The Dish

James Taranto emails to inform me of a threat to my beloved pudding. Apparently, there’s a move afoot to rename it as Spotted Richard. What an assault on British national sovereignty. We should fight this on the beaches, we should fight it in the skies, we should never surrender – in the defense of spotted dick.

Another one came up last night when we were discussing an art film made by one of our contemporaries. When it was shown on television, it was given a three-word listing that seemed to us one of the most damning ever printed: “Tedious erotic thriller.”

The art hasn’t been lost over here. Here’s a passage, again from this week’s Private Eye, on the novels of Iris Murdoch:

Murdoch’s fictional project was essentially to borrow plots from Shakespeare and ideas from Plato and meld them together as novels. Characters with names like Lysander Prosper chat and shag on islands or at large country houses, arguing over whether perfect love or essential goodness is achievable until, after a few hints of the supernatural, the plot is resolved in an exaggerated flurry of deaths or marriages. It’s like A.S. Byatt without the jokes.

One of the joys of British journalism is the work of Craig Brown. He’s Tina’s brother, I think, and he’s got her talent – but in a different form. He writes a lot for Private Eye, the satirical bi-weekly which has so influenced British journalism (and was one of the inspirations for the Dish). It’s like the Onion, only makes fun of elites more than ordinary people. Here’s Brown’s spoof of a diary written by Her Majesty the Queen. (Now that would be a great blog, wouldn’t it? E2R.com.) I guess some of you might not get it (it helps having been subjected to endless prose about the monarchy over the years), but I thought it was a hilarious and brilliant insight into the sheer middle-class tedium that is the essence of the modern monarchy. Anyway, here’s an extract fom the Queen’s Diary:

Monday.
In the evening, Edward and his wife arrive. We all shake hands.
She has fair hair.
“Hello, mummy,” he says, “We were just passing so we thought we’d just drop by to say hello.”
I say hello.
“Hello,” says his wife.
“You remember Sophie, of course,” says Edward.
“Of course,” I say, making her feel at home. “Have you come far?”…
Tuesday.
I receive my Prime Minister, a Mr. Blair. He informs me of his plans for revitalizing the National Health and modernising the railway system.
“This is all very interesting indeed,” I say.
“Thank you,” he says.
“You’ve obviously put a tremendous amount of thought into it,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“Railways are still very popular,” I tell him. “They are particularly useful if people want to get from A to B and for one reason or another they don’t have a driver. “
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says.
After fifty years as their monarch, I have a wealth of knowledge and experience to offer my prime ministers… I have had quite a number of prime ministers during the course of my reign. One of them was a woman. The others were men…
Wednesday.
This evening, my son Andrew turns up. He is divorced. “I was just passing by so I thought I’d just pop in to say hello,” he says.
“Have you been waiting long?” I say, setting him at his ease. “Have you done this sort of thing before? Keep you busy, do they?”

No wonder Margaret drank a couple of bottles of vodka a day.

It’s been a long time since I had a brutal hangover, but I’ve been nursing one all day. Hence the late start. Drinking is, of course, another integral feature of British life. It was in a good cause, I hasten to add. Last night, a whole bevy of my old college friends were kind enough to throw a dinner party for me. It was a blast. Funny how some people seem not to physically change at all, while others (like yours truly) look physically unrecognizable from eighteen years ago. It was an eclectic cast of characters – journalists, economists, writers, academics, civil servants, bankers, etc. We realized that, in ancient British tradition, almost all of us had spent many years abroad. Between us, there were years spent in Rome, Moscow, Tokyo, New York, Paris. And, in some weird echo of our debates in college twenty years ago, we got embroiled in the debate of the day. Back then, it was the Cold War. At the height of my college experience there was the arrival of cruise missiles in England and the final stand-off with the Soviet Union. I was the most strident anti-peacenik even back then. When the missiles arrived on English soil, I held a champagne party in my dorm room in celebration. In the English student culture of the time, I might as well have put a Pinochet poster on my wall. Day after day, we’d have near shouting matches about the whole matter (these were also the days in which Margaret Thatcher was regarded by almost every student as a combination of Tina Brown and Muammar Ghaddaffi.)

This time, it was Iran. The same debate really. Is Tehran a regime in transition with an inevitable shift toward democracy? Is it better for the West to take a hard line with the military-Islamic regime in order to encourage a change for the better – or should we ply them with trade, diplomacy, and oh-so-sophisticated engagement? I mentioned Rafsanjani’s recent public statement that he wanted to nuke Israel. “Oh,” my friends replied. “He is just a silly person. It is all for domestic consumption. You should take a more sophisticated approach.” I asked about the nominated British ambassador, rejected by Tehran because he is allegedly a spy, and a Jew. They didn’t have a particularly good answer for that, except to argue that Iran is now a unique state, in their opinion. It is a state with two equivalent regimes. We have to be careful, sophisticated (that word again) or it could all go horribly wrong. What about Iranian disruption in Afghanistan? Inevitable border dispute. That boat-load of arms to the PLO? Why not? The Iranians do not regard Hizbollah or Hamas as terrorist organizations but as national liberators. And so the argument came back to Israel, where one found almost zero support for any of the Jewish state’s actions. I recount this not because I agree with it,. but because it was a direct interaction with a worldview that is powerful and prevalent in the most pro-American European country. My friends are also no radicals and they are all in the top 1 percent educational bracket. Many are right-of-center. One demanded any evidence that George W. Bush wasn’t a moron. Now do you see the problem?

The other fundamental difference, it seems to me, is that the Europeans do not get what September 11 did to America. They don’t understand how the violation of two hundred years of mainland security altered something deep in the American psyche, traumatized and enraged us at a level the Europeans haven’t even vaguely felt. They don’t get that gaping wound in downtown Manhattan, although they’ve all seen it dozens of times. Or they do get it, but are terrified by this hegemon, enraged and righteous, executing its will across the planet. I think we have to make allowances for them in this, as they must for us. Some difference of view is not just healthy, it’s inevitable. I don’t think Americans got what Londoners went through in 1940 during the blitz, and the profound changes in the national psyche it wrought. Ditto the English toward Americans today. And the truth is, this is perfectly understandable. You simply can’t fully get something that traumatic unless you experience it directly – as a threat to oneself. Hence the difference in resolve and seriousness between America and the allies as this war continues. What to do about this? Americans need to explain their feelings more to a culture over here that saw September 11 as a media extravaganza that has now ceded to the next story. We have to try and explain the depth of the anger and the fact that fear of another attack – anywhere – is absolutely real. Perhaps it wil take an unthinkable terrorist atrocity in a European city for this psychological gap to narrow. I just hope we can get there without such a calamity. And if necessary, of course, America may have to simply go it alone.

How easy. How dumb.

George Orwell once wrote a lovely little piece called, if memory serves, “In Defence of English Cooking.” It was all about the joys of dishes like steak and kidney pudding and the immortal “spotted dick” (a sweet desert made out of animal fat and raisins). Honestly, no joking, all irony aside, seriously, I kid you not, I love both those dishes. One of the things I’ve never left behind after eighteen years in America is a hankering for British food. Yesterday, my mother made me roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. For lunch today in Soho, I had a big helping of baked beans on fried bread with two bangers (English sausages), followed by hot apple crumble and custard (the kind you can pour). Delicious. The enormous weight in one’s stomach one feels after such a meal can now be ameliorated by a Starbucks latte. The only thing I can’t quite get used to again is hot tea (with milk) served with the main course. That and warm, ice-free coca cola. But give me a week and my tastes will likely be as reconstituted as my accent.

I’ll be in London all this week, so don’t worry that I’ve started to post items at even odder times than usual. As I write, I’m looking out at a vista of small, brown-brick houses covered in a light but persistent drizzle. Maybe it’s going away from a country and returning every now and again that helps confirm the deeper truth of certain cultural stereotypes. But some things never seem to change. The papers are full of complaints about everything, from the health service to the trains, the British team just got knocked out of the Davis Cup, and the royal family is plastered all over the media. One thing is striking though. From the frivolity of the television to the general triviality of public life here (they’re excited about a Warhol and a Mario Testino exhibit), there is a completely different feel here than the one in the United States. The deep cultural shift of September 11 hasn’t impacted in anything like the same way. The culture still seems jammed with the idiocy of celebrity, sex-scandals, petty politics and irony, irony, irony. Tina, get back here. They’d still love you.