which much of his prose has fallen is perhaps explained by another of his contemporaries, the historian Lord Macaulay, in his review of one Croker work:
Many of his blunders are such as we should be suprised to hear any well-educated gentleman commit, even in conversation. The notes absolutely swarm with mis-statements into which the editor [Croker] never would have fallen, if he had taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions… [Edinburgh Review, 1831].
Little has changed in British journalism from Croker’s day to our own, expect that now few people bother remarking on the vast distance that separates what appears in most journalism from verifiable fact, generally accepted knowledge, and simple reality.
Pedantically yours,
Larry
Larry King on 9/11/2001
06/17/2025
September 23, 2001
Paul:
As you know, I lived in or around New York for thirteen years before I moved to London. I still consider it home, in the sense that when I think about moving back to the U.S., I think about moving back to New York.
My mental landscape of the city includes the twin towers of the World Trade Center. When I try to envisage the new skyline, without the Trade Center towers at the southern end of Manhattan, I fail. I literally can’t imagine New York without them.
I was lucky. No one I’m close to got hurt or killed. But that’s just among the people I know best. A friend of mine was the first person who put into words an idea I’m still getting used to — it’s going to take a long time to find out about everybody.
My friend is a bond trader. During his usual day, he’d probably call Cantor Fitzgerald LP, maybe several times. Cantor is the broker’s broker for the bond market — if you buy or sell bonds for a living in the U.S., you’d deal with somebody at Cantor at one time or another.
Cantor’s main offices were on the 101st, 103rd, 104th, and 105th floors of the north tower of the Trade Center, the first one hit. More than a thousand people worked in those offices. About two hundred and seventy of them got out or weren’t in the office in the first place. The other seven hundred or so are presumed dead.
My friend almost certainly was acquainted with some of them. Some he’d had a drink with a few times. Some he’d dealt with only over the phone. He didn’t necessarily know their names. He was the first person who put what I was feeling into words: He said he’d realized it might be months before he finds out about all the people he’s met. Some of them he might never find out about.
Almost everybody who lived in Manhattan and had a college education and a white-collar job is in the same position. We all knew casually people who worked in Wall Street. We might never know about those casual acquaintances and friends of friends — people we ran into a couple of times, people we had dinner with once or talked to at a few parties because we knew people who knew each other. A friend of mine in Amsterdam who’s from New York called it six degrees of separation from hell.
That may have something to do with another reaction among the New Yorkers living over here. We all want to go back. Not to live, necessarily, just to return for a little while. Maybe we’re feeling some urge to re-connect with those secondary and tertiary circles of acquaintances, to see how much damage was done.
Actually, though, I think the reason is more primeval. The tribal village was attacked. The tribe’s instinct is to band together.
That would be appropriate, wouldn’t it? New York was attacked as if it were a tribal village. Barbarians motivated by stone-age fear and hatred hurled themselves at it, trying to kill as many people as they could to satisfy the demands their primitive superstitions.
Going back wasn’t practical for most of us and would have been pointless for all of us. We couldn’t have done much to help anyone. So we’re rather helplessly marinating in much the same emotional stew as everyone in the U.S., I should think. Anger predominates.
In my case, at least, the anger is split. I’m enraged at the sub-humans who committed the attacks, of course. I’m also infuriated by the western scum who are apologizing for them and trying to justify what they did.
The stunted creatures who hijacked the planes were warped and twisted by a vicious, polluted culture. We could expect no better from them.
The journalists, academics, politicians, and miscellaneous commentators — what the British call, with pinpoint accuracy, the chattering classes — have no excuse. I cannot fathom those who are whining that the U.S. somehow brought this on itself. Some of the worst go slightly further, and claim Americans deserved it.
They’re a minority, though, and they know it. I also think they know they are simply wrong this time. Nobody in the U.S. did anything to deserve the choice between leaping from the 98th floor of the World Trade Center or being incinerated by burning jet fuel.
The rest of the populace in Europe looks to be pretty much on our side. They may not be as eager to go kill Islamic fundamentalists personally, but they’re perfectly willing to see them get killed.
One reason probably is the fact that many European countries have a sizable Islamic community. England has Afghans, Pakistanis and miscellaneous Arabs. France has Algerians and miscellaneous Arabs. Germany has Turks, Spain Moroccoans, Italy various Mideasterners.
Not all of them have assimilated terribly well. And like some urban blacks in the U.S., some of them have learned to play the victim game. Everything bad that happens to them is the result of discrimination, or the fault of past imperialism, or something.
In fact, a number of the Muslims here rushed to claim victim status pre-emptively. They set up an outcry about how the most important thing now was to prevent a backlash against British Muslims. I think it’s fair to say most people responded, Well, no, that’s not the most important thing. It’s pretty far down the list, actually.
By the way, almost no backlash occurred. I gather that’s the case in the U.S. as well. A few thugs got drunk and picked fights with convenience store clerks. A few bricks got tossed through mosque windows. Considering some of the mullahs here were preaching that the attack was a wonderful thing and all good Muslims should rejoice, I thought that showed remarkable forbearance on the part of the civilized population.
The point is, when Europeans think about Muslims, the local community is on their mind, and the local community is not always something they are terribly happy to have in their midst. The intelligent and liberal-minded among them try to discount the bad impression left by the jerks among the Muslims and maintain a level of tolerance, but it’s not always easy, the same way it’s not easy to stay liberal and tolerant in the U.S. when a gang of loudmouthed black teenagers invade a restaurant, clearly trying to be as obnoxious as they can. You know they’re not necessarily representative, but they’re still obnoxious.
Nobody knows how long the European solidarity with the U.S. will last or how far the support will extend, but I suspect it’s stronger and will go further than many imagine. Europeans know more about both terrorists and Muslims than Americans do; they’ve had to put up with both for a lot longer. Deep in their hearts, I think they’d like to see the fear of God put in the whole nasty, quarrelsome, troublemaking crowd overseas, if for no other reason than to remind the local troublemakers who’s boss.
Part of the reaction here provided a little comic relief, as well. That was the British insistence on acting as if anybody much cared what they were doing diplomatically or militarily.
The great cultural memory here is World War II, and the Brits persist in acting as if every prime minister were Churchill, showing Americans how the war should be fought. That the Americans spent much of their time fending off Churchill’s ideas about how the war should be fought is not something they acknowledge or in many cases are even aware of.
So last week we saw the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, boldly visiting Iran, the first visit by a British foreign secretary since the revolution in 1979. The Brits hailed this as a breakthrough, bringing Iran into the anti-terrorist coalition, and evidence of the deft touch the subtle, delicate British diplomat can bring to a situation that blunt, tough-talking Americans would botch.
Straw was headed for Israel next, but before taking off he managed to give a little talk in which he referred to the problems in the Mideast being basically all the fault of the Israelis, for ignoring the “plight of the Palestinians.” The prime minister and the president of Israel both refused to meet with him as a result.
And barely had Straw cleared Iranian air space before the main ayatollah and the supposedly moderate, pro-reform president both gave speeches denouncing the West and particularly America and declaring they’d never cooperate in any western military effort. They even revived the chant of `death to America, death to Israel’ that they’d considerately dropped from political discourse for a few days after the attacks.
Straw then headed for Egypt. Somehow, he managed not to say anything that incited the local terrorists to blow up the pyramids. Clearly, the Brits are missing a great opportunity. They ought to send Straw to Kabul. The Taliban would collapse before he got back to Whitehall.
Also last week, the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, waded into trouble. He made some impolitic remarks, endorsing the idea that at bottom what we’re seeing here is a clash of civilizations, and Western civilization is superior to the Islamic civilization. Much hue and cry resulted; when you’re the leader of a country, you’re not supposed to go around chanting, Nyah, nyah, my culture’s better than your culture.
I think it might have been Michael Kinsley, the former editor of The New Republic and now the editor of Slate, who pointed out that what journalists call gaffes usually consist of a politician saying something that’s true. A politician who let on that he doesn’t especially like children and would rather have teeth pulled than visit Newark commits a gaffe. In that sense, Berlusconi committed a classic politician’s gaffe.
He was a bit crude about it and he didn’t explore how the two worlds have often managed to co-exist, but in fact the basic tenets of Islam, as a lot of Muslims understand them, are antithetical to western values. Berlusconi was just trying to make the point that if you have to choose, you’d choose western civilization over Islamic civilization.
And I’m afraid we’re going to have to choose at some point. We face a huge, ugly contradiction. Much of the Muslim world wants to see Israel wiped out. They’d like to kill all the Jews, but even they know enough not to push that point. The U.S. and Europe are not going to let that happen.
It is hard to see a neat way to resolve this situation. My own feeling is, it won’t be resolved, in the sense Americans like to resolve things, where rational people debate what is the right and what is wrong, until the people who are wrong say, oh, yes, I see, I’ll set about mending my ways.
You can’t really resolve the contradiction with logic and compromise. The Muslims aren’t acting out of logic. They’re doing Allah’s will by slaying infidels and cleansing the holy places of Zionist filth.
The only real solution I see is brutal. We would have to kill quite a few of them, and occupy several of their homelands. Over the course of a couple of decades, we would establish democratic, secular states in those countries, much as we did in Japan and Germany after World War II. We would beat into them a lesson the west learned during several bloody centuries, which is that you can’t build a civilization if you kill people because you think God wants you to.
Some other course of action may work, although if by “work” what you mean is, eliminate both the existing threat of terrorism and the source of future terrorism, I doubt it. That contradiction is just too stark.
This is not necessarily a solution I advocate. It’s a little cheap and easy for somebody well past draft age, who lives far from the probable front lines, to advocate all-out war — and that’s what it would be, a war until one side doesn’t just sue for peace, but is effectively destroyed.
I’m simply saying, that’s the situation. Given the situation, it’s foolish to talk about fighting terrorism as if it’s some impersonal force of nature, like flooding or mudslides, which can be contained and countered with proper engineering and a few sensible precautions. We have to come to grips with the fact that an entire culture is opposed to our culture.
What we do after that . . . damned if I know.
Larry
Posted at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Foot and Mouth and British Tourism
06/17/2025
April 2, 2001
Paul:
You ask whether Britain is closed. The short answer is no. The accurate answer is longer and less clear. Sorry; if you’d lived here a while, you would understand there is no situation the British can’t make more complicated than it needs to be.
One thing to make clear is the cause of the problem. You relayed the question to me in a letter from someone who said, “All reports indicate this early spring 2001 is an excellent time to visit London because the diseased cattle scare has frightened off the usual tourist mob and things can be had cheaper, including hotel rooms.”
Your correspondent — like a fair number of people outside the U.K., and outside Europe especially — has conflated the latest sick-animal problem with the previous one. Granted, from a distance the sight of livestock keeling over tends to look the same regardless of whether the beasts have been struck by bubonic plague or a passing case of the fantods, but if you’re putting together travel plans it can make a difference.
The previous sick-animal problem was bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is often abbreviated to BSE and even more often referred to as mad-cow disease, because it affects the nervous system of cattle, eventually destroying the brain. That’s distressing for the cattle but wouldn’t have been terribly important to the rest of us, until the disease leapt the species barrier and made a few people sick with an obscure brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. C-J disease is very nasty — it more or less eats away the brain, progressively dismantling the victim’s thought processes and motor abilities until he mercifully dies. No treatment exists.
The chances of contracting C-J disease are and always were virtually nil. You had to eat beef from an infected cow, which meant a cow slaughtered some time in the 1980s or possibly early 1990s. Even then, it’s not the kind of disease that rampages out of control. A total of 91 people are known to have contracted it, 87 in the U.K., three in France, and one in Ireland. The combined population of those three countries is about 119 million, so since 1994, when the first case linked to mad-cow was discovered, approximately 0.00001 percent of the population has been afflicted each year. You get worse odds on a commercial airline.
Those few cases originated before the link between BSE and C-J disease was known, or while the government was strenuously denying any such link existed. Since then, steps have been taken that should eliminate the threat almost entirely. We banned the animal feed that probably carried mad-cow disease and we killed all the cattle that might have been sick, starting in 1996. Once that was done, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, especially the surviving cattle. Then in February sheep started getting sick.
That was the beginning of the latest sick-animal problem, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Foot-and-mouth is in most respects a much more benign disease than mad-cow. People can’t catch it, for one thing, and it’s seldom fatal or even very annoying to animals. Mainly, they lose weight and their milk dries up, making them unproductive as sources of either meat or dairy products.
But foot-and-mouth affects a wide spectrum of animals — pigs, sheep, and goats, in addition to cattle — and it’s highly contagious. It can be borne on the wind for distances of several miles. More important, for our purposes, it can be transmitted by contact, so anybody who’s walked around on a farm where one animal has it can infect animals on another farm.
That last bit has led the British authorities to take two steps. In combination, they seem to have given much of the world the impression virtually all of Britain is stalked by plague and under strict quarantine, with the fearful citizenry venturing from their hovels only to throw out the dead.
The first step was a cull of animals either diseased or at risk of the disease — that is, slaughtering them and burning their carcasses. One can only imagine the dismay of a cow who escaped being shot when she might have carried a disease that could kill her or anyone who ate a steak carved from her, only to be struck down just because she’d got too friendly with the sheep in the next field and might catch a bug that would make her feel out of sorts for a couple of weeks.
The second step the authorities took was imposing some limits on movement around the countryside. No part of the country is closed entirely, but you can no longer just hike across the fields at will, and you specifically can’t go onto farms where the disease has been diagnosed. How much that affects your travel plans depends on what you wanted to do once you got here.
Anyone who’d hoped to visit the Lake District might as well stay home. The area hardest hit by foot-and-mouth is Cumbria, which includes the lakes and their surrounding mountains. The restrictions on movement are making it hard to walk around the lakes and up and down the mountains. I understand that’s what one does there.
Other attractive parts of the countryside — Devon, for example, and Gloucestershire — also restrict movement, so for all practical purposes hiking and bicycling there are out of the question. The beaches will be open this summer, although I’d advise anyone thinking of visiting a British beach to just find a nice stretch of gravel road beside a sewage-treatment plant and lie down.
The various castles, cathedrals, and so forth are mostly open, although not necessarily — Stonehenge, for example, is closed. If you had in mind one particular attraction, it would be best to write or phone beforehand. Several times. Phones at public facilities in Britain for some reason are often manned by idiots who lie. To get an answer to a question, you need to ask several different idiots, then average their answers out.
Our cities are open for business, which is to say you can still come to London. You can also go to Liverpool or York or Birmingham if you’ve got nothing better to do; I can pretty much guarantee you won’t find anything better to do there, either.
As for saving money, a kind of Catch-22 is in effect. Some places are so desperate for business they’d almost certainly give you a great deal on a room or a meal. Unfortunately, they’re in places like Cumbria, where you can’t do anything once you get there except stare at the lovely scenery, softly lit by a distant glow from the burning carcasses of slaughtered livestock. If anyone in London is cutting anybody a deal on the price of anything, I haven’t heard about it. In other words, you can save a lot of money in places you don’t want to go and get mercilessly sheared in places you do.
It’s not clear how long all this will last. The latest guess seems to be incidence of the disease will peak in June. Whether the restrictions will be eased then is anyone’s guess, because the British government is carrying on with the ineptitude that has become traditional in such events.
In fact, its ineptitude apparently helped or at least allowed the disease to spread. A plan to tag animals so they could be traced, in the event of outbreaks just like this, was supposed to have been put in effect in the early 1990s. It wasn’t. The government wasted a lot of time just trying to trace sick animals back to their original farm, so it could figure out which other animals were or might be sick.
After a certain point, of course, tracing the animals was irrelevant. They needed to be isolated, immobilized, slaughtered and the corpses — which remain infectious — disposed of very rapidly. But the government wasted time trying to trace animals, couldn’t seem to make up its mind how or to what extent infected areas needed to be quarantined, and through bad planning and lousy management, seems not to be finding and killing and disposing of infected animals very fast.
Apparently, it’s not unusual for days to pass from the time an animal is diagnosed to the time it’s killed. Then more days pass before the carcass is burned. Newspapers reported cases where animals — cattle — were slaughtered in their stalls. By the time the disposal team showed up, the corpses had swollen so badly they couldn’t be pried out of the stalls.
The government resisted calls to use the army for slaughter and disposal, even though an army would seem admirably suited to killing things, and it’s got trucks and bulldozers and napalm for hauling away and disposing of the carcasses. The only explanation I heard was that calling out the army would cause panic. That’s the usual British government explanation for not letting anyone know what it’s doing or how badly it’s doing it. The ruling class will sort this out, don’t you know; meantime, we mustn’t let the lower orders get over-excited. One knows how upset they become, doesn’t one?
By the same token, the preceding government denied for quite some time any link existed between mad cows and C-J disease, even though just such a link was being investigated. A memorable scene occurred in 1990, when the unfortunately-named John Gummer, then the Minister of Agriculture, not only ate a hamburger publicly but more or less force-fed one to his four-year-old daughter, to prove you couldn’t possibly make yourself ill eating good British beef. His even-more-unfortunately-named successor, Douglas Hogg, maintained the same stiff-upper-lipped pose of studied ignorance until overwhelming evidence forced the government to retreat.
Our current government has learned a little from its predecessors — don’t appoint a man named Hogg as Minister of Agriculture if you expect anyone to take him seriously, for example — but not a lot. The party line now seems to be that foot-and-mouth is a very serious crisis the government is heroically grappling with, and it’s nothing to be concerned about so please invite all your friends abroad to come visit us. The latter clauses were hurriedly tacked on when someone recalled that tourism contributes approximately seven times as much to the U.K. economy as agriculture.My impression is that last fact is sinking in, and the inclination from now on will be to err on the side of latitude. Just today — Wednesday — Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech to the British Chambers of Commerce pleading with them to get the message out, Britain is open for business. Since the audience consisted of businesspeople, presumably they knew that, and wondered what the hell they were supposed to do about it. But at least some common sense is setting in.
The truth is, if every cloven-hoofed animal in Britain caught foot-and-mouth, we’d be over the whole thing in a month or so, and even the farmers wouldn’t be hurt much. A lot more people will suffer for a lot longer if everybody who’d thought about coming here and dropping a few quid on hotel and restaurant bills decides maybe he’d just as soon go to Disney World. So I would guess by the prime tourist season, May through August, most limits on where you can go and what you can do will be lifted. You’ll probably be able to find some bargains here and there on food and board, maybe tourist requirements like rental cars, although I wouldn’t count on it. My own plans include Hong Kong in April, France some time in early summer, Spain in early autumn, thereby getting out of town just ahead of whatever tourists show up, and settling back down once they’ve left.
Posted at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Joe Vs. Larry on Eurostar
06/17/2025
March 26, 2001
[Joe Brancatelli wrote in to comment on Larry King’s commentary that appeared last week]:
What your American ex-pat scribe doesn’t know (or has forgotten) is that Americans know nothing about trains. We don’t condescend; we’re amazed they work. As I told some Brit friends last month, while they were whining incessantly at the pub about Railtrack, the government-run infrastructure in the UK, Americans would KILL for Railtrack’s problems. The British system, by American standards, remains a marvel. So does the French, German and Italian systems. For a whole variety of reasons, we’ve let our rail system wither. It’s fallen and it doesn’t know how or why to get up. So when Americans encounter a rail network that works–and can actually get you somewhere–we are at first stunned, and then amazed, and, finally, embarrassed. After all, we think, how dumb are we?
That said, your ex-pat American friend should remember that everything about trains confuse Americans. Most of us can’t even read a timetable. I include myself in that–and I live on a commuter line. If it weren’t for the little station-specific cheat sheets my line stocks, I’d never know when the trains leave. The full schedule flummoxes me. And, you know it often flummoxes Europeans, too. For that, I give you Paris-based Roger Collis in the International Herald Tribune:
“Drop me at any airport and I’ll be able to cope. There is always stress, anxiety, but a familiar kind of anxiety. My antennae are tuned to telltale signs that a flight will be delayed – long, agitated lines of perplexed people; dissembling airline staff drip-feeding misinformation, etc. Airports are a predictable nightmare.
“Drop me at a train station and I’m a candidate for dementia. At the Gare du Nord in Paris or at Waterloo International in London, waiting for the Eurostar, I have had to ask little old ladies how to interpret the departures signs. Once onboard, I check with my neighbors (as many other passengers do) that I am indeed on the right train.”
And Collis, like me, is supposedly a travel expert. But airlines and airports are our lingua franca now. Trains confuse the hell out of us.
In fact, that is why more Americans don’t ride trains when they go to Europe. I had coffee last week with the marketing director for Rail Europe in the United States. He’s a former New Yorker, inexplicably based in Denver for Rail Europe. He says he has all the numbers to show corporate travelers: how it is cheaper to take rail under 300 miles in Europe; how it is faster to take rail under 300 miles in Europe; how it is more comfortable to take rail under 300 miles in Europe. He says, eventually, the sticking point becomes fear and knowledge. Corporate travel buyers end up worrying whether their highly paid executes can figure out the trains!
One final thought: Rail employees, especially in the United States, talk in jargon and expect everyone to know it. Last month, for instance, my wife and I were going to Philadelphia for the weekend. Instead of driving, I went to the Amtrak website and bought two tickets.
When I went to NY/Penn Stations, I strode confidently to the ticketing machine, entered my rez code, and the machine spit out four tickets, one for each direction for both of us. Oddly, I noticed, the NY-Philadelphia tickets were marked “business class.” The Philadelphia-NY tickets were not. (I have no idea how I bought business-class tickets. The option was never offered on the site and I was never informed I was buying anything but coach!)
So I went to a human at the Amtrak desk to ask about business class. That human asked another human who asked another human. The response: “Back of the train.”
Okay, I figure, I can find the back of the train. Maybe I can’t figure out how to buy a coach ticket, but I can sure find the back of the train (It’s the end with the little red caboose, right?) When they call the train, my wife and I (and our luggage) go to the platform. Now we don’t where the back of the train is because we can’t see the engine or the (ahem!) caboose. So I look along the platform. No markings on the platform. No marking on the cars. No indication whatever of what is coach and what is business class.
So my wife and I, moments before departure, jump on this packed train. I guess one direction and we start banging our way through the aisle. Luckily, I find a conductor.
“Business class that way?” I ask, pointing to the direction we were walking.”
“Last car,” says the conductor, and disappears.
Well, of course, neither my wife nor I can divine direction from his comment, so we soldier on.
A car or two later, we come upon another conductor and I try again.
“I’m in business class. Is the back of the train this way?” I ask, making an exaggerated gesture in the direction we’re walking. In fact, it’s the kind of gesture you make in a country where you don’t speak the language. You couldn’t miss it.
“Last car,” he says, and disappears.
By this point, I get it. No one is going to tell me where the last car is. So we continue our caravan in the direction we were walking only to find we had guessed wrong and were in the first car, which was a coach class car.
Then another conductor yells “Tickets, please.” I hand him ours and he says, “Oh, this is for business class. That’s the last car. You’d better start walking.”
Gee, no kidding.
Larry King’s Riposte
Paul:
Your invitation to “engage Joe in colloquy” sounds suspiciously like an attempt to stir up trouble, but what the hell, I’ve got a little time on my hands.
Actually, I think he’s right on his main point, which is that most Americans find trains mysterious and somewhat intimidating. I’ve never understood why the United States decided to let its passenger rail system wither away, but by now the decision looks irreversible.
If for some reason the United States tries to revive its railroads, though, I hope no one uses Britain’s system as a model. Joe’s protests to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s falling apart. No, that’s not quite true. It was deliberately broken apart, in a bi-partisan effort begun under the Tories and completed by the current Labour government, to privatize the old state-owned monopoly, British Rail.
The British ruling classes have a peculiar enthusiasm for wildly impractical, hugely complicated solutions to not-very-difficult problems. Nowhere was that enthusiasm more evident than the breakup of Brit Rail. In essence, a sluggish public system run by an incompetent bureaucracy was replaced by a quasi-private, semi-public system run by three, four, or twenty-odd different incompetent bureaucracies, depending on how you count.
It breaks down like this: Three different government bodies share responsibility for regulating the railroads. A somewhat private company, Railtrack, runs the rail infrastructure — the actual tracks, switches and signals, train stations, and so forth. Twenty-odd companies hold franchises to provide rail service, running the trains traveling over the tracks. They pay Railtrack to use its tracks and signals and stations.
The three government agencies cooperate about as much as you’d expect from any gang of bureaucrats whose turf overlaps. Railtrack works as well as any other quasi-monopoly with government regulators looking over one shoulder and private shareholders looking over the other. The operating companies seem to spend much of their time blaming Railtrack for their indifferent service.
Distributing blame occupies much of the time of any true bureaucrat, but in this case the process has practical consequences. Government subsidies can depend on who gets the credit when the trains run on time and who gets the blame when they don’t. In southern England alone, according to The Economist, Railtrack employs fifty people whose job is to pin the blame for bad service on somebody. Since they work — if that’s the right word — for Railtrack, you have to assume they try to pin it on somebody else.
Railtrack needs the subsidies because it can’t make money. The rates it charges the operating companies are government-regulated. When you think about that, you see Railtrack’s only real incentive is to cut costs, to make more profit on what it is allowed to charge.
Given that situation, a thick-witted student failing Economics 101 at a third-rate university, or any resident of California whose lights just went out, could have predicted what would happen. Costs got cut, all right. The tracks are now in awful shape and the signals system is downright dangerous.
I mean that literally. British trains crash with depressing regularity. The latest fatal rail crash was Feb. 28; ten people died. A crash last October killed four. The big one occurred in October 1999, when two trains collided near a London station and thirty-one people were killed.
In that crash, a complicated system required trains entering and leaving the station to use crisscrossing tracks, so that at certain points they were inevitably headed toward each other. They depended on the signal system not to collide. The signals were hard to see and to decipher. After the collision, Railtrack talked about replacing them.
The crash this past October actually did more damage to the whole system. It occurred when a rail broke and the train de-railed. Investigation suggested the companies to which Railtrack sub-contracted maintenance of its tracks were not always as diligent or well-trained or hardworking as they might be — in other words, they were British — and a lot of the rail system was, if not falling apart, about to.
Railtrack responded with a series of inspections and repairs. Those were supposed to be completed by Easter, after which the network would be tip-top and shipshape. Quite possibly, someone, somewhere believed that. If so, he now knows better. Railtrack has abandoned the pretense that things will get back to normal this spring and left us guessing when they might.
In the meantime, Railtrack has instituted speed limits and service restrictions, which can delay a train anywhere from half an hour to forever. The theory seems to be that if you can’t fix things well enough to prevent crashes, you can at least limit the damage by keeping the trains from moving fast enough to hurt anything.
None of the countries on the continent have the same problems. None of the countries on the continent have tried to privatize their rail systems. Much as it pains my economically conservative, free-market soul to say so, those two facts are not unrelated.
You simply can’t run a decent passenger rail system by free-market principles. The operating costs are too high, and you can’t charge enough per ticket to cover the operating costs. Nobody will pay it.
France, Italy, Germany, and the rest of the countries on the continent have looked at the problem and decided they want a passenger rail system, so they’ll pay the difference between what they can charge for tickets and the costs of operating the system. The U.S. has looked at the same problem and decided it won’t. You can argue with either decision, but you can’t argue that you’ve got some other choice.
The British, however, are possessed of a magnificent ability to look squarely at a problem, analyze in close detail all its components, and then ignore completely everything that’s staring them in the face. It’s a trait that occasionally benefits them enormously. Confronted by the menace of Hitler, most of the continental countries realistically determined that they hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell and gave up. The British ignored the undeniable facts that they were outmanned and outgunned and defended by an army inferior to Germany’s in every respect, and soldiered on regardless. It was, as Churchill said, their finest hour. The same grim determination that allowed London to live through the Blitz, however, is not what you want to run a railroad. Railtrack seems determined to offer its passengers nothing but blood, sweat, toil, and tears. The passengers, unsurprisingly, are not prepared to accept, at least not without grumbling a bit.
Cheers,
Larry King
Posted at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
On Eurostar
06/17/2025
March 19, 2001
Paul:
I read the Chicago Trib piece on rail travel with some interest and a little irritation. What irritated me was a certain tone I’ve come to associate with Americans writing about Europe, which manages to sound simultaneously condescending and naive. Look how much the people of these cute little countries have accomplished! They have trains! I realize word probably travels slowly across the prairie to Chicago, what with the oxen dying and the Conestoga wagons getting mired in the mud, but Eurostar has been in operation since November 1994. It’s not a new toy.
Other than that, I was left with a few questions. For one thing, I don’t see how on earth the writer could take an hour and a half to get from a hotel in Kensington to Waterloo station, particularly at 6:30 in the morning. I live in South Kensington, and at that hour it takes me twenty minutes. You could walk in an hour and a half.
(He gave us one clue, albeit inadvertently. He said he was delayed because a shortcut through St. James Park was shut. He was not. No roads traverse St. James Park. It sounds to me as if one of London’s more enterprising taxi drivers spotted a wide-eyed, apple-cheeked son of the plains, invented a shortcut that to his shock and dismay was closed, and took the guy for a ride, as it were. I wish he’d mentioned what the fare came to.)
I also don’t see how the Chicagoan could have had any trouble finding his coach. At Waterloo, Eurostar has its own terminal, where overhead monitors tell you to use a particular stairway, A, B, or C, depending on the number of your coach. That number is clearly printed on your ticket. Big signs direct you to the stairs, which lead to the platform. Once on the platform, you’re near your coach. Every coach is marked with its number at each end.
But if you have trouble reading and can’t tell your left from your right and don’t know the alphabet, it doesn’t much matter. All the stairs lead to the platform. On the platform, a horde of Eurostar staff stands ready to point you in the right direction. You might end up walking a bit farther than you’d have had to if you’d paid attention, but not a lot.
At least he enjoyed the trip. He should have. First class on Eurostar is about as comfortable a way to travel as I’ve found. You have a comfortable, roomy seat and attractive Frenchwomen bring you surprisingly good food and wine. You may smoke. And half the time, when you arrive, you’re in Paris.
Once there, I’ve never felt much urge to leave, although a trip to Rome would tempt me. A trip to Rome by rail from Paris would not. It’s almost as far as New York to Miami. How many people do that? I realize rail travel is more haphazard in the U.S., and outside the Northeast corridor waiting for a train can involve building shelter, digging a latrine, and laying in a supply of canned food, but even if you got regular, direct service, you wouldn’t want it.
The Chicago Trib piece never made it clear exactly why the writer felt compelled to make the trip. He gave the impression some doubt existed about whether it was possible. I don’t see why. A number of trains leave Paris each day, headed south. If you get on a train in Paris and head south, eventually you’ll run into Italy, the Mediterranean, or an Alp.
I’ve not taken the train from Paris to Milan, as the Chicagoan did, but I’ve taken a train from Frankfurt to Milan and Switzerland to Milan. I’ve also ridden from Milan to Venice, Venice to Milan, Milan to Rome, Rome to Milan, Rome to Florence, and Rome to Milan. Trust me, rail service crisscrosses Italy from side to side and cuff to sole.
One more thing puzzled me. The writer said when he was ready to leave Rome, he was told he could take a train to the airport. Instead, he hired a car and driver. He seemed to feel that was preferable. Maybe it was, from the point of personal convenience. From the point of personal safety . . .
As it happens, I just got back from Rome myself. I flew. The memory of my last cab ride from the airport into Rome had faded, so I was ready to take another, in much the same way the pain of childbirth fades, leaving women ready to breed again. Here are a few of the things my driver did as he accelerated from zero to about seventy miles an hour on the access road from the airport to the autostrada:
- made a call on his cell phone;
- took off his leather jacket;
- made a call on his cell phone;
- checked his hair in the rear-view mirror;
- took a call on his cell phone;
- turned around and handed me an English-language card outlining the taxi fares from the airport into central Rome, simultaneously explaining them to me in Italian, gesturing extravagantly with both hands to help me over the rough spots;
reached the autostrada and really hit the gas, very quickly reaching about 150 kilometers an hour and making me wish I’d never learned to convert kilometers to miles, so I wouldn’t realize we were doing ninety miles an hour while we jammed ourselves so close to the Mercedes ahead of us I could read the lead headline on the copy of La Repubblica the passenger in the backseat was looking over;
left the autostrada, tore through the suburbs and into the central city, where he came within a block of my hotel before discovering the street on which it was situated was one-way the wrong way for us, whereupon he pulled into the intersection of the street the hotel was on and the street we were on and then reversed down the street the hotel was on, traveling backward at high speed the length of the block, apparently on the theory that it doesn’t matter which way you’re traveling on a one-way street so long as the car is pointed in the right direction;
grabbed my bag from the boot, trotted up to the hotel door, and in my response to an admittedly lavish tip grabbed my hand and shook it furiously and then kissed me on both cheeks before hustling off, pausing only to gesture obscenely to someone blowing his horn because the cab was parked diagonally in the street, blocking traffic.
I’m joking about the kiss on both cheeks.
Cheers, Larry King
Posted at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Of Twits And Things
06/17/2025
(My good friend, ex-colleague, American expatriate in London Larry King was one of the first to correct my garbled Dorothy Parker aphorism here two weeks ago; last week, I said his note made me feel like a twit. His response (like all of his responses) was so literate I decided to put it up high this week:)
April 10, 2000
Sorry, I didn’t intend to make you feel a fool, or even a twit. I have this pedantic streak that emerges awkwardly at times.
Incidentally, I’m not sure you could be a twit. A true twit is British and lacks a chin. The correct descriptive phrase, in fact, is “chinless twit.” He comes from upper, middle-upper, lower-upper, or upper-middle classes and is the product of such relentless inbreeding and rigid upbringing that he lacks independent will, functioning intelligence, personal tastes, an orthodox libido, and, for all practical purposes, a chin.
I say “he” because the chinless twit is by definition male. The female equivalent resembles him in all particulars except the last. She has a formidable chin and even more formidable teeth — so formidable it can be hard to distinguish her from the horse whose company she generally prefers to that of her husband and certainly her children. I realize these are cheap cultural cliches. That does not make them less accurate.
And on the subject of the historical witticism, one I am persuaded did occur as reported was the “pox or mistress” remark, because it was made in Parliament, where records of such things are kept. In case there was any doubt about my pedantic streak, I will remind you that the exchange occurred between John Wilkes and the (4th) Earl of Sandwich and went approximately like this:
Earl: You will die, sir, either on the gallows or from the pox.
Wilkes: That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.
The remark, incidentally, had an added bite because Wilkes and the Earl had once been friends, or at least fellow dissolute 18th century rakes — they both belonged at one time to one of the offshoots of the notorious Hellfire Club. The possibility they had in fact shared a mistress, or at least a serving wench or two, is quite high.
As is well-known, the eponymous Earl was so dissolute he invented the practice of lying a slab of cold meat between two slices of bread and calling it lunch or dinner. A sandwich could be comfortably carried in a pocket, allowing him to gamble for hours at a stretch without leaving the table for a meal.
He is less well-known as a contributor to the loss by the British of the American Revolution. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he controlled the British fleet during the late unpleasantness. He felt much of it ought to remain in home waters, to protect the British Isles from the French. The French astutely noted that precious little fighting was under way in or around the British Isles — except, perhaps, when John Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich happened to run into each other in Westminster — but a considerable amount of fighting was going on in North America. They sent their fleet to the colonies, where it blockaded Chesapeake Bay in the autumn of 1781. That prevented the British fleet from coming to the rescue of Lord Cornwallis, who had blithely established himself at Yorktown, evidently failing to notice that Yorktown is situated on a peninsula. Cornwallis and his 8,000 men were hemmed in by the James River to the south, the York River to the north, Hampton Roads, the confluence of the two rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, to the east, and soon enough, George Washington and a combined American-French army of 16,000 men to the west.
His options were not extensive: fighting a force twice the size of his own, or drowning. Cornwallis had his own preference, which was for the British fleet to sail down Chesapeake Bay and along the York and pick him up and get him the hell out of town. But with much of the fleet guarding the Channel coast back home, thanks to the Earl of Sandwich, and the rest kept out of Yorktown by the French, that option was foreclosed. Cornwallis realized he had a fourth option and promptly seized it. He surrendered. To quite a large extent, you drink coffee rather than tea, drive on the right, and are governed by people with chins because of the Earl’s bloody-minded refusal to let the fleet go fight.
John Wilkes, by the way, supported the American colonists during the Revolution, and presumably he never let the Earl of Sandwich hear the end of it.
Cheers,
Larry King
Posted at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Spring Arrives in London
06/17/2025
2 April 2000
Spring arrived in London two weeks ago last Wednesday, some time around midday. Until then, it had been late winter. The sky was generally gray and rain would fall at unpredictable intervals, keeping the air damp and chill. Then for a few days a brisk wind blew, brisk enough to make you think winter had quit fighting a rear-guard action and staged a counter-attack. But then the wind died down and when I walked outside that Wednesday for my mid-morning cigarette, I realized I wasn’t hunching over against the cold and the damp. Since then, it’s been house-to-house fighting, one day’s gain giving way to the next day’s losses, but each day getting closer to the objective, which is a reasonable chance that on any day the sun will be shining and the temperature mild.
I’m a little ambivalent about spring. On the one hand, no one can regret seeing the end of a British winter. We don’t get much snow, and that we do get falls in derisory quantities. (Although you’d never know it from the over-excited prose in the tabloids whenever a storm does drop a few flakes. One memorable story a couple of years ago in, I believe, the Evening Standard, described beleaguered hikers forced to fight their way to safety through drifts as high as six inches.) No, what we get is that damp, pervasive chill, and nightfall that comes about four in the afternoon, and dawn that straggles in some time past eight in the morning. What daylight we have is filtered through the leaden clouds that hang over London like a threat. After a few months spent never quite dry, seldom really warm, and huddled more or less in darkness, your spirit has contracted to the size of George Bush’s intellect and your soul shriveled to something as grim and ugly as Al Gore trying to be spontaneous.
On the other hand, when Spring arrives, the tourists can’t be far behind, and nothing breeds mixed emotions in an American living in London like hearing a group of his countrymen and women at a nearby table in a restaurant. You can’t help but feel a little thrill of recognition and homesickness at the sound of an American accent. You also can’t help wishing they’d lower their voices and stop making fools of themselves.
Americans always seem surprised to find that by going abroad, they end up in a foreign country. When they visit England, they talk at length among themselves about how odd the English are: you push the light switches down to make them work! You pay cab drivers after you get out of the cab! But they also appear to believe this particular foreign country is a lot more foreign than it is. Specifically, they seem curiously unaware the people speak English, so everyone within earshot can understand them. And damn near everyone in the Home Counties is within earshot – Americans conduct conversations at a volume the English reserve for attracting attention when they’re drowning. Americans tourists in England are like parents at a children’s birthday party, talking about little Johnny’s bedwetting problems and blithely ignoring the fact little Johnny is standing right there. He’s taking in every word and storing up the kind of animosity that in years to come he’ll spend a great deal of time and money discussing in a quiet room with a bearded man who at infrequent intervals will ask how that made him feel.
Complaining about the oddities and inconveniences of another country is at least half the fun of travel and nothing I’d want to stop. Americans go one step further, though. They honestly seem to believe other countries want to be American, but haven’t quite figured out how, yet. I’ve heard an American man – he was queuing for the National Gallery; I was seated in a café in Frith Street, as I recall – describing what an improvement it would be for “downtown’’ London to adopt a system of alternating one-way streets, like Topeka or Akron or wherever it was he was proposing as the epitome of urban development. I’ve listened while an American woman told her companions how disappointed she was not to find her favorite cosmetics in Harrods, leaving unexplained why on earth she went to Harrods hoping to buy the same warpaint she could have found back home at the Rite-Aid.
Americans are unique in that regard, in my experience. The French and the Germans are equally sure of their own superiority; the French assume everyone knows it and the Germans are irritable because no one else seems to see it. But the French don’t act as if they believe the Italians or the Swiss are hoping one day to become Frenchmen. Germans don’t show any sign they feel the Dutch and the Belgians are looking to turn themselves into Deutschelanders, although I grant you Germany occasionally will try to make the conversion for them.
The unthinking assumption that other countries are just works in progress, and what they’re progressing toward is the kind of generic U.S. suburb where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T., is the cause of the low-grade anti-Americanism that often puzzles and distresses the tourist, incidentally. “Yankee go home’’ really means “Yankee, don’t try to make yourself at home.’’
In fact, these days a lot of Europeans are strenuously trying to prevent anyone else’s making himself at home, at least if that involves actually moving next door. Just about every country in Europe, from the excitable Italians to friendly little Denmark, has a far-right party that’s making a great deal of noise and gaining a certain amount of support by insisting most of their problems stem from the presence of too many damned foreign immigrants. Pat Buchanan would feel right at home, except for all the foreigners.
The Austrians went so far as to form a government that included the Freedom Party, an enchanting group run until recently by a grasping opportunist named Jorg Haider. Herr Haider got a lot of attention by suggesting from time to time a certain amount of sympathy for another Austrian with political ambitions and extreme opinions. The comparison between Haider and Hitler was wildly overblown, not least because Haider showed little evidence of being an anti-Semite, and nobody thought he was foolish enough to entertain thoughts of expanding Austria’s frontiers by force. What resonated with Austrians, and chilled other Europeans, was his xenophobia.
Haider and his crowd don’t much like anyone who’s not Austrian, and their definition of “Austrian’’ is pretty strict. It’s someone whose ancestors were good, Teutonic Austrians themselves, with ancestry stretch back until roughly the time the Hapsburgs were getting so upset over the defenestration of Prague. Anyone else is a foreigner, and they’re not welcome. This is not an attitude confined to the kind of knuckle-dragging, pilsner-swilling louts who in the U.S. would be hanging around filling stations or getting elected to Congress as Republicans. A friend of mine, an Irishwoman who lives in Vienna, told me during the election campaign that she called a doctor’s office to try to make an appointment. The doctor’s nurse barked, “He doesn’t treat foreigners,’’ and hung up.
The excitement over Austria’s new government has died down some it took office in February. Haider first declined to seek a position in the new government, then resigned as head of the Freedom Party, although no one thinks he’s not still in charge behind the scenes. People also seem to be having second thoughts about a decision by the rest of the European Union to cut back ties with Austria, which after all had held a perfectly legal, democratic election that happened to elevate a party not everyone felt comfortable having in an E.U. government. The maneuver looked like bullying to a lot of people, as if the rest of the U.S. had ganged up on New Hampshire for backing McCain. It also carried a whiff of hypocrisy. Both the French and the Italian governments include what used to be Communist parties, and nobody was talking about ostracizing them for any lurking sympathies they might feel toward Josef Stalin. Finally, the angry reaction of a bunch of foreigners to anti-foreign politics in Austria seemed self-defeating, since it served mostly to cause Austrians to dislike foreigners.
Here in Britain, the tabloid press and the less-attractive elements of the Conservative party are going through one of their periodic spasms of indignation at foreigners, specifically asylum-seekers. Among the great myths of the brainless-twit wing of the Tories – a phrase that may be redundant – is that great hordes of foreigners are steadily pushing north and west toward the Channel. It seems they are hoping to sneak into the U.K. and claim refugee status, so they can take advantage of the British welfare state, in the process bleeding white the honest, hardworking Anglo-Saxon taxpayer. In fact, the U.K. welfare system is one of the more parsimonious in western Europe, and the concept of the hardworking Anglo-Saxon would provoke disbelieving laughter in anyone who ever tried to catch an Englishman in his office much before nine or a few minutes past five. Any bogus asylum-seeker with half a brain heads for Germany.
What’s provoked the latest round of outrage at the wogs, however, has got some truth in it. A steady stream of Gypsies has been slipping into the U.K. and making a nuisance of themselves. One must tread carefully here. Gypsies are the subject of a great deal of bigotry and occasionally violence throughout Europe. Hitler rounded them up, and today various skinheads and free-lance thugs enthusiastically engage in Gypsy-bashing at regular intervals. Discrimination against the Roma, as they’re more accurately known, in jobs and education is as rank as anything in the deep South of the U.S. during the Jim Crow days.
But the fact is, a certain number of Gypsies – I have no way of knowing how many – actually are thieves, pickpockets, and beggars. One of their more odious habits is sending kids out to do the dirty work. It’s hard to keep in mind grand concepts about how we’re all children of God in the brotherhood of man when an actual child has just lifted your wallet. I was walking across the Piazzo del Duomo in Milan once when a knot of Gypsy children surrounded me, ostensibly trying to sell a two-day-old copy of La Republica. Frustrated by my refusal to stand still long enough to be plucked, the ringleader, a dirty-cheeked little girl about nine or ten, stepped in front of me and with no effort at deceit thrust her hand deep into my inside jacket pocket. Startled, I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her back gently. An Italian walking nearby said in accented but accurate English, “It’s no good . . . you’ve got to belt them,’’ and swung his hand, miming an open-handed slap. The little gang saw the odds were shifting against them and turned and bolted across the piazza. I don’t think I could bear to strike a child unless he were coming at me with a knife in his hand and murder in his eye, but I have to admit the prospect of violence got results in this case.
The main activity of the Gypsies now making their way to London seems to be begging on the Tube. This deeply offends the English. A traveler here is not supposed to acknowledge the presence of all those other travelers in any fashion except to say “sorry’’ if one of them steps on his toe. An instructive story circulated here not long ago about eight passengers seated in the compartment of an inter-city train. Most were strangers to one another, but two were a male and female in late adolescence, traveling together and evidently reaching that feverish state of lust achievable only by teenagers in heat and the upper echelons of the executive branch of the U.S. government. Eventually, the girl threw off all restraint, opened the fly of her companion, and performed upon him a sexual act that kept her as speechless as the rest of the passengers. Upon its completion, he leaned back and lit the traditional cigarette. Only then did anyone else speak: one of the others reminded the youth he was in a non-smoking carriage. The youth meekly put out the cigarette. He and his petite cherie got out at the next station and the group continued their journey, in silence.
Nobody really knows whether the story is true; the point is, everybody assumes it could be. With that in mind, perhaps you can understand just how put out the average London commuter gets when he’s accosted by a young, foreign-looking woman, who’s wearing a Romany dress and shawl, carrying an infant, and imploring him in broken English for enough spare change to feed the poor urchin. It’s not that he’s opposed to feeding children. He’s opposed to being addressed by a foreigner without an introduction.
What I don’t understand is how the Gypsies get into the country in the first place. The U.K. makes it harder to cross its borders than most of western Europe, where passport control now is usually limited to a half-asleep border guard glancing at your passport and waving you through the barrier in the same motion. The U.K. immigration officials take their time, examining your passport, you, the passport, you again, until they’re satisfied the photo is a fair likeness. They often consult some list of suspected terrorists or smugglers or possibly chefs, to intercept subversives opposed to boiling the life out of every vegetable intended for human consumption. How can they miss whole families of Gypsies? They look like Gypsies – they’re dark-complected, they wear sashes and shawls and baggy dresses and trousers. Short of banging on tambourines and slaughtering sheep in the baggage-claim area, it’s hard to see how they could be more distinctive.
Several of the right-wing newspapers have set out to answer that question. Intrepid reporters duly uncovered whole villages in Romania organized to smuggle the younger members of the tribe into the U.K. in order – you guessed it – to take advantage of the British welfare state, in the process bleeding white the honest, hardworking Anglo-Saxon taxpayer. I am skeptical. For one thing, their accounts always elided the mechanics of the trip, avoiding any description of how the young Gypsies got from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains to Terminal Four at Heathrow Airport and past the gimlet-eyed immigration officials. For another thing, the Gypsies they found in Romania were both articulate and forthcoming, freely admitting their intention to bilk that honest Anglo-Saxon. I don’t know much about Gypsy culture, but my impression is they frown on loose talk with outsiders. More generally, I have lived too long in the U.K. not to believe that any intrepid British reporter sent out to find thieving Gypsies would pay for his own drinks before he’d straggle back to London without filing several colorful dispatches, complete with tambourine banging and sheep slaughtering. The more intrepid could gather the necessary details without leaving the cocktail lounge of the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Bucharest. The most intrepid wouldn’t leave Hampstead.
My own theory is the Brits are victims of their singular approach to bureaucracy. They must be the last people on earth who assume, when a government functionary tells them they’ll just have to fill out the necessary forms and be patient, that they should fill out the necessary forms and be patient. Bureaucrats are accustomed to their sheep-like docility and treat asylum-seekers accordingly: they pop them into public housing and tell them to stay put while their claim is sorted out. The bureaucrats then return several months later to tell the asylum-seeker, sorry, we find no evidence to support your claim you’ll be the victim of ethnic, religious, and political persecution if you return to your homeland. They assume the asylum-seeker will still be there, because a Brit would still be there. They are continually surprised to learn the asylum-seeker was last seen approximately fifteen minutes after the bureaucrat dropped her off a few months back. She was hurrying into the nearest Tube station, carrying an infant and imploring some stony-faced Brit to give her spare change to feed her baby.
I also suspect the legions of immigration bureaucrats aren’t paying too much attention to wandering bands of Gypsies, because that would distract them from their real purpose – keeping both British citizens and foreign visitors from smuggling rabid animals into the country. Gypsy beggars, Irish terrorists, and Madonna come and go without much let or hindrance, but no dog or cat gets past the guardians of the approaches to this scepter’d isle. Well, they can get through, after six months in quarantine.
That’s right. If you want to bring your household pet into the U.K., or if you’re a British resident who takes your pet with you on your summer holiday in the south of France, when you enter the country you’ve got to put the animal into a licensed kennel for six months, at your own expense. The expense is not inconsiderable, either. It averages about £1,500 and can run as high as £3,000 if you own something the size of an Irish setter.
Now, rabies is a horrible disease and any reasonable effort to prevent it can only be applauded. The operative word in that sentence is “reasonable.’’ The British are not reasonable on this subject. They’re wild-eyed fanatics, impervious to argument, unswayed by evidence. In a word, they’re rabid about rabies.
You may think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. When the Channel Tunnel was being built, one of the arguments against the project in the U.K. – an argument made and heard in all seriousness – was that rabid animals could come through it and invade the countryside. To combat the threat, at least one group proposed that an electrified grid be laid down at the entrance to the tunnel in France, to electrocute the slavering French beasts determined to make their way to the U.K.
I don’t know what happened eventually to that idea, but I can guess. My guess is the French listened with every outward sign of courtesy and attention. They nodded gravely as the British contended that seriously ill animals were going to climb a chain-link fence, make their way down a steep embankment, stroll along a stretch of gravel roadbed and iron tracks, past the railroad workers and noise and confusion at Calais, then enter a large, forbidding hole and walk through 20-odd miles of harshly-lit tunnel, all the while evading trains roaring toward them every thirty minutes at speeds up to a hundred and eighty miles an hour, and finally emerge fresh and fit in the Kentish countryside, ready to sink their fangs into the first Anglo animal or human they encountered. Then the British delegation left, and the French fell on the floor, sobbing with laughter.
Being French, though, they were both immensely practical and deeply cynical. So they strung wires around the tunnel entrance and attached switches to nearby telephone poles. When the British came by a few weeks later, they pointed out the arrangement and swore on the graves of their mothers it carried enough voltage to flash-fry a mastodon, much less a cocker spaniel intent on using la belle France as a jumping-off point for invading Angleterre.
The French, by the way, are not careless about rabies. They drop food impregnated with anti-rabies vaccine in rural areas, a practice that has virtually wiped out rabies in foxes, the main carriers in the French countryside. In 1996, the last year I could find statistics for, ten foxes were diagnosed with rabies in France, along with no dogs and 2 cats.
That same year, an infected bat was found in England, near Newhaven, down on the Channel coast, so Britain is not quite the pristine, rabies-free land it would like to think itself. The British reacted predictably: they blamed the French. The bat had either sneaked ashore off a ferry from France or flown across the Channel under its own power, the local authorities concluded, on the basis of no evidence I can discover. I’ve never noticed flocks of bats flying west across the Channel, foam dripping from their tiny jaws. However a bat might get here, by the way, it’s as safe as a Gypsy pickpocket. Safer, in fact. Bats are protected by law. It’s illegal not only to kill one – except, presumably, in self-defense – it’s illegal to disturb their roost, even if the roost is your garage. The Bat Conservancy Trust maintains a vigilant watch for any would-be bat disturbers. You might think it makes little sense to maintain a quarantine law passed in 1904 to prevent the spread of rabies, then prosecute anyone who so much as disturbs the sleep of the only creature known to have carried rabies into the country in the past several decades. You’re right; I told you people are irrational on the subject. What truly elevates the entire situation to the level of the absurd, though, is how pointless it is. Since 1970, when the modern rabies vaccine for animals became available, the sum total of the household pets incarcerated for six months at a cost of up to £3,000 each who have during that time been discovered to be infected with rabies is . . . none. The entire system is an elaborate defense against a threat that for all practical purposes no longer exists. It’s as if the United States was maintaining a huge defense establishment geared essentially toward preventing the invasion of western Europe by the armies of the Soviet Union and . . . never mind. The good news is that the system being modified to provide “pet passports.’’ A pilot project got underway in February. If your puppy is properly vaccinated, and a microchip is implanted under his hide so he can’t be smuggled in with some other dog’s papers, he’ll be let in without quarantining. The bad news is getting a pet passport means vaccinating the animal – regardless of whether it’s been vaccinated, as I read the law – testing him thirty days later, then re-testing him six month later, and then getting a somnolent British bureaucracy to certify the various steps have occurred. So if you were hoping to take your holiday this year, you’re just about out of time. It takes a peculiar sort of bureaucratic genius to replace a scheme quarantining animals for six months with one that effectively hobbles their owners for at least seven. British bureaucracies are both a vast subject and one that right now is just about guaranteed to kindle in me the kind of smoldering rage usually associated with moody loners carrying assault rifles and an assortment of grudges, because I am in the process of acquiring a British driver’s license. I’m out of time, though, and I’m sure you’re about out of patience, so I’ll save that rant for another time.
God shave the Queen, Larry King
Posted at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Very Little Happens in August
06/17/2025
Sept. 6, 2001
Very little happens in Europe in August, except for the occasional German invasion of a neighbouring country. Nothing so interesting occurred this year.
Even less than usual was going on in the U.K., Monday being the final bank holiday of the summer, more or less analogous to Labor Day. The main event in London was the Notting Hill Carnival on Monday, which contrary to what you might expect is not a celebration of the recent Hugh Grant film (as it’s referred to locally; I would assume in the states it’s called a Julia Roberts vehicle). Rather, Carnival is a massive festival-street party-amiable riot, imported from the Caribbean and enthusiastically embraced by the locals.
In practical terms, Carnival means several hundred thousand people gather in the streets of the Notting Hill neighborhood to party. A parade occurs at some point. If you like hanging out with several hundred thousand people, many of whom are drunk and many of the rest of whom are pickpockets, purse-snatchers, and general miscreants, you’d enjoy it immensely. Like the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, it’s worth seeing once, if only for the impromptu distance-and-volume projectile-vomiting competitions. It’s also marvelous to see just how little clothing a young Englishwoman can wear and not get arrested.
The other notable event here is in the nature of Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark — the quite remarkable lack of public breastbeating about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, two years ago today. You have to admire the innate equilibrium of the Brits; they simply cannot take leave of their senses for very long.
The emotional outpouring when Diana was killed was the most intense reaction to the death of a public figure I’d seen anywhere since Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both killed in 1968. But after the burial, the Brits wiped their eyes, dusted off their hands, and — aside from a bit of sniping at the royal family for being, oh, shall we say, not so demonstratively sorrowful as one might have hoped — as much as said, right, now for a spot of tea.
Aside from their instinct for moderation, I suspect the Brits are a little embarrassed by Mohammed Al Fayed, the owner of Harrod’s and father of Dodi, Diana’s companion, who died with her in the car wreck. Al Fayed is storming around the U.K. ranting that Di and Dodi were in fact murdered by the royal family, or rather by MI6 at the direction of the royals. How MI6 was supposed to have engineered a high-speed crash that was witnessed by a couple of dozen paparizzi, he has not yet said. The spectacle Fayed is making of himself is discomfiting, and I get the impression a lot of people feel that joining in any sort of public show of grief would just encourage the poor man.
The same tendency to revert to the sensible is not shared by our cousins across the channel. The French have got their knickers in a twist about the U.S. again, this time because of American gastronomical imperialism, or something like that. A herd of them just smashed a McDonald’s to protest . . . it’s a little hard to work out what they’re protesting. There was a lot of talk about how France would not stand by while Americans standardized the cuisine of the world, establishing hegemony over the tastebuds, stomachs, and livers of la belle France. Given the hordes of Americans who flock to France every year, more than a few of them not half so interested in its cultural heritage as in finding something decent to eat, the charge seems misguided. Given the hordes of French converging on the McDonald’s of Paris, it seems downright perverse.
In fact, lurking beneath the high-flown oratory is hard-eyed self-interest, as is so often the case. The French farmers are fighting U.S. tariffs on Roquefort cheese, foie gras, and other delicacies. They were imposed in retaliation for a European Union ban on beef from U.S. cattle that were injected with growth hormones, part of the continent-wide revulsion against the U.S. tendency to genetically modify, artificially enhance and generally screw around with its food.
I cannot quite see the justice of the complaint, since the French are willing — eager, in fact — to tinker with their own livestock if the outcome is something they want to sink a fork into. Foie gras is perhaps the foremost example. Farmers get the raw material for foie gras by stuffing fistfuls of grain down the gullets of geese until their livers swell to grotesque proportions. The goose livers, that is — the farmers have livers of normal proportions, or normal for Frenchmen at any rate.
People who ram food into geese are hardly in a position to criticize U.S. hayseeds for re-weaving the DNA of a stalk of corn. They may call the super-corn unnatural, butI would say forcefeeding a goose is every bit as unnatural, at least to the goose.
One good thing about the August torpor is that even the politicians respect it. Or, to put it another way, they’re just as determined to have their holiday as everyone else. Germany has six elections in the next six weeks, one local one in North Rhine-Westphalia, the biggest lander, or state, and five for the Bundesrat, the equivalent of the U.S. Senate. The first is this coming Sunday. So far, virtually no Germans have appeared in public to campaign for any of them. Can you imagine not one Democrat or Republican getting up on his hind legs and braying for attention if, say, California was electing a governor and a state legislature, and New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio were electing senators, and those elections were going to start in less than a week?
I have never been able to decide whether the relatively low-key, unemotional approach to political campaigning in Europe is a sign of good sense or deep-seated cynicism. I suspect the latter. It’s hard to credit good sense for the political situation in any continent that includes Italy. I’ve lost count of how many governments Italy has had since the end of World War II, but it’s close to sixty. Of course, you could argue that a propensity to throw out the government on a moment’s notice is the epitome of good sense. But if you start ascribing good sense to Italy, you have to come up with an explanation for opera, Venice, and the traffic in Rome, which are, reading from left to right, charmingly detached from reality, a breathtaking defiance of all the usual rules governing the best place to build a city — few recommend the middle of a lagoon — and downright deranged.
So my vote goes to deep-seated cynicism. Europeans tend to assume elections are straightforward grabs for power. They vote for whoever’s self-interest seems to coincide with their own. The odd treehugger in the Green party or goosestepper on the far right aside, you don’t get a lot of ideological posturing. On a continent where modern-day political excitement started with the French Revolution guillotining the aristocrats, and most recently led to far more enthusiasm in Germany than anyone was prepared for, a certain cold-eyed realism is both understandable and a relief to the rest of us.
As a result, you see a lot less of the sheer silliness you get in the U.S. Gerhard Schroeder, for example, the chancellor of Germany, is on his fourth wife. Not right this moment, I assume, but I could be wrong. And he’s widely presumed to have something going on the side, given his disappearances from view during slow afternoons down at the Reichstag. Nowhere will you see the Hun equivalent of William Bennett huffing and snorting and spouting great clouds of bilious nonsense about public morality and the virtues of, uh, you know, virtue.
The exception is here in the U.K., which is the only country I can think of where people and particularly the press get as loopy about sex and sin as they do in the U.S. Not for nothing did Thomas Macaulay say he knew of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. If he’d been paying attention, though, he might have realized the Yanks were going to give his countrymen some stiff competition one day.
But even the Brits get it over with fast. Some time ago, one of our politicians, a member of the Labour government, found himself in a sticky situation: he’d gone for a stroll on Clapham Common late one night — the equivalent of dropping by the Ramrod leather bar down near the Hudson River docks in New York for a quick drink — and ended up trying to persuade the police he’d been carjacked. The police were skeptical. He revised his story, several times; eventually, he was forced to acknowledge that he’d been cruising for a bit of rough trade and found some that was rather rougher than he’d bargained for.
He was gone in a week. The rank and file of the British press — and never has the term “rank” been applied more aptly than when it is used to refer to a British newspaper — had great sport while it lasted, but it lasted very little time at all by American standards. The Prime Minister’s spin doctor heard him out and then said, right, we’ll have none of that, or rather we won’t have any of that if you’re going to get caught at it, you silly bugger. A letter of resignation by the end of play today would be most welcome. My best to the wife and children.
Incidentally, one reason relatively few upper-class twits and high-ranking political figures come out the closet in the U.K. is that their wives won’t let them. So a steady stream of upper-class twits and high-ranking political figures are caught in back alleys, public loos, and hire-by-the-hour hotel rooms doing an Oscar Wilde imitation. They are then forced out of public life, ensuring fresh faces and new thinking constantly enrich British political discourse. The system seems awkward to an outsider, but it works well.
Better than the U.S. system seems to be working, at any rate. The sight of George W. Bush running around the country obfuscating madly on the issue of when, how, and if he ever snorted coke is highly entertaining but sheds little light on what kind of president he might be. At this point, can anyone possibly doubt that at some point in his youth, he hoovered the occasional line? More to the point, does anyone care?
All right, granted the poor suckers locked up in Huntsville for possession of less than a gram of Peruvian magic dust because of Bush’s vicious drug laws may well take some interest in the subject. But hasn’t it sunk in yet that going one toke over the line from time to time is no big deal for most people? The biggest single population bloc over voting age comprises us babyboomers. We like drugs. Some of us more than others, and for most of us the attraction at this point is purely nostalgic, but few of us find the thought of a little recreational usage repugnant (although we’re probably a bit queasy on the subject now that we have sons, daughters, nephews, and nieces entering the prime drug-taking years).
Personally, I know the thought that George once took more than a casual interest in whether he had a full supply of Kleenexes handy makes him slightly more likeable. I also like the fact that he could knock back a few shots with the best of them, and that he chased women and caught his fair share. He’s grown up and settled down now, sure, but he wasn’t one of those dreary student-council types who could think of nothing better they’d rather do on a weekend than settle down for spirited discussion of zoning reform. I wouldn’t vote for him, but not because of his hellraising. It’s because I think he combines the intelligence of Dan Quayle with the vision of his father and the deep-seated personal integrity of his father’s mentor, Richard Nixon.Anyway, I’m starting to ramble. More later, once everyone gets back from holiday and life starts revving up again.
Cheers,
Larry King
Posted at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Prague for Thanksgiving
06/17/2025
Feb 7, 2000
Paul: I went to Prague for Thanksgiving, and before you ask, no, Czechs don’t normally celebrate the safe arrival in the New World of a small, hardy band of religious bigots from England almost four hundred years ago. A friend of mine, who’s American and married to a Czech, lives there, and he’s introducing the holiday year by year.
So far, resistance has been minimal. A holiday featuring a vast amount of carbohydrates fits right in in the Czech Republic, where the basic food unit is the dumpling. You can do a lot with a dumpling — fill it with cheese, garlic, and various meats and smother it with gravy, for example — and whatever you do, anyone who eats a few will spend the rest of the day in a caloric torpor, occasionally belching but otherwise inert. Throw in football, and you’ve got the kind of afternoon any American who’s endured a traditional Thanksgiving dinner would recognize.
Jim and Lucie, my hosts, omitted the dumplings and produced an American Thanksgiving spread that could have come from a Norman Rockwell painting. The Czech aspects of the event emerged later. Foremost among them was the tendency of any convivial group of Czechs to stay up all night and drink everything in the house, especially the high-octane liqueurs Central Europeans are so fond of. I don’t know what goes into that stuff or how they distill it, but a few shots will keep you singing bawdy Czech folk songs till dawn, even if you’re an American visitor who doesn’t speak a word of Czech.
Prague itself has changed some since I was last there, a few years ago. The Czech economy supposedly is slumping, but the city center in particular has been cleaned up, renovated, and studded with cafes, restaurants, and boutiques. It’s full of prosperous-looking Czechs wearing the same black denim, wool, and leather as the crowd in Soho and the East Village. The roads get clogged during the morning and evening rush hour, and the cars are Volkswagens and Audis and Volvos and Mercedes, not the pre-revolution Skodas and East German Trabants that used to roam the streets looking for a place to fall apart.
You do see one of the old Soviet dinosaurs occasionally, and the Trabant especially makes you wonder why we ever feared the communist bloc. The engine sounds like a lawn mower and the exhaust spews more noxious fumes than Vesuvius. None of the body parts fit flush against the adjoining parts; the hood and trunk won’t stay latched and the bumpers rattle against the frame. The simplest mechanical parts — window cranks, windshield wipers, rear-view mirror swivels — break and fall off after they’re used the first few times. After a couple of Central European winters, you haven’t got a car body so much as a delicate sculpture of free-standing rust.
And this was a car made by Germans, for God’s sake. They had cousins in Stuttgart putting together Mercedes and family friends down in Munich building BMWs. But communism did to the cherished tradition of German engineering what Bill Clinton did to the concept of Presidential dignity. Think what it did to Russian engineering, which reached its apogee with the vodka distillery. If a Soviet general had ever fired an ICBM at the U.S., he would have needed to warn the folks in the Ukraine they better duck. The entire city of Prague offers a kind of architectural rebuke to Marx and Lenin, for that matter. The city hasn’t suffered a great fire in centuries and it’s never endured a serious bombardment. If a building got knocked down in Prague during the five hundred years or so before 1948, it was probably because somebody had in mind to replace it with something better. Consequently, the city offers a living history of urban architecture since the Dark Ages.
The center of the city is divided into what are called the Old Town and the New Town, the New Town being the upstart neighborhood that didn’t get built until the 1300s. Medieval buildings still exist, and not just the occasional carefully preserved cathedral or palace. I ate dinner in a restaurant housed in a building that dated back to the 15th century or so.
Surrounding Old and New Town are rings of newer buildings, newer in this instance meaning you start before the Thirty Years War, and work up through World War I and immediately thereafter. Although Prague was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire most of that time, the Czechs managed to put up buildings in the Hapsburg style without making them grandiose and pompous, unlike much of Vienna. The Austrians were trying hard to impress on everyone that their city was the seat of a vast empire. The Czechs had no one in particular they wanted to impress, and they ended up with a much more graceful, appealing city.
It helps that they hide the drab and ugly parts. The slums are outside the city instead of in the center, the sensible arrangement most European cities have adopted. The outer edge of Prague is a belt of houses and small businesses, mostly from the Thirties, that aren’t so much unattractive as run down and suffering from being converted into “worker” housing. Go a little further out, and you come to the true worker housing, built some time between 1948 and the 1980s — what Jim, my American friend, calls commie condos. And until you’ve seen what unmotivated workers who drink heavily can do with poured concrete, you don’t know how ugly a building can be. A commie condo is an unadorned cube of rough concrete, ranging from two to six stories. Sometimes the concrete was left its natural color, sometimes it got a thin coat of whitewash. Depending on which was chosen, the polluted air that comes from burning soft coal and untreated gasoline for forty years soon turned it dung brown or faded-bruise yellow.
Calling them cubes is optimistic. The word implies plumb lines and straight edges, which they haven’t got. Jim says they were built by laying wooden frames on the ground, filling the forms with concrete, then winching them upright to form the walls. A roof would also be built on the ground, then lifted atop the rickety structure. If you think about that a minute, you realize none of the building’s constituent parts is integral to the other parts. They just lean against or rest upon one another, not unlike the workers after they’ve done their drinking for the day.
In short, if you take a tram from the outer rings of Prague into the center, you can watch as the history of architecture and building craft reverses itself outside the tram windows. It’s a little like one of those dioramas in the natural history museum that shows the evolution of man from hairy, stooped brute to upright, thinking human. But in this case, things get better as you go back in time. Once you reach Old Town Square, you’ve seen incontrovertible evidence that when it came to the basic matter of putting a roof over his head, a Prague resident made out rather better in the Middle Ages than he did ten or fifteen years ago. Or to put it another way, with roughly eight hundred years of human history to guide him, a demented German intellectual came up with a social, economic, and political system that actually worked worse than feudalism. And he thought he was doing everyone a favor. The enduring mystery of the twentieth century, or at least the latter half of it, may be why so many people continued to think Marx was right, no matter what the evidence showed. It’s as if people responsible for the education of children ignored the very existence of the fossil record that establishes how evolution occurs and . . . never mind.
Actually, I retain a sneaking affection for old Karl. He was such a complete scoundrel. Did you know the champion of the working class never actually worked for a living? He sponged off his bourgeois family while he bummed around Europe preaching revolution until he was thirty-one. Then the Belgians, usually an even-tempered bunch, threw him out of their country. He’d already exhausted the patience of the authorities in his native Germany and in France, so he moved to London. From then until his death thirty-four years later, he sponged off Frederick Engels. Engels, incidentally, had arranged his life rather neatly — he earned his living oppressing millworkers at his family’s textile factory in Manchester, and between times wrote books expressing his shock and horror at the oppression of millworkers. On his income from the mills, he supported not only himself and Marx, but also Marx’s wife, multitudinous children, and mistress, near whom the latter is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery. The credulous regularly make pilgrimages there to this day.
I thought about dropping by myself when I got back from Prague, just to thumb my nose, but I didn’t have time. I almost immediately left to go to Paris for work and then to the U.S. for Christmas. I was only in the states five days, and I spent much of my holiday fascinated by the obsessive television and newspaper coverage of the Y2K bug. I gathered the U.S. was teetering on the edge of an abyss, and the republic would avoid tipping over into darkness and chaos only by dint of a heroic, horribly expensive effort on the part of battle-hardened programmers with nerves of steel. Is everyone feeling suitably abashed now? Have high-priced consultants been dragged out of their paneled offices and soundly thrashed? Is anyone standing on the Idaho border laughing at the survivalists crouched around their campfires?
The questions are rhetorical. But I do honestly want to know one thing. In the many months the U.S. was whipping itself into an apocalyptic frenzy, did anyone isolate a non-vital computer system, flip its clock forward to 23.59 on 31 December 1999, and wait a minute to see what would happen? Lots of people performed that test after they’d spent a few million bucks updating and debugging software. But so far as I can tell, no one checked to see if the millennium bug actually existed in the first place.
By contrast, you could go weeks in the U.K. without catching a reference to the millennium bug. If anybody was stockpiling canned food and ammunition in the Yorkshire Dales, I never heard about it. I don’t recall seeing a single story in a London newspaper about the bug after I got back, a couple days before New Year’s Eve.
Just in case my countrymen were right, though, I immediately left for Paris again. If civilization was going to end on New Year’s Eve, I wanted to be in the most civilized city I know of.
Paris was paying as little attention to the millennium bug as London. I saw one story in a French newspaper about it. Read through the murk of my extremely uncertain French, the story seemed to regard with some amusement people who were worried about “le boug.”
What the French were taking seriously was their New Year’s party. They cleared much of central Paris of its murderous traffic, for which someone should get at least an honorable mention the next time the Nobel Peace Prize is handed out. The Champs Elysees became a vast pedestrian mall. The best place to be at midnight was down on the Right Bank of the Seine, where I made my way with a group of five friends and a couple of million acquaintances. That was where you got the best view of the fireworks. Maybe you caught some of it on television — they blew up the Eiffel Tower. It was a rousing spectacle and it went on just long enough, then quit before things got boring, unlike virtually every other fireworks display I’ve ever seen.
Unfortunately, the French are not as hyper-rational in some matters as they are in others. The Paris Metro, for example, usually quits running between one and half-past one in the morning. You would expect the hours to be lengthened somewhat on New Year’s, since a decent party is just picking up steam about one in the morning. You would be wrong.
As a result, I found myself standing outside a Metro stop in the sixteenth arrondissement at half past one in the morning, wondering how I was going to get back to my borrowed flat in the third arrondissement. If you’re familiar with the geography of Paris, you will understand this was no idle question. If you’re not, well, the distance between the one and the other works out to about ten miles.
Not much can be said about the dreary business of putting one foot in front of another often enough to cover ten miles. Most of the walk was along the Seine, which was as pretty as ever in the night-time lights. The weather was mild and the crowd — several hundred thousand people evidently believed the same reports I had about the Metro staying open all night — was relatively good-humored. In a mere three hours, I was home. Out of curiosity, over the next few days I asked around among Parisians just why the Metro would close at such an unreasonable hour, particularly after the authorities had gone to quite a bit of trouble to get everything right for the big celebration. No one knew for a fact, but the consensus was that it probably had something to do with the work rules for Metro employees. As I understand it, the transport union makes it impossible to force any Frenchman who drives any vehicle to do anything he doesn’t want to. When anyone tries, the union brings the entire city and if need be the entire country to a screeching halt.
The union in question, or the umbrella labor group to which it belongs, has a long, proud communist heritage. I’m tempted to say the inconvenience I and a few hundred thousand others suffered on New Year’s provides a coda for the grand theme sounded in Prague. Marxism is antithetical to a reasonably well-conducted society, one where things work and people can enjoy a certain amount of prosperity and comfort. But in fact the Paris Metro is a model for how public transport ought to run, the odd bit of stubbornness on working hours aside. The trains are clean and comfortable, they come along every few minutes, and breakdowns and unexplained delays are rare. Anyone who puts up with the London Underground on a daily basis would cheerfully vote for Josef Stalin if he got anything like the same performance out of the Circle Line.
For that matter, Prague has a small but efficient subway system and an extensive tram network, both of them cheap, comfortable, reliable, and yet left over from the bad old days. So maybe left-wingers are uniquely suited to building and running public transport systems. The best subway systems in the U.S., at least in my experience, are those in San Francisco and Washington D.C., two notorious nests of pinkos, commies, anarchists, fellow-travelers and Lord knows what else. In right-wing cities like Houston, they think if you can’t afford a car or don’t want to spend three hours a day clogged up in traffic, you ought to damn well stay home. I admit the entire theory breaks down when you consider Los Angeles. That’s so often the case.
Whenever you find yourself trying to explain Southern California, it’s time to sit back, put your feet up, and have a nice stiff drink. I will try to write less but at a shorter interval next time
Cheers,
Larry King
Paul E. Schindler Jr.
