I ’ve taken to calling myself Lady Black of No Fixed
Address while I spend the summer betwixt and between houses. Floating happily in a semi-weightless state, I stay in touch wherever I am by watching BBC World News.
The BBC addiction to anti-Americanism is getting more acute and can only end in delirium tremens. Every second story has a negative take on America. Last week the ratio seemed higher. Every 20 minutes an anonymous voice promoted the upcoming news stories to the accompaniment of agitated music. Cue announcer: ‘Sixty years after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, how do you feel about that attack?’ Cut to faces of youngish Japanese answering while blankly contemplating this barbarous American act which took place 40 years before they were born at a time when all non-Japanese were subhuman in Japanese eyes. Perhaps the newsroom had a bet on how many answers of ‘Never again’ before some young Nipponite said, ‘Well, you know, if any group of people deserved it, it was the generation of my ancestors. They were really asking for it.’ ‘No one knows how many young women like Natalya leave their homes,’ said the BBC person ominously, ‘and make the journey into the unknown to marry an American, and there’s growing concern about what happens to them when they arrive.’ My instinct might be to worry about the American men who get these mail-order brides. In the contest between those needing mail-order brides from foreign parts and the adventurous conquistas who strike out to subdue the American bull, my money would be on Miss Moscow.
Actually, I worry about the BBC scraping the bottom of the barrel to feed their addiction to anti-Americanism. In the early days, a single story per news broadcast could give them a good buzz but now they clearly need more to prevent them sinking into terminal depression. One fix can’t get you high enough in the ritual of hate America; you need ever increasing doses just to keep on an even keel.
‘Talks with North Korea on atomic reactors have ended with the United States saying it would never accept North Korea having nuclear reactors,’ the announcer continues reproachfully. Blink. I remember a lot of BBC fussing before the Iraq war about why America wasn’t doing anything about the much greater threat of North Korea. For the anti-American crowd, the wrong place is wherever America makes a move. The right place is where they don’t. So simple really once you get the hang of it.
After moving house, I treated myself to a deluxe stay at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. Quite a few of the Natalyas so worrying to the BBC work there. But they will have to jump over a few cultural hurdles. A bath is clearly one of them. Russians are a clean people but they do view bathing in your own dirty water as unsanitary and much prefer showers. In this they are closer to the Americans, which might be a reason for the BBC to worry less. In fact, the Hungarian refugees of 1956, on encountering large numbers of Americans for the first time, nicknamed them ‘nylon Russkies’. My chambermaid paid a lot of attention to provisioning my unused shower with soap, while the bath which I used never had any.
Natalyas come in many varieties. Before Hank. On their way to Hank. When they’ve finished with Hank. At the Hotel de Paris in Monaco they were legion. They came through the lobby and if they turned right they were likely to be ‘goodtime girls’ using the loo before circling the casino next door, and if they went to the lifts they were wives changing outfits for the fourth time that day. The outfits, short and expensive, were the same either way.
The air transportation business is the only business I know which has managed to reverse the notion that the customer is always right. Just out of Toronto, an excited flight attendant came breathlessly up the aisle to make a telephone call asking for police to meet the plane. My seat was proximate to the phone. ‘It’s a level one threat’. Looking down the aisle nothing seemed amiss. When we arrived at La Guardia, four huge NY cops were at the door. ‘He’s very verbally abusive,’ explained the flight attendant. The poor sod was sleeping and had been woken up by the attendants serving drinks. His language was foul but flight-attendant school should teach you how to cope.
Airlines have discovered that it’s much more business-friendly to adopt the credo that the customer is always wrong. If you voice any dissatisfaction in the clouds you will be treated as a potential hijacker and face arrest. The intrinsic instinct of flight attendants is to give service, and one often encounters kind and helpful ones, but they are bucking the system.
Ispent the afternoon in Harlem last Sunday. When I lived in New York during the late 1960s and 1970s, Harlem and the East Bronx were synonyms for danger: riots, Black Panthers, burned-out buildings, stripped cars. Mayor John Lindsay, the NYC version of JFK, walked up Madison Avenue to Harlem in a sort of rapturous St Genet romanticism. I was behind him one Sunday when he stopped on the way to buy a tie at the Givenchy Boutique.
Harlem’s getting a bit white and gentrified now, though you do see the odd rooster on the streets. They’re kept for Santerian sacrifice, an Afro-Caribbean blend of Catholicism and Paganism. I went into a Methodist church on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The congregation was quiet, solemn in a way remembered from some other time. White dresses, white shoes, white stockings and white-gloved hands holding abanicos. The men wore skull caps, black suits and ties even though it was 98° outside and a furnace in the hall. The blades of the ceiling fans turned slowly, round and round, and the gospel singer sang ‘Let my work speak for me, dear Lord’. My sins fell away. Perhaps these values simmered quietly during all those awful years from Vietnam through Jimmy Carter until America started rediscovering itself under Reagan.
Back in Toronto, my objection to a city with no opera house will be voided in the autumn of 2006 when the new one opens with a complete Ring cycle conducted by the brilliant Richard Bradshaw, a protégé of Sir Adrian Boult. Tickets are 80 per cent sold out already. Which reminds me to ask the opera question that’s been plaguing me ever since I saw Lorin Maazel’s 1984 at the ROH. He entirely omitted Big Brother’s scapegoat and hate figure Emmanuel Goldstein. I wondered if it was because daily hate sessions for Goldstein would too much mirror the Left’s current hate of the Jewish state, or just for politically correct reasons. One can only speculate.
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