Newt (Photo by Patrick Coin)
I'm sick of talking about books and writing all the time. And anyway, what you really want to know is what I think about this year's US presidential election. Come on, you know you do.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I learned a great truth about Homo Britannicus: HB is thick and ignorant.
Let me rephrase that. In 1979–80, I taught English in a language institute in Sweden. One of the Swedish teachers – who knew me well enough to know that I was unlikely to take offence – once told me that, much as she liked the UK, she was astonished by the pride that some Brits took in brutish ignorance.
Anyone who doesn't know what she was talking about doesn't know Britain. In the early nineties, I worked in Saudi Arabia, where I taught English to cadets of the Royal Saudi Air Force – prospective pen-pushers, since I wasn't up to teaching air crew. Well, in addition to English, technical subjects were taught, frequently by ex-servicemen. Now these weren't all Neanderthals, but many were prejudiced against English teachers, who, with their university education, were seen as effete and effeminate, and often derided as "poofs". (The equation between education and homosexuality is a feature of British anti-intellectualism.)
Now it would be foolish to say that all Swedes are sophisticated and well informed. But Sweden's society is far more egalitarian than ours: there isn't the division between Morlocks and Eloi (look it up) that you find in Britain.
It’s all our fault
Anti-intellectualism is not unique to Britain. You get it also in the US and in Australia – but not, for example, in France or in Russia. And it doesn't take a genius to spot the connection between the UK, the US and Oz. For all the cultural diversity of America and Australia, the social and political bedrock of both is Anglo-Saxon. We have a lot to answer for.
What got me thinking about this was the recent to-do over Mitt Romney's language skills. Senator Romney, as you know, is favourite for the Republican nomination to challenge Barack Obama in November's presidential election. And I'm pretty sure you know also about the attack ad released by his rival, the appalling Newt Gingrich, berating Romney for speaking French. No explanation of why this should be a bad thing is offered; we are simply told that "... just like John Kerry [defeated Democratic presidential candidate, 2004] he speaks French, too."
Well, America has issues with France. Most seriously, the French refused to get involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, at a cost of only a trillion dollars and fewer than five thousand coalition lives, saved the world from tyranny. (A number of Iraqis died, too – somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million – but it was for their own good.)
Don’t blame America
Well, you can't blame the US for having a jaundiced view of the French after such a monumental failure of moral fibre. (You might, however, blame Gingrich: newts usually get on well with frogs, and the Great Newt himself cites French sources in his doctoral thesis. Let's hope nobody finds out.)
But there was more to Gingrich's attack than resentment against French foreign policy. The real point was that a true American speaks English.
(Sadly, just as this classic piece of redneck anti-intellectualism had me thinking that, bad as we are, we're not as bad as the Americans, news came through from the Cambridgeshire village of Northborough that a former Beefeater had been thrown out of a pub for speaking German. In the landlady's words: "We are white, you are English, so you speak English in my pub. Otherwise get out." Germans and other Africans be warned.)
Where’s Sarah?
But back to America, and the election campaign. The great disappointment in the Republican race to find someone to challenge the black foreigner currently occupying the White House is the absence of Sarah Palin. Because, say what you will, she's box office.
And nobody could ever accuse her of being an intellectual – or even of being articulate. As she told ABC's Barbara Walters in 2009: "Because of that one episode, that one episode [a failure in an earlier interview to think of a single newspaper or magazine that she read], that would turn an issue into what it has become over the last two years. I think that's ridiculous. That's one of those things, where that issue... that I don't read, or that I'm not informed, it's one of those questions where I like to turn that around and ask the reporters, 'Why would it be that there is that perception that I don't read?'"
(If you enjoyed that, you can find more of the same here. And if you're a real masochist, you might even try to get hold of Nick Broomfield's extraordinary documentary on la Palin.)
Nasty horrible place
But even in the absence of the Greatest Living Alaskan, some of the Republican attacks on Obama have been distinctly odd. Most notoriously, there was the bizarre "birther" movement, which claimed, in the face of all the evidence, that the President had not been born in the United States, and was thus ineligible for office.
Some of the opposition to Obama was clearly racially motivated, but whereas he couldn't be attacked publicly for being of mixed ethnicity, he could be derided for being intelligent. As failed Republican hopeful Rick Perry put it: "His thinking that he's the smartest guy in the room has hurt America around the world, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. And I think that mentality of 'I'm the smartest guy in the room and therefore it couldn't be my fault' is really hurting America.'"
So America is (to borrow a description of prison I once heard from a former inmate) a nasty horrible place full of nasty horrible people... But if memory serves, neither Obama's intellect nor his complexion prevented him from winning the White House in 2008. Which suggests that not all Americans are in thrall to ignorance and stupidity. It just sounds that way sometimes.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I learned a great truth about Homo Britannicus: HB is thick and ignorant.
Let me rephrase that. In 1979–80, I taught English in a language institute in Sweden. One of the Swedish teachers – who knew me well enough to know that I was unlikely to take offence – once told me that, much as she liked the UK, she was astonished by the pride that some Brits took in brutish ignorance.
Anyone who doesn't know what she was talking about doesn't know Britain. In the early nineties, I worked in Saudi Arabia, where I taught English to cadets of the Royal Saudi Air Force – prospective pen-pushers, since I wasn't up to teaching air crew. Well, in addition to English, technical subjects were taught, frequently by ex-servicemen. Now these weren't all Neanderthals, but many were prejudiced against English teachers, who, with their university education, were seen as effete and effeminate, and often derided as "poofs". (The equation between education and homosexuality is a feature of British anti-intellectualism.)
Now it would be foolish to say that all Swedes are sophisticated and well informed. But Sweden's society is far more egalitarian than ours: there isn't the division between Morlocks and Eloi (look it up) that you find in Britain.
It’s all our fault
Anti-intellectualism is not unique to Britain. You get it also in the US and in Australia – but not, for example, in France or in Russia. And it doesn't take a genius to spot the connection between the UK, the US and Oz. For all the cultural diversity of America and Australia, the social and political bedrock of both is Anglo-Saxon. We have a lot to answer for.
What got me thinking about this was the recent to-do over Mitt Romney's language skills. Senator Romney, as you know, is favourite for the Republican nomination to challenge Barack Obama in November's presidential election. And I'm pretty sure you know also about the attack ad released by his rival, the appalling Newt Gingrich, berating Romney for speaking French. No explanation of why this should be a bad thing is offered; we are simply told that "... just like John Kerry [defeated Democratic presidential candidate, 2004] he speaks French, too."
Well, America has issues with France. Most seriously, the French refused to get involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, at a cost of only a trillion dollars and fewer than five thousand coalition lives, saved the world from tyranny. (A number of Iraqis died, too – somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million – but it was for their own good.)
Don’t blame America
Well, you can't blame the US for having a jaundiced view of the French after such a monumental failure of moral fibre. (You might, however, blame Gingrich: newts usually get on well with frogs, and the Great Newt himself cites French sources in his doctoral thesis. Let's hope nobody finds out.)
But there was more to Gingrich's attack than resentment against French foreign policy. The real point was that a true American speaks English.
(Sadly, just as this classic piece of redneck anti-intellectualism had me thinking that, bad as we are, we're not as bad as the Americans, news came through from the Cambridgeshire village of Northborough that a former Beefeater had been thrown out of a pub for speaking German. In the landlady's words: "We are white, you are English, so you speak English in my pub. Otherwise get out." Germans and other Africans be warned.)
Where’s Sarah?
But back to America, and the election campaign. The great disappointment in the Republican race to find someone to challenge the black foreigner currently occupying the White House is the absence of Sarah Palin. Because, say what you will, she's box office.
And nobody could ever accuse her of being an intellectual – or even of being articulate. As she told ABC's Barbara Walters in 2009: "Because of that one episode, that one episode [a failure in an earlier interview to think of a single newspaper or magazine that she read], that would turn an issue into what it has become over the last two years. I think that's ridiculous. That's one of those things, where that issue... that I don't read, or that I'm not informed, it's one of those questions where I like to turn that around and ask the reporters, 'Why would it be that there is that perception that I don't read?'"
(If you enjoyed that, you can find more of the same here. And if you're a real masochist, you might even try to get hold of Nick Broomfield's extraordinary documentary on la Palin.)
Nasty horrible place
But even in the absence of the Greatest Living Alaskan, some of the Republican attacks on Obama have been distinctly odd. Most notoriously, there was the bizarre "birther" movement, which claimed, in the face of all the evidence, that the President had not been born in the United States, and was thus ineligible for office.
Some of the opposition to Obama was clearly racially motivated, but whereas he couldn't be attacked publicly for being of mixed ethnicity, he could be derided for being intelligent. As failed Republican hopeful Rick Perry put it: "His thinking that he's the smartest guy in the room has hurt America around the world, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. And I think that mentality of 'I'm the smartest guy in the room and therefore it couldn't be my fault' is really hurting America.'"
So America is (to borrow a description of prison I once heard from a former inmate) a nasty horrible place full of nasty horrible people... But if memory serves, neither Obama's intellect nor his complexion prevented him from winning the White House in 2008. Which suggests that not all Americans are in thrall to ignorance and stupidity. It just sounds that way sometimes.
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