Keith greeted Steyn's ramble through Iraq with condemnation of the writer's 'flippant' attitude. Yet, this is his style. Just as Fisk's style is mostly doom and despair.
I ran across an earlier Steyn discussing the "last Western Traditionalists". You'll be surprised at who they are. It's funny, yet informed. It will give you a background to Steyn's article on his Iraqi trip.
Read and enjoy.
Harry ---------------------------------------------------------
The Last Western Traditionalists by Mark Steyn --------------------------------------------------------- "How do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word - tradition!" -Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof
What's the musical Fiddler on the Roof about? The opening number spells it out: "Tradition! Tradition!"
Fiddler is based on a handful of Sholom Aleichem stories about a dairyman in a Ukrainian shtetl. Interestingly enough, Aleichem's stories are not about tradition: When Aleichem's Tevye hears that his daughter has pledged herself to the penniless tailor, he's not bothered about the tradition of arranged marriages being broken, only that he's been left out of the deal.
Sholom Aleichem, who grew up in the Ukraine, never gave tradition a thought. The
tradition theme was invented for the Broadway stage version by an American
librettist, and brilliantly musicalised by an American composer and lyricist.
That was what they thought the story ought to be about.
Fiddler's opening number tells you a lot about American attitudes toward tradition. The so-called New World is, in many ways, more mindful of tradition than the Old. If you do come across tradition in ancient Europe, you often find that, as in Fiddler, it's there because of the Americans.
Take the telephone. A few years back, British Telecom, as part of its "exciting"
"new" look, decided to remove the country's distinctive red telephone kiosks.
Admittedly, the kiosks had one basic flaw, which their designer, Sir Gilbert
Scott, had not foreseen: The British were wont to use them as public toilets.
This tended to discourage long phone calls. Nonetheless, the announcement of their demise prompted a public outcry: That's to say, the British denounced the removal of their red kiosks for about ten minutes and then found somewhere else to urinate late at night.
BT sold off the red boxes to interested parties around the world. A few Hong
Kong millionaires had them installed as showers. A shopping mall on Cape Cod
snapped some up. Film producers acquired them for dropping into the background of scenes, thereby indicating to international audiences that this was somewhere in the United Kingdom.
Having abandoned one of the most instantly recognizable symbols of Britain, BT
then installed U.S.-style street phones, although, displaying the usual British
skill for aping the Americans to the point of caricature without ever getting it
right, they installed them facing into the traffic, so that you couldn't hear a
word. Instead of the British Crown, an "innovative design" firm came up with a
new logo of a prancing ninny in red-and-blue striped underwear.
And then something curious happened. A year or two back, BT reintroduced red telephone boxes in Central London - because the American tourists missed them. They ripped out the new phones and replaced them with the old phones that they had ripped out to make way for the new phones.
The boxes stand there now, down the Mall, round the back of the Palace, a rebuke to native feebleness: The British, it seems, now depend on Americans to maintain the traditions they lack the will to defend themselves.
American communications firms seem to have a better understanding of what constitutes a selling point with the public. Despite the upheavals of recent years, most American phone companies that have the right to do so still boast some form of the famous Bell logo. Directories even offer displays proudly illustrating the evolution of the bell symbol over the last century.
Even on the cutting edge of the information superhighway, managers are at pains to emphasize continuity, to demonstrate to the public that they're the true heirs of
Alexander Graham Bell.
What happened in Britain could only occur in a culture with a willful disregard
for tradition. Had, say, Coca-Cola been British, they'd have gone to some trendy
marketing gurus who'd have told them the first thing they'd have to do was get
rid of that dumb looking bottle and the squiggly writing. That, incidentally, is
one reason why there is no British Coca-Cola. (True, Coke did try a "New Coke"
flavor; Americans shot it down and the company quickly relented.)
These aren't trivial examples. If the most vigorous forms of U.S. capitalism
understand the value of tradition, that speaks well for American society. And
it's reflected all the way down the line to a zillion smaller businesses. The
old guy who came and drilled my well in New Hampshire a couple of years ago had his truck emblazoned: "Ed Green and his Water Machine. A North Country tradition since 1934."
Visiting Britons love to mock the shingles proclaiming "Irv's Paving, Established 1978." "What's the point," they snigger, "of boasting that you were established 19 years ago?" The point is an obvious one: Irv is aspiring to tradition.
There's a superficial novelty in American life which is noisy and distracting,
especially to Europeans who wander into New York coffee bars and order the
Flavor of the Day (hazelnut-Eurasian-milfoil-cappucino). Yet, for all the
rampant miscegenation of American capitalism ("It's the great taste of
Rolaids - now in a pizza!"), the brash and vulgar Yanks are not, as the British
like to sniff, crazed novelty junkies. When it comes to the important things,
they're great traditionalists.The deplorable constitutional tinkerings of today's American judges and
politicians, for instance, are nothing compared to what goes on in Europe.
Italy's entire constitution dates from the 1940s, Germany's and France's from
the 1950s, Spain's, Portugal's, and Greece's from the 1970s; Belgium's latest
doomed rewrite dates from circa a week ago last Tuesday and effectively divides
the country into two nations which just happen to share the same monarch. Forget about Goethe, Beethoven, and sixth-century churches; in Western Europe, most of the mechanisms of the state go back not much further than the Partridge Family.
In that fundamental sense, the New World is much older than the Old World. It's certainly more reverential of tradition: Even the experimentalists, like proponents of abortion and gay marriage, feel the need to seek constitutional legitimacy.
Europe's current governing elites tend to view tradition as something from which
the masses have to be weaned. The disruption of tradition is, in this sense, a
totalitarian act-the imposition of something which would not have occurred
naturally. Just over 20 years ago, Sir Edward Heath, supposedly a Conservative
Prime Minister, decided to "reorganize'' Britain's ancient counties-an
expression of local identity going back over a thousand years.
Small counties like Westmorland and Rutland were abolished; large counties like Yorkshire were sliced into three or four pieces; medium-size counties like Herefordshire and Worcestershire were merged into unwieldy new ones; just for the hell of it,
Shropshire had its name changed to "Salop"; by the time they got to Scotland, their creative juices were running out, so Stirlingshire wound up with the Stalinist moniker "Central Region."
Thousands objected, but ineffectually. Now try to imagine a Washington apparatchik wandering up to some Texan and telling him, "We're going to slice off half your state, merge it with Oklahoma and rename it Southwest Region - purely for administrative convenience, you understand."
Meanwhile, there isn't a single coin in the British currency which, in size, shape, or denomination, dates back more than 30 years: the 5p, 10p, 20p and �1 coins, as well as the �5, �10, and �20 notes, have all been introduced in the last 15 years.
In America, we may wax nostalgic for the buffalo nickel, but the
fact is, the coins and bills in our pockets have been mostly unchanged for
generations. That's one reason for the dollar's soundness as a currency: You can
get by with dollar bills in Uzbekistan or Rwanda because the natives recognize
them; British pounds no longer look like pounds, only like the play money of any
banana republic.
Britain's 1971 switch from pounds, shillings, and pence to a "decimal" currency
was the first stage in the country's ongoing metrification. America is now the
last major power to retain feet and gallons and bushels and pecks. Only a
European could have concocted the metric system; instead of weights and measures which have their roots deep in human experience, some fellow in an office cooks up the thing and gets it imposed on the entire world. Britons had to get a special exemption from the European Union just to permit a temporary continuation of the right to enjoy drinking beer by the pint.
What happens when you live in a country where the symbols of nationhood, the
physical landscape, and even your address can be torn up at whim? Inevitably, a
sort of fatalism sets in, a kind or cultural vacuum which usually winds up being
filled by dubious and ersatz tradition. I'm a big fan of the American Christmas,
by which I mean the whole kaboodle: carols and pageants, but also Bing and Santa and Rudolph and poinsettias and "Happy Holidays." In Britain, somewhere along the way, Christmas died.
The British have two Christmas traditions these days: watching telly, and moaning about it. The dominance of the one-eyed monster is assumed to be unavoidable and, like all that is coarsest and most degrading in contemporary culture, American in origin. In fact, the electronic Yule is a strictly British invention. In Britain, Christmas attracts the biggest TV audiences of the year; in America, it attracts the smallest.
No U.S. networks would bother getting into a blockbuster ratings battle between Sylvester Stallone's Cliffhanger and Tom Cruise's Top Gun on Christmas Eve, as Britain's two TV networks did - because they know no one would be around to watch. Around the 20th, the American networks shut up shop until the New Year, leaving a schedule of reruns and innocuous fillers for the handful of social misfits still watching.
To contrast the American and British Christmases is to appreciate the difference
between a culture which is instinctively traditional and one which has, by
bureaucratic fiat and public lethargy, been severed from its own roots.
Ironically, the nostalgic imagery in British commercials today is often foreign-1950s U.S. diners, Greyhound buses, and so forth. When your society declares that your own past is worthless, it's a small step to latch on to somebody else's.
As the American century ends, we should pause to consider: ours has been the
most continuously successful nation not just because it's the most inventive,
but also because it's the most continuous. No Fifth Republics or Third Reichs
here, only the same old federation the Founding Fathers had. The countries of
Europe remake their governments every 20 years because they've been conspicuous failures.
Consequently, they're obsessed with big ideas, the grand scheme.
"Without our traditions," says Tevye, "our life would be as shaky as a Fiddler
on the roof!" But today's real rooftop Fiddlers are the Europeans-fiddling here,
rewriting this, abolishing that, until they wind up with the sort of wacky
notions-Communism, Nazism, European Union-that can only take off in an
anti-traditional culture where everything's up for grabs.
Americans should raise up their milfoil-flavored cappucinos and thank God for a country where novelty has a sense of proportion.
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Media and arts critic Mark Steyn divides his time between the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. He's a conservative (American) who is a senior editor on the very left wing New Republic. He is English.
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**************************************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242 http://home.attbi.com/~haledward ****************************************************
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