British Mindset
Unraveling the tangled chaos of the Briton brain
Everyone is talking about Harry and Meghan’s dishy tell-all interview with Oprah. The allegations were shocking: the Queen refusing to give Meghan a second plate of breakfast beans; Kate making Meghan cry because she sang “Champagne Supernova” at pub karaoke when everyone knows that’s Kate’s song; Will forcing Harry to do an old Eton hazing ritual involving Marmite and an unripe banana on his stag do. All this fighting, just because the royals thought the baby might not be inbred enough.
Safe to say everyone is right yampy over the drama in Buckingham Palace. Piers Morgan had to quit his job because talking about it was making him too aroused. But, let me say this: I don’t give a shit, and it’s not just because my religion forbids me from commenting on another man’s marriage. And don’t get me wrong -- I love it when hot girls fight. But the royal situation is probably the most boring thing currently happening in the carnival freak show that is England. The decline of empire produces much funnier things than Court gossip.
Friends will know that I am a bit of an Anglophile. I’ve been enjoying a lot of British television recently: Industry, about young bankers in London who do a lot of drugs, People Just Do Nothing, about MCs in Brentford who do a lot of drugs, and Peaky Blinders, about Birmingham gangsters who cope with the trauma of World War I by doing a lot of drugs. I’ve written before that my dream job would be columnist for the Daily Mail. I even have my first few headlines ready to go:
The new Jubilee Commemorative Plate is a dishonor to collectors and The Crown.
Nobody liked a nice lasagne more than my sweet nan. The smell of a Tesco hot bar still reminds me of her.
I forgot sun cream on my lad’s tour in Tenerife and now I’m burnt down to my batty crease.
I think Americans have a certain duty to immerse themselves in British life as a window into our own future. Britain is about one generation ahead of us in their country’s fall from power. They are speedrunning the decline of a nation, in all its pompousness and humiliation. Observing the trendline of Britain’s fall might teach Americans how to collapse gracefully.
The most glaring example of the indignity of collapse is the British meme Four Lads in Jeans. The image is a group photo of four men from Birmingham on a night out. Their pants are lecherously tight and their shirts are either completely buttoned up or barely buttoned at all, as is local custom. The Four Lads are metonyms for today’s Britain: they still believe themselves to be alpha male conquerors, but are actually silly-looking knobheads.
Digging into the personal lives of the Four Lads reveals the ridiculous inanity of post-imperial English life. The squat one is a former plumber turned bodybuilder: living proof of deindustrialization’s disastrous consequences for the psyche and self. Two have become internet PR consultants based on the virality of the picture, illustrating the random and temporary nature of success in the Attention Economy and the bloated consulting industry that gloms onto the economy like a leech. And the fourth one is named “Connor Humpage.”
In his new series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, the documentarian Adam Curtis tells the story of Michael X, a West Indian immigrant to England and acolyte of Malcom X. Michael X sought a revolution for racial justice in London in the 1960s. He argued that Britain used its self-mythology as a genteel, dignified country to mask a bitterly racist underbelly. But that myth had been fabricated in the late 19th century, using false imagery of the countryside to mask the poverty and desperation which characterized British cities. The empire’s collapse caused economic pain, and without colonies for the British to prey on, exacerbated racism back home.
Today, that old myth continues to steer the country astray. Brexit is solid proof of the country’s lingering egotism. Britain cannot shake the idea that it is more powerful than it actually is, and the colonial logic that it deserves more than it has. Meghan Markle represents another intrusion on that false ideal. The Royal Family, which once presided over an empire the sun did not set on, has been infiltrated by a B-list television actress. Though that family is now geriatric and powerless, they must maintain their vestigial image of majesty in order to preserve the old myths. But the old ideal is so degraded, Harry chose being a Los Angeles Media Guy over a prince.
America is headed in that direction. When this pandemic and the dust clears, we will have to contend with the realities of an empire in decline. The world will not soon forget how horrendously we managed the pandemic. There will be global resentment over how we have hoarded vaccines, leaving much of the world unprotected along colonial lines. It remains to be seen how much of the damage Trump did to our international relationships can be undone. ere at home, our national mythologies — the Land of the Free, the Land of Opportunity, the Melting Pot — are falling apart. As things get worse and our self-confidence decreases, we will fall deeper and deeper into those false stories, even as they become further and further removed from the truth.
I can already picture my column: “President Barron Trump has married Motoko Kusanagi. But I’m old enough to remember when this country would not tolerate an animated First Lady.”