07 08 05

What does the soul of a people sound like? With the Germans, you have adequate proof; Wagner spoke for them, for better or worse – grandeur and myth that elevated the soul as easily as it rotted to the soundtrack for a meglomaniacal death cult. Italian music – well, no one ever marched off to war to Respighi’s ode to a peacock. Music for life, lived without lasting consequence. (They did their part in the Roman times; they’ve earned a nap.) French music is best expressed by the gauzy wash of Debussy and his comrades, music that doesn’t confront the ear but gently appeases it. America: cheerful tootling Souza marches or great broad optimistic Copeland yawps. Or jazz. Or rock and roll. Or country twangs. (It’s not that we have no sound – we have many, and each is as much a part of us as the other. Few cultures can pull that off.) Russian music has that delicious third-drink moodiness. Canadian music – no such thing, really, which is telling. Unless you define it as American style music recorded in a Canadian studio to satisfy a government requirement.

And the Brits?

This.

This is British music. More so than the regal fanfares or the Merseybeats or the Beatles or Ska or punk or any other wind that blew through and moved along. That melody is from “Jupiter,” a movement in Holst’s suite “The Planets.” It was used during WW2 to keep the home-front chin at the necessary angle, and you can see why. It has majesty, but it’s a particularly elemental sort of majesty – not so much the glory of kings but the stern deep power of the nation. It’s a theme for a King to enter, yes, but it also brings to mind a chap in the square on a ceremonial occasion, cap in his hand, head bowed not the King but for the land the King represented.

I’m no fan of kings and I have no interest in the British monarchy, but I am an admirer of England and understand the role the monarchy has played in the shaping of the culture. As an American I bow to no lord, but if I found myself in London today, standing with Britons in a square, and this tune played, I would bow my head. There is something about the song that compels to you bow your head, to stand still, to connect with something greater than yourself. And if you know the piece, it later erupts into wild demotic exuberant joy, a song for their V-E day as much as Glen Miller was the soundtrack for our Times Square celebration.

Does that Britain still exist? Will it reemerge after five more attacks, or retreat? I don't know enough to say, and defer to those who have a better understanding of contemporary England. But Thursday night I was on the Hugh Hewitt show, and the bumper music was old-style choral high-brit imperial glory stuff. I was thinking that it might be telling how the music that sounds so truly British is old, a remnant of the God-King-Country era that has no modern resonance aside from the force of cultural habit. You can find all sorts of contemporary American music that sums up Red State gung-ho values, but I’m not so sure what the British analogue would be today. They have to go back to the classics.

This might not be a good sign. The UK has taken such pride in becoming a postmodern 21st century polyglot country with indie cred – Rule Britannia replaced by Cool Britannia . It might be that the components of this multicultural Britain have little in common aside from the sense of having little in common. Is that enough?

Countries have national memories, national traits, but they’ve always been based in a certain amount of ethnic homogeneity. (To put it mildly. For Europe, nationalism was tribalism.) If you've moved beyond this, then what sort of core identity emerges after a great shock? What do you rise to defend? It is possible that a multiethnic society can unify along the lines of national identity; America proves that. But our foundational concepts are different. We’re the only true transnational country, inasmuch as our ideas are infinitely applicable. Our ethnic complexity began with refugees from all points of Europe, which is different from basing your national identity on beef-eating tars from Wales, Scotland, and assorted shires. Our ideals surpass ethnic identity, which is why a recent immigrant can get a lump in his throat when he hears the national anthem. Does someone who came to London last year from the West Indies respond on an elemental level to Holst like a fellow whose mum told him stories of the Blitz?

I don’t know, but I doubt it. At some point the old legacy culture is unbellyfeel to the newcomer. This puts Great Britain in an unusual position – its cultural heritage is more specifically ethnic, which makes it difficult to apply to other cultures, and its new self-definition as a melting pot means it has fewer means to unite the culture to face a specific threat.

But that’s the old way of looking at it; perhaps the new definition will be sufficient to form a unifying identity. In which case enough with the Holst; enough with the Brittan and the Walton and the lace-doily tea-and-crumpet summers-at-Brighton music, and bring on the ska and the punk and rap and all the other sounds that blend into one contentious racket that stands for the ability of people to live together on a hard northern rock.

In the beginning, America was next England; in the end, England ends up as the next America.


And gets bombed for it. Some believe that England was already America, inasmuch as both were ruled by fiendish quazi-nazis who tossed their nations into a war for grins and giggles. Some believe that the bombings in London, like the ones in Madrid, can be blamed on Bush and Blair for the Iraq campaign. It’s always interesting to see how people who pride themselves on sophisticated analyses and exquisitely tuned cultural sensibilities cannot see the plain home truths. The foe sneers: you are infidels; you die now. The moderns pull a face, steeple their fingers, and wonder what they really mean. Surely this is a result of invading Iraq and forcing them to have elections. Surely one of the bombers was an ordinary Iraqi who lived a peaceable life – well, aside from the time that Qusay’s men came by, took his daughter, returned her the next day as a broken heap who died from a vaginal hemorrage, and aside from the time when his brother was thrown off a roof because someone said he had turned his portrait of Saddam to the wall - surely it was the invasion that made this ordinary man take the understandable step of moving to London to kill commuters.

I know the 90s don’t matter at all; I know that nothing we believed in the 90s has any relevance, but you might want to heed a fellow named Osama who declared war on the West, and cited the sanctions against Iraq as one of his causus belli. Let us assume then that the Iraq campaign had never taken place. By now either the sanctions that so inflamed Osama’s sensibilities would still be in place, or they would have been removed due to international pressure. Saddam would still be in power, free to spend the Oil-for-Food money as he pleased, lavishing stipends on Palestinian suicide bombers, building up his own weapons programs without fear of international interference, having weekly meetings with Zarkawi. (Who would have been something other than a terrorist, of course. A chiropractor, perhaps. Or a botanist.) The situation in Lebanon would be unchanged; Libya would be happily pursuing its own agenda. And we would be safer?

Yes! Because the Arab world would not be enraged by our removal of Saddam and imposition of representational government, and we could get back to the real work of combating terrorism by addressing the root causes. You know, tyranny and lack of representational government. But this assumes that Newsweek et al wouldn’t have run with the Gitmo detainee stories. This assumes that Osama would be mollified by the lifting of the sanctions, an assumption so naive it makes the statue in the Lincoln Memorial weep on your behalf. This assumes that the London bombers’ mention of Afghanistan was just a rhetorical device, and they really have no fellow-feeling for the Taliban and their recent troubles. This assumes that all that stuff about the tragedy of Andalusia was just boilerplate, and they really aren’t animated by the loss of Muslim Spain.

One of the curious facts about the enemy: they may time their bombings down to the second, but their clocks count off the centuries.

They did not bomb London because there is insufficient transparency in Congress about the Gitmo detainees; they bombed London because it is part of the Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy run by the sons of monkeys and pigs, who must submit or die.

Any questions?

Ummm, how does it end? I don’t know. Not well for quite a few, I fear. And not well for quite a few, I hope. As for Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity, it ends like this. As for us, we should be so lucky as to find such joy in our lives as you hear at this movement’s conclusion.

There will always be this music in someone’s soul somewhere – and at least in in that simple sense, there will always be an England.




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