Capitol Ideas: Rip Van Winkle in England
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEA S1 by Tom Bethell Rip Van Winkle in England Even the cricket isn't what it used to be. I n an interview with an English journalist, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post recently...
...We may expect to see a good deal more of that...
...His column still appears once a week, in the Daily Telegraph, although I think these old characters have long since died away...
...What would the go-ahead bishop of Bevindon have made of that...
...But everything is changing...
...Art, early in the twentieth century, dramatized nihilism...
...Pakistan does not enjoy the rule of law, for example, but Pakistanis certainly understand the idea as applied to cricket, and they are very good at the game, too...
...Some years ago Charles Moore, now the editor of the Daily Telegraph, got it right when he referred to an "international salariat of professional politicians and civil servants and bankers who are bored with parliamentary democracy and want to construct a form of government impervious to the wishes of the people...
...Imagine what cricket or baseball or football would be like if they were subjected to our modern and debased ideas about law: partisan umpires openly siding with the weaker team, and so on...
...Remember, he left Thatcher's economic reforms largely intact...
...I n an interview with an English journalist, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post recently commented on the difference between the British and the American press...
...But the determination of euro-elites to realize their drawing-board empire has far exceeded my expectations...
...of the political world...
...The idea was "to shock people from religious complacency:' Oh...
...Most Germans, I am told, still don't know that the Deutschmark is due to be abolished in 2002, the submissive German press having covered the issue with great deference and discretion...
...In Britain, the European project has been more skeptically received...
...ruminations were without end...
...It's true that British journalists freely insert their opinions into newspaper stories...
...What is interesting is that England was able to export this important legal invention, or discovery, in the rather unimportant realm of sport...
...Both fantasy and reality used symbols of contraception...
...In Westminster, a relatively poorer Parliament can hardly afford staff, or even office space...
...Organized sports are based on the rule of law observed within a highly artificial environment...
...Having almost single-handedly prevented Chile from becoming another Cuba, the Chilean general has for a quarter-century been the Left's No...
...On Capitol Hill, the media-attuned congressional staff is there to publicize the boss's activities...
...His real name is Michael Wharton, and I once had the pleasure of spending an evening with him...
...The late British journalist Henry Fairlie said that English journalists saw themselves as an adjunct to the literary world, American journalists as a part (an important part...
...While I was there it came out that the Labour government of Tony Blair was planning to ban fox hunting...
...The game has been internationalized to a considerable extent, with players from every corner of the former empire competing in county games...
...but was not able to do so as it applies to society more generally...
...Blair has great phalanxes of left-wing MPs — polytechnic-trained and Masters of the Arts of resentment—whom he must placate...
...The captain of the English team is called Nasser Hussain...
...This former venue of London journalism has since been displaced by more up-to-date facilities elsewhere...
...In Britain, the educated minority has by tradition opted for the civil service, and has enjoyed (at least until recently) the esprit de corps needed to reserve policy making unto themselves...
...Peter Simple imagined they would one day be used to educate the heathen and reduce his progeny...
...Government in America is a machine that interdigitates with the public prints...
...A number of the great and the good had earlier written a joint letter claiming that Britain cannot maintain its influence outside the Euro zone...
...SpacelyTrellis, and so on...
...It is of course deliberately sacrilegious...
...Nor is it anywhere else in Europe...
...Sometimes it seems that there is one news item per day, which is then endlessly mulled over in features, comments, and editorials...
...Sir Charles Powell (Thatcher's assistant in the 1980's) dismissed these gentlemen as "the Foreign Office's European mafia who built their 18 September r9 9 9 The American Spectator reputations and careers during the glory days of Britain's ceaseless decline...
...It will be interesting to see what happens...
...And yes, the adjectival interjections of the Brits would be hurriedly removed by American editors...
...1 demon in the world...
...But he stipulates that these churches, once converted into temples, "must include `family planning' clinics and vasectomy units:' Here's an actual news item published in the Times while I was in England...
...Banning fox hunting is the kind of "socialist" issue that Tony Blair has tried to avoid...
...The interesting thing is that in some respects his reactionary vision of the progressive future turns out to have been understated...
...In America, journalism is integrated into the development of policy, which is not the case in Britain...
...Martin's Press...
...Here's what the actual bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, said: "It is appropriate that works of art today should seek to recapture the original sense of shock felt by the first Christian believers...
...today, sacrilege...
...An accompanying photograph showed what look like upright, inflated condoms covering the floor of the 11th century crypt...
...There's a sense in which George W. Bush was "nominated" by the media before a single vote was cast...
...The arrest of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, while on a visit to a London hospital last fall, was similarly motivated: The Left had to be appeased...
...In 1995 I thought that a supranational entity called Europe "will not come to pass...
...All of Europe is in decline, of course...
...The influence of Christianity has simultaneously declined, but although suggestive, that may not be the reason...
...That came as quite a blow to the Trots, who thought that socialism was finally within their grasp...
...In Britain, policy is more completely formed offstage and then handed down, as a fait accompli...
...Although they are employed by private corporations, journalists are policy makers de facto...
...They won't much mind if he wins, either...
...Even "the godless goody-goodMess of the Guardian," one writer noted, found room for "a collection of tributes and a panegyrical opinion piece:' Radio Four praised Hume for presiding over a "golden age of English Catholicism," but this judgment was "not easily reconciled with the halving of Mass attendance during his reign, or the increase in abandoned vocations...
...and if observant at all they are much more likely to be Moslem than Christian...
...I t has been 33 years since I was in England in the summer, and one day, in a Rip Van Winkle frame of mind, I went to watch a game of professional cricket in London...
...Now, in a real cathedral, they are being used as instruments of blasphemy, to scandalize the faithful...
...Big government ensures that people don't know what their represenatives are up to, most of the time...
...Even in the high-toned broadsheets (which are becoming much less high-toned), there is far less reporting on government proceedings than there is here...
...That again...
...There are a number of cultural explanations...
...Even though it lacks constitutional authority or coercive power, it has enormous influence because it controls the terms of the debate...
...So why has England been doing badly against its old colonies...
...In Gloucester Cathedral has been placed a work of "art," consisting of "thousands of latex rubber shapes emerging upwards...
...Whatever its effect on the more general culture, however, there can be no doubt that the institutional face of Christianity is becoming more timid and inconspicuous...
...A former English cricket captain, Ian Botham, said the reason is that the English just don't mind when they lose...
...The subsequent TOM BETHELL is TAS's Washington correspondent...
...They work hard, operate in the cash economy, keep their families intact, circumvent the child labor laws...
...Britain is getting richer, and imitating America in many ways...
...Dutt-Pauker, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, Dr...
...If it continues to decline, then I suppose Britain really will stay out and the various countries may recover their separate monetary policies...
...press didn't begin to gain its leverage over policy making until Watergate (or the Pentagon Papers episode that paved the way...
...a decline that is conspicuous in Thatcher's characterization of the Foreign Office view, that "Britain's only way forward" is to dissolve its national independence...
...Originally from Pakistan, he plays for Essex...
...They look nervously upon those with the power to make them look bad...
...Much will depend on the market's assessment of the euro, which was intended to "stand up to the dollar...
...This attitude has been held by a handful of senior officials since the Fifties, without regard to the opinion of the electorate or of various Governments since then...
...The U.S...
...Margaret Thatcher, now in the House of Lords, herself wrote to the Sunday Telegraph, calling attention to the Foreign Office's institutional view of the world, "which believes that Britain's only way forward is to dissolve our national independence in the European Union...
...More of the top talent in Britain will no doubt head for the media rather than thecivil service...
...It is divisive precisely because it is so easily understood, unlike the regular fare of small adjustments to the welfare state...
...Populous countries like India and Pakistan obviously have a larger talent pool, but this doesn't explain victories by, say, New Zealand...
...At the moment, they remain cushioned from reality...
...The press is effective in this respect, precisely because so much is going on...
...As public understanding of it sinks in, furious letters have begun appearing in the papers...
...A determined political party could just push ahead anyway, ignoring the media's interpretation, but with narrow electoral margins, most politicians are cautious...
...The main difference, however, is that on this side of the Atlantic the press plays an integral role in policy making...
...In society at large, it seems that the rule of law really did emerge in England ahead of other countries...
...The American Spectator • September 1999 19...
...Euroland" perhaps better than anything illustrates the absurdities that elites are capable of when they operate independently of press scrutiny (as was the case for many years when European union was in preparation...
...The separation of fact and opinion, so much touted and admired by American journalists, is not well observed on Fleet Street...
...I became aware of this on a recent visit to England...
...That may be true...
...No leaks...
...As the example of Nasser Hussain suggests, where vitality is to be found it seems to be coming precisely from the Asian immigrants, in England at least...
...Ultimately, this loss of determination is probably an expression of national decline...
...Fleet Street, on the other hand, was for those who didn't take life so seriously...
...In a fantasy item published in 1972, for example, the go-ahead bishop agrees to sell off redundant churches to Moslems, Hindus, and Buddhists...
...Way back in the 1950's he invented a cast of absurd progressive characters, such as the Hampstead thinker Mrs...
...The news is that England does poorly in the international cricket league, some-times even losing to the likes of Zimbabwe, the former Southern Rhodesia...
...One political issue that has attracted a good deal of news coverage in England is the monstrosity of European federation...
...The Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, died a few days before I arrived, and it was suggestive that he was virtually canonized by the newspapers that have been most hostile to traditional Catholicism...
...But Woodward did not mention, and may not fully appreciate, a more basic distinction...
...His latest book is The Noblest Triumph (St...
...One thing that happily endures from my youth is a newspaper parody of modem life by "Peter Simple...
...Its supervisory control over politics has greatly increased since then, and no doubt it is still increasing...
...In shaping our perception of what is going on in Washington, it steers politicians toward one choice rather than another...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
