Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 23, 1993 TAG: 9309050315
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Pacton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It wasn't much of a trip, as it turned out. The boat was crowded and slow, the weather windy and cold, and I hadn't bothered to learn how long the cruise would take, and it in fact required more time than I had. I wound up taking a train back to Waterloo instead of returning by boat.
But, like most disappointments, it had a silver lining. Cold and a little bored, I went into the cabin, where I fell into conversation with a pair of older women who were retired schoolteachers.
They were nice women, too, educated, thoughtful, free of conventional chat and cliches, and both had a lot to say about Britain and what is happening to it - and, by implication and sometimes explicitly, what is happening to the civilization of which all three of us are products and now, to some degree, victims.
They were glad, despite their love of children, to put their teaching lives behind them. British schools, they said, had become unpleasant to schoolmasters like them. Standards of behavior had slipped badly. Students were no longer polite. Students no longer dressed and talked with consideration for their elders. They were rude in the classroom. They were rude on the street. They spent most of their time watching television. They did little work at home or in school and too many were nearly illiterate.
Worst of all, they scarcely cared. Ignorance - and with it prejudice, indifference to society's needs, vulnerability to demagoguery - was not only acceptable but endemic in their world.
Much of this the schoolteachers blamed on the United States, which in their view has exported its young people's dress, hair, music and bad manners throughout the world. Some of the fault lay with the British people themselves, of course, for being willing to abandon the behavior and standards that had made them the world's leaders in favor of the loud, brutish and wholly antisocial ways of their American cousins. But our society, they argued, has much to answer for.
This sounds easy and even glib, I suppose, but it confirmed much of what I saw in England - and especially in London - this summer. That British youth, like so much of the European youth, is obsessively attracted to the worst of the United States will surprise few who've been abroad lately.
Superficial evidence is easy to come by. McDonald's and Burger King fast-food outlets are now visible not only in Picadilly Circus but in many parts of London and other British cities. Every street market boasts a thriving trade in blue jeans, and the pricier places sell them with ``designer'' labels, whether authentic or forged I do not know. The T-shirt, worn loose, with imprints and preferably dirty, is the universal garment.
British television, once the envy of every nation, has undergone an obvious Americanization. Not only is there ``breakfast television,'' which is a poor imitation of America's morning shows, but there are two commercial channels, with ads as tastelessly wacko as ours; and imported sit-coms are everywhere and immensely popular. I hardly need add that the loudest and most irritating rock music is impossible, even for a dedicated recluse like me, to avoid.
What is much worse, however, is the coarsening of behavior one encounters on the streets, in stores, in the tube. Young people - and I do not mean only the T-shirt crowd - bump you aside as they rush to get wherever they're going. Once the politest people on earth, the British have let their children dominate their everyday life. Rudeness, idiotic street chat and no consideration for others now are the norm, not the exception.
The United States cannot be blamed for all of this, to be sure, and Britain has yet to see schoolchildren carry guns and knives into the classroom. But the Americanization of their customs - and space prevents my enumerating further examples - is ominous. Barbarism is not just at the gates. It has entered.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB