mind Bach or even Offenbach, these days the French can’t produce a Sacha Distel or the Germans a Bert Kaempfert, the boffo Teuton bandleader who somewhat improbably managed to play a critical role in the careers of the three biggest Anglophone pop acts of the twentieth century—he wrote “Strangers in the Night” for Sinatra, “Wooden Heart” for Elvis, and produced the Beatles’ first recording session. If that sounds like a “Trivial Pursuit” answer, it’s not. Eutopia turned out to be the trivial pursuit; to produce a Bert Kaempfert figure right now would be a major cultural accomplishment Europe can’t quite muster the energy for. Life is a matter of passing the the new Athens time—or, indeed, of holding the moment: “Linger awhile, how fair thou art,” in the words of Goethe’s Faust, which would make a fine epitaph for the European Union.
“In the long run we are all dead”: Keynes’ flippancy disguises his radicalism. For most of human history, functioning societies honor the long run; it’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant gardens, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for king and country…. It’s why extraordinary men create great works of art—or did in the Europe of old. A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words, “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream”: Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well…. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.50
Europe climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: the state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: it’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool. How fair thou hast been —but only for the moment, and the moment is passing. Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis: What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up.
Yet it’s not about the arithmetic, but about instilling in people for whom life is a diversion a sense of purpose larger than themselves: What’s it all about, Alfie? Cradle-to-grave nanny-state “protection”?
Europe is already dead—in the short run.
Linger awhile, how fair thou art. It’s nice to linger at the brasserie, have a second cafe au lait, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, “Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?”51 To pose the question is to answer it. But it only works for a generation or two, and then, as the gay bar owners are discovering in a fast Islamifying Amsterdam, reality reasserts itself.
We began this book with some thoughts from Bertie Wooster and Jonathan Swift regarding Belshazzar’s feast and “the writing on the wall.”
But sometimes there’s so much writing you can barely see the wall. On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude of hideous graffiti- covered contemporary ruins. Sit at an elegant cafe in Florence, Barcelona, Lisbon, Brussels, almost any Continental city. If you’re an American tourist, what do you notice? Beautiful buildings, designer stores, modern bus and streetcar shelters… and all covered in graffiti from top to toe. The grander the city, the more profuse the desecration. Go to Rome, the imperial capital, the heart of Christendom: the entire city is daubed like a giant New York subway car from the Seventies. Look at your souvenir snaps: here’s me and the missus standing by the graffiti at the Trevi Fountain; there we are admiring the graffiti at the Coliseum.
A
It’s strange and unsettling to walk through cities with so much writing on the wall, and yet whose citizens see everything but. Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia is right: once upon a time, you were certainly an ass if you didn’t know where “the writing on the wall” came from. It was part of the accumulated cultural inheritance: in the old Europe, Handel and William Walton wrote oratorios about it. Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s Feast hangs in the National Gallery in a London all but oblivious to its significance. Instead of paintings and oratorios and other great art about the writing on the wall, Europeans have walls covered in writing, and pretend that it’s art. Today, I doubt one in a thousand high-school students would have a clue whence the expression derives. And one sign that the writing’s on the wall is when society no longer knows what “the writing on the wall” means.
CHAPTER FOUR
DECLINE
American Idyll
Looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and mild; and—this may seem egotism on my part—I fancied even that there was a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.
We took a whirl on H.G. Wells’ famous time machine a few pages back, riding from the 1890s to the 1950s to our own time. In the original novella, a fellow in late Victorian England saddles up the eponymous contraption, propels himself forward, and finds himself in a world where humanity has divided into two: the Eloi, a small, soft, passive, decadent, vegetarian elite among whom one can scarce tell the boys from the girls; and the Morlocks, a dark, feral, subterranean underclass. This is supposedly London in the year 802,701 AD.
That’s the only thing Wells got wrong: the date. He was off by a mere 800,690 years. If he’d set his time machine to nip ahead just a hundred or so to the early twenty-first century, he’d have been bang on target. Today, an insular myopic Eloi while away the hours conversing with the flowers, while the American Morlocks are beyond the horizon and rarely glimpsed.
These groups are not yet formally divided into vegetarian on the one hand and carnivorous on the other, but they are evolving into physiognomically distinct species—an attenuated, emaciated coastal elite nibbling arugula in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard, while the vast bulk of people with vast bulk are confined to the intervening and less fashionable zip codes waiting in the drive-thru lane for a 2,000-calorie KrappiPounder. In his Obama hagiography, the MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe reported that, at lunch one day, a conspicuously overweight White House aide was ostentatiously presented with a light salad by the president himself. The staffer responded that he could take care of both his health and his menu selections himself, but Obama was having none of it. “I love you, man,” said the Commander-in-Chief. “Eat the salad.”1
As an Obama acolyte, Mr Wolffe characterized this vignette as an example of how “caring” the president is, but a whiff of aesthetic revulsion from a coercive Conformocracy hangs over the incident: I love you, man. But you don’t want people to get the impression that perhaps you’re… not one of us. In
Beyond the White House as within, these are the salad days of the West.
