Europe

I know I missed Britpop. I know I was not only merely sixteen in 1994, but also on the wrong continent. Where I was living in the mid-nineties, Blur was nothing more than the band that had released “Song #2″, tricking all the frat boys into buying what they thought would be a rock album, but which turned out to be cynically twee hangover-pop. Blur was my weird shame, Oasis my embarrassingly cocky proclivity, to be hidden from my friends as so much of my music was. But what was a “club kid” to me in 1994, except ads for odd clothes in the back of expensive music magazines? I was a grunge grrl. Pacifiers were for babies.

By the time I understood Cool Britannia, it was several years back in the blurry collective memory, and England herself was indeed hungover. But no matter. When in London, I threw myself into grimy streets that no longer gave any fuck about AbFab, or Noel Gallagher’s eyebrows, or translucent shark slices. Who knows where that headtrip went? Probably into the same dumpster where they tossed the silver windpants and chewed-up glowsticks after Y2K. Nevertheless, I chased it all over England, that lucid delirium. Finding it in the sparkle of a sunset on the Thames after a few Guinness and some Thornton’s chocolate, in the almost imperceptible movement of the lights on a closed London Eye at midnight, in the jolting, decrepit thrust of an accelerating Tube train–a flashing exuberance, a driving and mad exultation, the gloss on the decadence. Cool Britannia isn’t gone, it’s a mindset. It’s just the form that magic takes in London.

When everything around you is moving, the human tide breaking and swirling around the aggressively grand old architecture; the sense of history pulling like an undertow, just making our modern selves swim faster; til all is racket and motion and smell, and you can feel the web of tracks under your feet, and reach with ecstatic fingers towards the same grey sky the trees in Hyde Park have clawed for centuries…in clammy fog, in needle rain, in giddy sunshine, it’s always been there. Dip your head in that river.

Went to a party with A and P on Saturday. My heart told me to beg off and stay home, but I didn’t want to be rude to the hostess, whom I’d promised to come. Should have stayed at the flat. There was a terribly anti-American cokehead Englishman neighbor at the party, who picked relentlessly  at me. I’m ashamed to admit that I wasted time arguing with him. Ladies, you know the type–the skinny, twitchy, balding loudmouth who begins every sentence with “Well, women blah blah blah…”, and then shouts down his girlfriend when she tries to argue. Even though he’d never heard of William Blake (an English poet), he still told me he’d “tried to challenge me on my level, but was afraid I’d failed”, apparently because I haven’t yet read Milton. When I got irritable with him, he said in a chiding tone of voice, “now you’re acting a bit American”. Does it surprise anyone that he’d never been to the States?

I’ve been in Europe seven months, I’ve had challenges thrown at me about my country’s politics; and each time, the person seemed genuinely interested in my answers. French people, Mexican people, Scottish people, German people, they all pick, but then they all listen. Because guess what? Everyone seems to want to understand what the hell is going on in the world right now. We all do need to talk about it. Regular Americans and regular people from other countries need to discuss their perceptions, so that we can all realize that it isn’t “America vs. Whoever”, it’s “shitty government vs. shitty government, with regular people everywhere left holding the bag”. Most people, I think, suspect this, and are glad to have it confirmed that plenty of Americans are resisting this slide towards evil fascism. People here in Europe don’t know about AMERICAblog, they don’t know the names Russ Feingold or Howard Dean; their ostensibly unbiased and comprehensive media has been less-than-reliable when it comes to reporting on the American people’s fight against their own government. But everywhere else that I’ve gone, people seem to want to believe in that resistance. Everywhere but here.

Why not England? Has it been too long since they’ve had a revolution? Are they too used to thinking of themselves as the center of the civilized world, and whatever anyone else is doing, it is automatically less than what they’d do in the circumstances? Americans are less politically apathetic than the English I’ve met so far. Do I need to remind anyone that Tony Blair–the man that dragged his country into the Iraq war with less cause even than Bush–is still in power, and nobody here in London appears to be rallying in the street about that fact? England used to rule the world. Now they sit by and drink tea while their government gets bullied by mine. Of course they need a scapegoat, and why not some random American traveler? That’s a lot less dangerous than actually fighting Blair and Bush.

Look, some things are inescapable. If Bush is affecting the whole world, then he’s the whole world’s problem, not just America’s. It’s embarrassingly disingenuous to say, “Damn, your president is ruining the world, better get a different one, American,” and then fold you newspaper over and read about Man Utd. You get off your ass and help me, fellow human being. Join the mutiny, or go down with the fucking ship.

Obviously, not every Englishperson feels like that one drunk does. I remember the huge protests here against the war. But is the war “all Bush’s fault”? I sense an aura of victimization vibes swirling around the brow chakra of the English public. And I’m afraid for them. If they fall into a spiteful blaming of Americans for everything, with themselves as the poor bullied civilized gentlemen, that’ll be just as bigoted and impotent as Americans buying French wine and pouring it into the gutter. And god knows, you don’t want to be like us, do you?