There are many more searingly graphic accounts in novels, films and even music of the physical and mental devastations of the Second World War but, for me at least, none is as poignant as Strauss's Four Last Songs; and so, as there were no Accession festivities for the ten new, largely formerly Communist, countries of the European Union, I put Soile Isokoske's brilliant new rendering on the player and tried to think myself into the composer's valedictory desperation.

That there were no festivities is due in part to our reaching a new low point in our political morality which, I am sorry to say to a largely United States readership, results from the coarsening that British society has undergone as a result of its uncritical acceptance of Margaret Thatcher's wholesale importation of American capitalism, transforming greed from a public vice to a public virtue and exalting meanness of spirit to the same level as the meanness of purse so admired by the wealthy. Perhaps this selfishness is not so corrosive in the relatively wide open spaces of the United States but in cramped, introspective Britain the density of nastiness is almost unbearable and for the first time in my life I am ashamed to be called British, even worse English. Whereas it was once brave to be insubordinate it is now brave to be decent. Morality is not so much quaint as ridiculous and generosity does not now so much surprise as bewilder. Were I a bright, young, brilliantly qualified Polish doctor I would live anywhere but here even if the salaries were ten times as high; but, of course, the irony here is deep for as the greediest country in the EU we are just about the poorest and within a decade our standard of living will be lower than that of many of the new entrants ...

© 2004, GENERATOR 21.

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