After America полностью

While the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer is busy arresting you for offending the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer, in the broader scene London now has more violent crime than New York and Istanbul. From personal observation, an alarming number of the men on its streets seem to affect the appearance of the bad guys’ crew in Pirates of the Caribbean, shaven headed with large earrings, and the sprightly swagger of a rum-fueled sea dog sighting one of the less pox-ridden strumpets in Tortuga. As for the English roses, at about 2:00 on a Wednesday afternoon, in order to enter a convenience store, I was obliged to step over a girl of about twelve dressed like a trollop and collapsed in her own vomit. But never fear, the government is taking action: in order to facilitate safer binge drinking, police announced that they would be handing out free flip-flops outside nightclubs in order to help paralytic dolly birds stagger home without stumbling in their high heels and falling into the gutter.²⁸

In 2006, on a train in South London, a 96-year-old man was punched in the face and blinded in one eye.²⁹ His 44-year-old attacker had boarded the crowded tram, tried to push past Shah Chaudhury in the aisle and become enraged by the nonagenarian’s insufficient haste in moving out of the way. “You bastard!” he snarled, and slugged him. Much of the commentary concerned the leniency of the sentence. Yet that wasn’t what caught my eye about the story of poor Mr. Chaudhury. In a statement to the court, the the victim “said he had been standing in the aisle of the tram because nobody would give up their seat for him.” He was ninety-six years old and relied on two walking sticks. How can it be that not a single twenty/thirty/fortysomething in the car thought to offer his seat?

Some years ago the livelier members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were illegally burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. When this became public, Pierre Trudeau blithely responded that, if people were upset by the Mounties’ illegal barn-burning, maybe he’d make it legal for the Mounties to burn barns. George Jonas, one of our great contemporary analysts, responded that Monsieur Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong.³⁰

That’s an important distinction. Once it’s no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it. Beating up a 96-year-old isn’t wrong because it’s illegal; it’s illegal because it’s wrong. Not offering your seat to a 96-year-old isn’t illegal at all, but it’s also wrong. And, if a citizen of an advanced western social democracy no longer understands that instinctively, you can pass a thousand laws and issue a million ASBOs (the “Anti-Social Behavior Orders” introduced by Tony Blair) and they will never be enough. British society has come to depend on CCTVs—closed-circuit cameras in every public building, every shopping center, every street, even (in some remote rural locales) in the trees. In some cities, traffic wardens have miniature cameras in their caps to film ill-tempered motorists abusing them for writing a ticket.³¹ Britain is said to be home to a third of all the world’s CCTVs, and in the course of an average day, the average Briton is estimated to be filmed approximately 300 times.³² So naturally the Croydon trolley had a camera, and it captured in vivid close-up the perpetrator attacking his victim. And a fat lot of good the video evidence did Mr. Chaudhury.

Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples—not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital. What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe,³³ the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease,³⁴ the highest number of single mothers,³⁵ the highest abortion rate;³⁶ marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. A couple of years ago, the papers reported that stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company that specializes in military body armor is now manufacturing school blazers lined with Kevlar.³⁷ For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.