COVER -> DAY ONE
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The information is, as they say, "anecdotal" because it derives entirely from my personal experience but having shared London buses, East African Christian missionary light aircraft, AMTRAK dining cars, Bombay taxis and Parisian Bateaux Mouches with American citizens, not to mention a whole year in early adulthood at Harvard, I think I am entitled to risk a puzzling generalisation. This is that Americans abroad are distinctly reluctant to put aside stereotypes in the face of real evidence of the peculiarities of people and places. The puzzle is that this should be so when the United States has so many vibrant, multi- and cross-cultural facets. Cosmopolitan aesthetes on the Eastern Seaboard, for example, mindlessly aping the Europe to which they look for cultural justification, tend to forget how many people of non-British stock there are in the Mid-West.
For all its accidental or deliberate statistical illiteracy, delivering a standard of 'reporting' which would have been unacceptable in the days of Cronkite, Americans ought to be grateful to CBS for its programme on crime in Britain. Grateful indeed for anything that might ultimately convince them that Britain is not one massive, regally adorned heritage park. We British have more drug dealers than brandy smugglers; more drunken drivers than eye-patched pirates; and more street thugs than knights errant. Our poverty is neither noble nor picturesque, our agriculture aspires to the ruthlessness of Nebraska, our smokestack legacy is miserable.
As an advocate of Britain's adoption of a Europe-wide currency I have a right to complain but most Britons do not. They fear that whatever national characteristics they might have retained following the invasion of Disney, Coca Cola, McDonald's and Gap, will be lost if Her Majesty's head does not appear on the humbler units of currency.
Paradoxically, this is a statement of jingoistic insecurity because they do not think the French will be any less French when they adopt the Euro.
It is perhaps this very insecurity which leads those weak of intellect to fear the new currency so greatly; and yet, in every sphere that matters in our lives it is the United States, not any European country or all of them represented by the European Commission in Brussels, which devastates our autonomy.
Whether it is the benign pressure of American science or the rotten corrosiveness of Hollywood, the enlightened management practices of Tom Peters or the corporate brutality that makes a fool of him; whether it is the cowardice of the Pentagon or the bombast of the WTO, we, in Britain at least, have few escape routes into ourselves; our curse is the common language. We are not protected by the perversity of the Irish, the flair of the French, the roots of the Germans nor the soaring of Italians. Well, there's a string of caricaturistic clichÈs to characterise nations of astounding diversity!
To a certain extent the caricaturing of difference at a distance does not do too much harm. In spite of natio-state labels for wars they are rarely nationalist and even less often race based. Soldiers are usually mercenaries of one sort or another, even if it is characterised as patriotic.
Yet caricature all too easily leads to dehumanisation; the loss of 3-dimensional status makes ill treatment easier for the perpetrator. We have become accustomed, almost without thinking about it, to accept morally degrading assumptions about people of other races and about the poor. The CBS programme was remarkably coy about poverty as a cause of crime and racism as the motivation behind a bewildering succession of otherwise motiveless crime.
For your ease of reference perhaps I should refer to two news items, which might have appeared as single paragraphs in obscure corners of your favourite journals. 58 Chinese people attempting to enter Britain illegally died in the back of a truck and got less news coverage than a similar number of veal calves. They were, in any case, asking for it. They were not victims of poverty but were "bogus" asylum seekers or "scrounging" refugees. Frankly, I would employ anyone who could scrape up the price and screw up the courage to get from rural China to my front door in search of a job.
In another story a man was given six life sentences for releasing nail bombs against black people and gay people. The guardians of our morals, the tabloid press, screamed "Fascist!" at the guilty man (always supposing they knew what it means) after waging blatantly racist campaigns against foreign immigrants. Indeed, one of the rarely remarked curiosities of our Fascist press (and I do know what the word means) is that it preserves its respectability through an occasional moral outburst. Liberals should not be taken in.
As global capitalism gets a grip it is not being matched by global labour migration. The harsher the wind from each trade round the more the insecure will lash out at seeming rivals. In societies where immigration (slavery) has been officially organised there is no more vicious group than the indigent indigenous.
One cannot expect anything other. Slavery was abolished in Britain before child labour. Capitalism has graduated from killing its workers; it knows how to judge the fine balance between cruelty and efficiency and if it is prepared to do moral and physical violence to those of its own race it will hardly scruple to care for those who are different; it can always divide and rule, the old poor against the new poor, the old fruit pickers against the new fruit pickers. This is, as they say, anecdotal, but having seen global capitalism in more than half of the countries of the world, from the richest to the poorest, I will hazard the generalisation.
