America, Eastern Branch

I had the unfortunate experience earlier this month of seeing the movie Love Actually. If you must go, have two martinis (3/4 Plymouth Gin, 1/4 vermouth, shaken, 2 queen olives) ahead of time, so that you are either insensible to the sentimentalized drivel on-screen or are led into a well-timed two hour nap. Watching it cold sober gives you the unpleasant trapped feeling of wanting to come out of your skin. Two things kept coming to mind while enduring the movie. First, one of the necessary factors to enjoying a film is somehow, someway liking the characters. Instead, I thought "what an awful group of people here -- mostly young, modern, trendy, urban Brits." Second, that being so, I further thought to myself, "they are awful because they don't even seem British -- they seem like young, modern, trendy, urban Americans with British accents." This wasn't an exercise in self-hatred on my part. I just could not fathom why were aping the very worst America has to offer rather than the best.

Which brings me to Theodore Dalrymple's latest article in the Spectator, showing how young, modern, trendy, urban Brits are unconsciously exhibiting American habits of speech, dress, and attitudes because of their consumption of American pop culture. This is not a pretty picture. Rather than reflecting America's best qualities and habits (a nation of fabulous educational and cultural institutions, a nation of tremendous religious belief while the Western world goes cooly secular), these young people dress like Brittany Spears, talk like Eminem, and act like Al Bundy. Dalrymple notes: The problem with the demonstration effect of Virtual America is that it is confined purely to externals, often of the least attractive kind. White-trash clothing, for example, must be among the most unattractive ever devised by man. It is impossible to look intelligent or dignified, and difficult even to look civil, in a baseball cap. The popular music is appalling and brutalising, the food horrible and the manners depicted selfish and egocentric. Virtual America will never convey the message that the Americans are, in fact, a courteous people, whose manners are (at least nowadays) vastly superior to our own.

Even further, superficial mimicking of American pop culture without America's better qualities of individual striving leaves young, modern, trendy, urban Brits void of ideas and bored. When the demotic culture is not combined with or ameliorated by a belief in personal striving for material improvement, but rather with the idea that affluence is delivered by the government through confiscation and redistribution — that is to say by the promotion of ‘social justice’ — a uniquely horrible, new culture is forged, the culture of embittered slovenliness. The British are increasingly a nation of angry slobs.

If Love Actually is even a partial reflection of British realities, Dalrymple's forecasts are coming to pass. London looked like LA.