BDx13 - 1-4-2010 at 11:46 PM
LETTER FROM LONDON: My American Friends
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Dyer-t.html
my favorite bit:
"Granted, these visiting Americans often seem to have loud voices, but on closer examination, it’s a little subtler than that. Americans have no fear
of being overheard. Civic life in Britain is predicated on the idea that everyone just about conceals his loathing of everyone else.
To open your mouth is to risk offending someone. So we mutter and mumble as if surrounded by informers or, more exactly, as if they are living in our
heads. In America the right to free speech is exercised freely and cordially. The basic assumption is that nothing you say will offend anyone else
because, deep down, everyone is agreed on the premise that America is better than anyplace else. No such belief animates British life. On the
contrary. A couple of years ago a survey indicated that British Muslims were the most fed-up of any in Europe: a sign, paradoxically, of profound
assimilation."
mattybar - 1-5-2010 at 05:39 AM
haha that's all pretty spot on
this bit rang very true for me having recently been in America:
"As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow, we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves. But, for a
week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious of a rudeness in British life — a coarsening in the texture
of daily life — that had hitherto seemed quite normal."
simply put, we are a nation of haters.
we love it when bad shit happens to people that isn't us.
the only times i ever really seen Londoners genuinely stand side by side and talk openly is when something threatens us all as a whole, eg when
terrorists set off bombs on the tube and so on.