Madame Public Television and the Deification of European Culture, Politics and Savior Faire
By
David Gottfried
In my youth, I suffered many hours under the tutelage of Madame Public Television. Public television has very definite ideas on what it takes to be intelligent and cultured. First and foremost, it knows that having an English accent and wearing severely Preppy clothing is synonymous with sophistication. On some evenings, it will host a succession of inane dramas and comedies which make Queen Elizabeth seem free-spirited. Some Americans pat themselves on the back for their viewing habits and suggest that watching 20 episodes of a silly British sit com should give them three credits in English literature.
Of course, “educated” American women are the ultimate worshippers of all things British. Their knowledge of things British revolves around the tribulations of the royals, the sweets consumed with tea, the dramas they imbibed from public television and little else. Ah, but they have heard of Virginia Woof.
She was British, a writer and a lesbian. As such, she was, in their minds, the coolest bitch to rave and rant since Janis Joplin stormed the stage at Monterey. (Because history teachers nowadays wouldn’t dare teach students anything as boring as the dates of events, many students don’t realize that Janis Joplin succeeded Woolf.)
The hordes of ill-educated American women ought to know what Virginia had to say about Americans and art and Europe:
“Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it.”
Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, October 1915
That’s what Woof had to say about America’s conception of what art should be. In one of her essays, she said that American artists spend too much time thinking about Europe as opposed to trying to craft art. Likewise, if they are consumers of art, they spend too much time asking themselves if putative art possesses European savoir faire instead of asking themselves if it is any good. She thought that Americans had a fascination and predilection to go gaga over anything and everything that was rich, old, extravagant or regal. In one sentence in her essay on the American fallacy of kowtowing to Europe (I read it about 20 or 30 years ago; I don’t remember the title of the essay) she said, in talking about Henry James, they his novels are, most unfortunately, filled with too many balls, great gowns and chandeliers (I don’t remember the exact wording of this sentence.) Essentially, she sounds like a butch lesbian expressing her frustration with an excessively elegant gay boy.
.(To be honest, she said more: She also said that when American art was not simpering supplication at the throne of a European dowager empress, it was a crude, violent repudiation of what Americans imagined Europeans to be.)
In any event, the American tendency to genuflect before Europe, so masterfully skewered by Woolf, occurs not only in art but also in the way we live our lives.
1) For example, in 1981 I discovered Aranciata in Italy. It is orange soda and as such it contains the sort of common and junky stuff that orange soda in this country contains: Sugar, orange coloring, maybe citric acid to give it tartness (or if they want to be super cheap, they can use the same souring ingredient found in coca cola: Phosphoric acid.) It sold for 350 lire or in other words cost less than 35 cents for a twelve ounce can.
In the autumn of 1981, I was in a café in Greenwich Village, and I noticed people buying arianciata for about two dollars. The sophisticated beverage had been poured into very slender, elegant glasses which could not have contained more than 4 ounces of the charmed beverage.
But the pseudo intellectual precious things in the Village knew that something with a foreign name like Aranciata had to be imbued with the culture and savoir-faire of a movie featuring Cary Grant in Italy, the artistic depth and historical profundity of the Popes and the Renaissance, and our Aranciatta sippers hoped they would soon taste the forbidden fruit had by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton when they filmed “Anthony and Cleopatra.”
2) In Israel, people sometimes eat a snack called Fallafel. It is a piece of Pita Bread into which balls of fried chickpeas have been inserted, along with lettuce, maybe a couple of other vegetables, and some sort of sauce. In the summer of 1981, I could get a fallafel sandwich in Israel for about 40 cents.
In the early 1980’s, my work took me to Columbia University. I remember seeing a restaurant near Columbia which sold falafel sandwiches for about five dollars and fifty cents. But of course, the pampered, rich and supposedly brilliant Columbia students would never do something as uncouth as contest the price. They knew that because they were going to Columbia, and because the dish was foreign (had they known it was often eaten in Israel, it would have cost less because Israel was viewed as an outpost of Imperialism), and because they had to exude sophistication as good little snooty Columbia students should, they readily paid the outlandish price.
.
3) In cuisine, very spicy foreign cuisines have become more and more popular in America. Because the food is foreign, it is deemed to be inherently superior or edifying, and the possibility of contracting gastritis of any number of gastrointestinal afflictions should never stand in the path of higher education.
However, the nit wits who love this food don’t realize that people ate very spicy food, ages ago, because there was no refrigeration. Unless meats were liberally spiced and/or salted, they would be swarming with millions or billions of bacteria. People endured, and learned to live with, highly spiced food so they wouldn’t die of infectious maladies. In this era of refrigeration, there is no need to assault one’s stomach with enough hot red pepper flakes to get a bleeding ulcer. Highly spiced food is an unnecessary relic of another age.
The American adulation of Europe extends to politics. Some Americans seem to think that Europe is more progressive. Of course, they may have good cause to make this assumption. Socialist parties have made great strides in Europe whereas in America Marxism is hysterically condemned as something as bad as fascism.
However, Americans don’t realize that Europe, in part, has voted socialist because Capitalism is, in a way, more wretched there and it is so wretched that even after the implementation of Socialist policies, much of the degradation instilled by Capitalism remains.
Let me be specific: In Europe, capitalism is fused with feudalism and the belief that when a person is born into a certain class he is bound to stay in that class until death. I once read an article (in all fairness, the article could have been based on misinformation or a bald-faced lie; I say this because I found it hard to believe and still find it hard to believe) which said that as late as 1968, 96 percent of University students in West Germany were upper middle class or richer. By contrast, in America, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, a person, if he were white, very often could ascend from the working class to the middle class. (Nowadays, things are getting much wore in America and class stratification is becoming more entrenched).
Prior to World War Two, America was arguably much more progressive than Britain and most of Europe. We had established the New Deal to combat the Great Depression. It had many flaws, but it was light years ahead of England. In Britain, the country was governed by a political faction known as the “Respectable Tendency.” These people were as respectable as Henry Luce and Joseph Kennedy having champagne as they commended Hitler for stopping the Reds. In short, the respectable tendency stood for treating British workers like the serfs of the Middle Ages and appeasing Hitler because he kept the Red Menace at bay. The Soviet Union was a menace, of course, not because it was aggressive – most of its wars were fought in states on Russia’s borders – but because if communism spread, the steelworkers of Britain could get a hefty raise. Actually, General Montgomery found that the Brits had been losing to the Germans because working class Brits were undernourished and downright weak. He demanded a huge increase in the allotment of calories and protein for his Men, and this turned the tide of battle at Al Alamain in 1942.