UK division
We have always fondly thought of England as at least the slightly more vigilant partner when it came to preserving propriety, respecting tradition, and resisting change undertaken merely for the sake of change. A recent visit to London has made us reconsider. One of the first things to greet us was a headline in The Daily Telegraph: “Yet another Labour snub to the Queen.” Actually, there were two snubs. The first was the decision—taken by the Labour government without consulting Buckingham Palace—to drop the word “Crown” from the Crown Prosecution Service. The second snub was the decision to rename “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” the “National Offenders’ Management Service.” No, we are not making this up. In part, of course, both renamings are part of the Labour government’s not-so-subtle efforts to abolish Britain’s Constitutional Monarchy by erasing its stamp from more and more public institutions. But replacing “Prison Service” with “Offenders’ Management Service” is not an anti-monarchical gesture so much as a politically correct one. It is exactly the sort of thing that George Orwell would have savored as a specimen piece of Newspeak— before, that is, he savaged it as an insidious euphemism designed to increase state control by redescribing its activities in bureaucratic psychobabble. With the phrase “Prison Service” we know where we are—in the legal realm of specific crimes and corresponding punishment. But substitute “Offenders’” for “Prison” and where are we? In that Kafkaesque realm where yesterday’s innocuous remark is tomorrow’s punishable outrage. Already “racism” and “xenophobia” have been designated crimes by Europe’s masters in Brussels: how much easier to handle such amorphous torts when criminals are rebaptized “offenders” who in turn are no longer “punished” but merely “managed,” like the cattle, the sheep, that so much of Europe’s populace is eagerly striving to become.
Alas, The Telegraph does not merely report on the degradation of English life, it also abets it. In the special Arts and Books section for the Saturday paper on March 6, for example, readers were treated to a long, wandering piece of hagiography about the pop singer Morrissey. Reprinted from The London Review of Books, the essay by Andrew O’Hagan is a trashy paean to trash culture.
I used to know a girl called Fiona who kept a joint diary with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven’s Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van in their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, and then carried hurriedly on to doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking funeral.
O’Hagan goes on to eulogize Morrissey, who “knew how to hate Margaret Thatcher and the Royal Family,” and who “had built a career encountering and dramatising his own maladjustment.”
This is precisely the sort of vulgar rubbish one expects to find in pop magazines—but The Daily Telegraph? The London Review of Books? The former is Britain’s most respected conservative broadsheet. The latter is as reliably left-wing as its model, The New York Review of Books. But what does it mean that these bastions of high- or at least middlebrow culture should stoop to the gutter of mind-numbing pop fandom?
It’s the sheer vulgarity of the piece that is so depressing—a vulgarity that more and more seems to characterize daily life in London. Fortunately, there is still Oxbridge, the great universities with their many centuries of tradition, their commitment to the life of the mind, their still-cloistered detachment from the hurly-burly of pop culture. Consider Cambridge University, where a group of female students, led by a second-year theology student, used university funds to start a group called “Fellowship of the Pole” and hire a stripper to teach them the ins and outs of erotic “pole dancing.” The students intend to use—indeed, apparently already have used—their newly developed skills to supplement their incomes in a local nightclub. According to the London Times, Nadia Messaoud, the theology student from Queens’ College,
hopes that her group of pole dancers will be recognised as an official university organisation, alongside the tiddlywinks and bell- ringing societies. “It is art, just the same as ballet, tap or any other kind of dance,” Ms. Messaoud said. “Cambridge is definitely getting sexier and pole dancing is just a part of this.”
Ms. Messaoud reported that her parents were “100 percent” supportive of her new avocation. Should we be outraged or merely depressed?
US division
Speaking of depression, it is good to know that campuses in the US are doing their bit to keep up with their British counterparts. A friend recently sent along a notice from the University of Chicago announcing a conference on “Depression: What Is It Good For?” “Co-Sponsored by the Arts Planning Council, Critical Inquiry, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago,” this event is intended to address the following:
Is disempowerment the only prognosis for the depressed? Is the goal to “get happy”? This conference asks how we might use the experience of depression as the very index of our current political climate and as a key to future political thinking. We suspect that depression in its many forms has come to suffuse the daily lives and endeavors of a wide range of people, generating important social and political effects. In a time of economic downturns (no longer referred to as “depressions”), corporate and political scandals, rising fundamentalisms, capitalism’s “triumph,” the expansion of the security state and increasing threats to civil liberties, can depression be used politically?
“Can depression be used politically?” How depressing can things get? Perhaps pole dancing is not so bad after all.
