Wannabe Yanks

Theodore Dalrymple regrets that we import many of America's vices but none of her virtues

In the modern world, the availability, indeed ubiquity, of entertainment is the most potent cause of boredom. It causes boredom because the world cannot ever be as fast-moving or dramatic as audiovisual entertainment, and for most of the time interest has to be extracted from the world rather than merely absorbed from it passively. Hence the more people with vacant minds seek distraction by entertainment, the more bored they grow; and bored people create chaos in their lives because intense misery is preferable to ennui. I have long thought that much social pathology is an attempt to evade boredom by the propagation of violent crises; and, since television causes boredom, it thereby causes social pathology.

I doubt whether anyone lives more in the virtual world of entertainment than British children and adolescents. They are among the world's most avid passive consumers of virtual excitement. They thereby prepare themselves for a life of constant discontent, permanent disillusion and bitterness, finely honing their personalities for a life of employment — if any at all — in the service industries without service that are so characteristic of modern Britain.

Last week, a friend related a story that demonstrates how completely entertainment does, or at least can come to, dominate a child's sense and knowledge of reality. His next-door neighbours left their 11-year-old daughter alone in the house for a few minutes and she, growing frightened, suddenly feared that a fire had broken out. She decided to call the fire-brigade, and dialled the emergency number. The number she dialled was 911 — the American emergency number.

She did not know that the emergency number of her own country was 999: she knew only the number of the country in which she truly lived, at least mentally, namely TV-land, which bears a closer resemblance to America than to anywhere else, but is not of course the real, living America, only the screen version of it. If there had been a real fire, she would have been done to a crisp, thanks to her habit of watching TV.

The day my friend related this story, I had earlier walked from my hospital to the prison. A young man of the gold-fronttoothed community passed me in the street, and said with that triumphant inso

lence that makes one nostalgic for the days when insolence was merely dumb, 'Are you one of the wardens?' I did not reply, but went on my way, whereupon he called after me, 'What's the matter? Are you afraid to tell me?'

I was, of course, struck by his use of the word 'wardens'. British prison officers have never been wardens, though they were once warders. They are wardens in America, not in Britain. The young man who used the word lived in Virtual America, and he was the kind of young man for whom domesticity meant sitting in front of the television with a microwaved meal, scanning the screen for guidance as to how to behave, talk and feel. Among his problems was self-esteem: vastly too much of it, the disease of the age. an epidemic in fact that makes the Black Death look like a local outbreak.

Once in the prison, I asked a patient about his schooling.

'I wasn't no good at high school,' he said.

It is true that there is a high school locally — but it is an exclusive establishment, where the local bourgeoisie sends its daughters. He wouldn't have gone there, except perhaps for burgling purposes. In the telephone directory, there are listed many kinds of school: junior, infant, secondary, grammar, community, comprehensive, senior, and so forth, but no high schools. He meant high school in the American sense. He regarded his schooling as a pale and depressing version of the American high-school scenes that he had witnessed on television.

Virtual America looms so large in the lives of these young people that they are completely deracinated. Their dress is white-trash American, their habits — such as the chewing of gum — are American, their language is ersatz American (later that day, I went to one of those brash new chrome-plated restaurants of the kind in which you can't hear yourself think, where the waitress insisted upon calling my wife and me 'you guys', though neither of us is in the first flush of youth). Of course, it seems to me unlikely that imitation of what is seen and heard on television is confined entirely to these relatively minor aspects of life, but that is another question.

The problem with the demonstration effect of Virtual America is that it is confined purely to externals, often of the least attractive kind. White-trash clothing, for example, must be among the most unattractive ever devised by man. It is impossible to look intelligent or dignified, and difficult even to look civil, in a baseball cap. The popular music is appalling and brutalising, the food horrible and the manners depicted selfish and egocentric. Virtual America will never convey the message that the Americans are, in fact, a courteous people, whose manners are (at least nowadays) vastly superior to our own.

American virtues are much harder to convey, let alone imitate, than American vices. These virtues are, in a loose sense, spiritual, or at least philosophical. As Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 'Theory becomes a spiritual force when it is gripped by the masses.' And Americans, en masse, believe that their lives are what they themselves make of them. It is from this belief that their wealth arises; and it is from their wealth that their high culture arises. What Virtual America does not convey is that the world's best universities, best libraries, best scientific research laboratories, best cultural institutions are American. America is simultaneously demotic and elitist, but only the demotic is communicated to consumers of Virtual America. But it is the products of the elitism that are admirable, and so essential to American affluence.

The consumers of Virtual America see the affluence and are embittered that it is not theirs, but they do not understand the culture or effort that created it. They are like Africans who see the wealth of Europe but have no idea where it came from, or of the depth of the intellectual tradition that created it. Like Africans, they become cargo-cultists, expecting wealth to drop from the skies by supernatural delivery. When this fails to happen, they grow bitter and enraged.

In fact, a combination of American demotic culture and expectations inculcated by the welfare state is a disastrous one. When the demotic culture is not combined with or ameliorated by a belief in personal striving for material improvement, but rather with the idea that affluence is delivered by the government through confiscation and redistribution — that is to say by the promotion of 'social justice' — a uniquely horrible, new culture is forged, the culture of embittered slovenliness. The British are increasingly a nation of angry slobs.