The British Do Make Me Laugh
“The car didn’t actually explode. There were a few pops and bangs which presumably was the petrol.”
Ah, watching the British determinedly shrug their shoulders at yet another terrorist attack (I feel I must remind my American readers that we did have the IRA making a nuisance of themselves for a while and they were quite often harboured in America. What, a country harbouring terrorists? Invade them! Ahh, how quickly things change…)
Anyhow – sorry about that, that was a bit of cheap shot – but anyhow; this casts my mind back to the London bombings a few years ago which I was actually right in the middle of and yet had no idea it was even happening. In other words I was a station away on the same tube line but when they all stopped working I got off and walked to work, cursing Transport for London’s bloody inefficiency as I went. Sort of a London ritual really – ‘Sake! Bloody trains.’ I only found out about the attacks when I got a frantic phonecall ten minutes from the door wondering if I was okay.
The reaction then – to an actual bomb – reminds me of the reaction to this latest damp squib: an absolute refusal to countenance anything other than a shrug of the shoulders and and a cup of tea. This insistence that it’s nothing really seems sort of the polar opposite of the usual American reaction – ie that their disasters are the biggest and the most tragic and the most important the world has ever seen – despite the fact that the two cultures are so incredibly similar in most other ways. Quite how we’ve ended up so different on this one point seems quite bizarre.
Anyhow, not that two failed car bombs and a minor fire constitutes much of much in the grand scheme of things, but it really put me in mind of the media immediately after the July bombings frantically hunting for drama and emotion and being greeted with a mass response along the lines of ‘Well it’s all pretty much back to normal really. Bloody nuisance that the tube’s not running, of course, but there you go.’ The Americans have their excitement, the French have the utterly brilliant Gallic shrug and we have a sort of resigned indifference. Fair brings a tear to my eye, so it does.
Billy Bragg – The Home Front Is this the greatest song ever in history? If not, it’s bloody close.
The Pierces – Boring
It’s really no big deal there? That definitely is the opposite of Americans and 9/11 – the Friday after, Americans were told to wear red, white and blue, have a moment of silence. It’s a sort of mourning day every year. Rudy Guiliani’s undoubtedly going to use his handling of New York on 9/11 as grounds for being able to handle terrorist threats if he makes it to the presidential debates. I can’t imagine what would happen if we actually held war in our country instead of someone else’s, heaven forbid.
Well it’s presumably just two opposite ways of trying to show how brave you are.
The Americans do it by insisting that their catastrophes are the worst ever and therefore they must be very brave to get through them.
The British do it by insisting that they are so brave that even seriously dangerous and shocking tragedies are just not that big a deal.
Same motive, totally different approach. It’s quite funny.
The IRA comment was definitely NOT a cheap shot, by any means. They killed a lot of innocent people over the years, though there were unquestionably awful things carried out in the name of the British Army there over the years too, and further afield.
Let us hope the new PM aviods the knee-jerk reactionism that characterises so many politicians.
The most frustrating thing, when it comes to wars and terrorism is when countries have a Foreign Policy that can best be summed up as’The eneny of my enemy is my friend,’ which I think both the UK and the US are guilty of.
Had to grind my teeth in class today when I heard one of my fifteen year olds say that ‘the bombers should go home and bomb their own country.’ I despair, I really do.
Sorry, I’m ranting on your blog. Like a lot of Billy Bragg’s stuff, hadn’t heard ‘The Home Front’ before but it’s brilliant. As is The Piersces trafck, which I hadn’t heard before either.
The irony of it is that the Americans went bloody nuts. All manner of interviewing paniced English people and “Terror Plot Nightmare” headlines.
Well I remember hearing someone saying that the UK was a soft touch for terrorists. This is in a sense true because the terrorists are virtually all British, but one would hope this would make the racial aspect of the whole conflict less prominent. Doesn’t seem to be the case though.
Hmm. I’m sorry that this happened to you. Again. And I’m glad no lives were lost. I absolutely take issue with the characterization that Americans tend to view their own catastrophes as somehow worse than yours. No offense, but it sounds to me like most of the Americans you know are cocksuckers. That said, the 9-11 attacks did kill more than 3000 people and bring down the World Trade Center Towers. On national television. It was a pretty fucking incredible, unprecedented tragedy, and I don’t really feel like apologizing for being enraged and terribly frightened by it. I have no intention of over-dramatizing to show how brave I am. I was working in a tall building about 5 miles away from the Pentagon when 9-11 happened, the woman across the hall from me was screaming as she watched the plane go in (we already knew about the NYC attacks), and many of the people around me–tolerant, charitable people by and large–thought they were going to be killed. I don’t recall anyone focusing, then or later, on how brave they looked. I do recall the self-contempt, though. That I was spending my time obsessing about CDs and tuning in to see who was going to be voted off the island next week while there were people in our midst who were plotting to kill us and our kids and our parents and our friends, violently and indiscriminately.
Sorry about the rant. One too many glasses of Pinot Noir at dinner I’m afraid. And grilled asparagus always make me bellicose.
my indifference comes from knowing that no matter what, people are always going to be blowing each other up. whether it’s 3000 at a time or none due to messed up plans.
scary, but that’s the world we live in. saying that, i’d rather die than be one of these people wearing those annoying ‘drop beats not bombs’ tshirts.
All I mean, C&B is that if an American and a Englishman were involved in exactly the same incident and were equally scared, you’d hear two completely different accounts from them, along the sort of lines I mentioned above.
I don’t mean showing how brave you are in an ostentatious show-off sort of a way, I mean internally, to yourself, to gird your own loins as it were.
(And if you can’t rant here, where can you rant!)
Jamila – well exactly. No point getting stressed. And if ‘Beatz’ can’t save the world no-one can. Although actually, dropping a bunch of DJs into the middle of a war zone has a definite appeal…
Simon and I were in London at the end of last week, and we were quite delighted at the virtually empty tube stations on the Piccadilly lines (we got out at Knightsbridge and had a play on the deserted escalators) and didn’t have a clue what was going on.
We flew home, slept for nearly two days, and woke up to frantic messages from my mother, who had seen the incidents on Fox News (US) played out like the next Apocalypse. So yes, you’re right. Americans do react differently, but it’s not their faults really. But that’s a rant for another day.
I’m certainly not saying any of it is anyone’s fault – just laughing at how different the reactions are.
My little brother lives in Boston and he also said the news coverage over there was really quite hysterical.
Mind you, he also said that if you watch Fox News then you can pretty well guess what you’re going to get.
I didn’t even hear about the bombs planted in London until the news about Glasgow Airport came through. But maybe that’s a Scottish thing…!
for god’s sake, please don’t watch any more fox news! it only encourages them. they are perhaps the most hideous, insidious side of america to get shown about the world–and they DON’T represent the majority of us. or put it this way–what they show is the most lop-sided, exaggerated part of how some people react, not the reality.
that said, i think part of american culture is a tendency to think, “well, if we worry about it enough, it won’t happen here,” which we hope will act as a talisman against “evil,” treating it as “other” rather than as a manifestation of or reaction to something we might have done elsewhere in the world that might cause others to *gasp* hate us. perhaps the indifference proferred by the british is just the other side of that coin–if you ignore or downplay the intensity of the hatred, you don’t have to take responsibility for it either. neither approach, of course, is sensible or in any way about long-term problem solving.
and i, for one, am ever so grateful to have a place to rant!
As an American, (not the George W. type of American, the other kind), I too find it interesting the difference in reaction between the Brits and the Americans. I think America, as a society, tends to be egocentric and thus their reactions tend to be more over the top. I also feel that the current regime wants people to live in fear so that they can justify more intrusion into our civil liberties. The Brits seem to know how tragic things are but tend to move on with life at a much better. Maybe this grew out of the tragedies from WW II. I prefer the British reaction, and their beer, so maybe I should slip across the Pond to live.