You want fear? Outrage? Londoners won’t give you the satisfaction
THE MAN arrived at Queen Alexandra’s House, right next to the Royal Albert Hall, just as expected Thursday.
“I’m here to deliver the carpet,” he said. “Isn’t this a mess?” He then went about his business delivering the carpet.
“This,” of course, was the bombings that struck the London Underground and one of the city’s emblematic double-decker buses, killing dozens of Britons in a few moments that shook the world.
But aside from those immediately involved, it didn’t shake up Britons all that much. The above anecdote was related to me by our own Randle Christian, whose fuller account of her impressions appears on the facing page.
You will also find there the observations of Phil Lader, former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He wrote the piece on his Blackberry Friday while riding from London, through the Chunnel and on to Paris. To Mr. Lader, who wears more hats with more prestigious firms here and over there than I have ball caps in my closet, this is not an atypical day.
We sort of played phone and e-mail tag throughout his journey, and finally made voice contact as he arrived in Paris.
With apologies — which I assured him were quite unnecessary, as I knew exactly what he meant — he suggested that watching American TV news Thursday night from London, he was struck by how the tone and emphasis of it was a bit… off.
You’d have thought from the U.S. telly that there was pandemonium throughout the city, and 
terror the length and breadth of Britain. Hardly. There was “no sign of panic,” he said, even in areas close to the actual incidents.
There had been much more excitement on Wednesday, when Britons were literally dancing in the streets over having snatched the 2012 Olympics away from Paris. When I observed that such behavior as that didn’t sound much like the British (even with the added sweetener of having stolen a march on their neighbors across the channel), he ascribed it to the fact that “The pubs did a very good business” that day.
They did all right on Thursday as well. Andrew Sullivan’s blog quotes one Londoner this way: “Work’s over but there’s little chance of getting home right now. Most of us are just going to go to the pub until the traffic has died down. It’s not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal, it’s quiet defiance.”
Or as Mr. Sullivan quoted from a site called “The London News Review:” “What the (expletive) do you think you’re doing? This is London. We’ve dealt with your sort before. You don’t try and pull this on us….”
In describing this unflappability, Mr. Lader worried, “You risk dismissing the human tragedy.” But the thing is, the Brits just don’t lose their cool about this sort of thing. In America, the nation weeps, mourns and shakes its fist in avenging rage. Even allowing for the significant gap in magnitude between 9/11/01 and 7/7/05, our reaction was qualitatively different, not just quantitatively. Perhaps terrorism on our shores shattered the sense of invulnerability that two oceans gave us for most of our history, whereas the British populace has coped much more directly and much more often with attacks, ranging from Hitler to the IRA.
Even when the English get worked up enough to fight about it, they don’t let it interfere with their routines. In 1944, Americans were frequently flabbergasted when they had the Germans on the run, and the Yanks were all hot to press the advantage, and their British allies would stop, build fires and have their tea (Note: Search that page for the word, "brew"). If there had been a pub handy, they likely would have stopped for a pint. Lacking that, they made do (once again, search for "brew"). It wasn’t for lack of courage; British pluck is just different from its gung-ho American cousin.
Mr. Lader had his own anecdote from that war: He told of German pilots using the Greenwich monument that marks the spot where the world begins its system of telling time as a navigational landmark for their bombing runs. Greenwich civilians would look up, see the Heinkel and Junkers bombers making their turns overhead, and then go on about their business, though fully aware of the aircrafts’ purposes.
It was those people’s children and grandchildren that Mr. Lader’s daughter Mary-Catherine went to work with at Reuters on Friday, the day after the attacks. If not for people casually relating their inconvenience stories from the previous day — the Tube was tied up, after all — he said you wouldn’t have known anything had happened. I pictured workers speaking in the same tones characters in the BBC’s “The Office” used to moan about how many pints they’d had the night before.
Mr. Lader spoke of the “resolve” and “determination” he saw among Lon
doners, which he thinks Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public comments on Thursday perfectly captured.
But, I asked, resolve and determination to do what? To address the sources and causes of terrorism, or simply to go on about daily life (which actually, except for our volunteer armed forces, is pretty much what we’ve ultimately done over here — carry on as though nothing happened)?
Mr. Lader didn’t know. He expected that some who have been furious at the PM will “have to look at Blair’s decisions in a different light.” But was this a “tipping point” in either British attitudes or
the resolve of advanced nations to address terrorism aggressively, from fighting poverty to waging war? “Not necessarily.”
While there might be some new “momentum” toward renewing the viability of the Western alliance, “It’s going to take more than that” — his “that” being the same as the carpet man’s “this.”
The world, unfortunately, has become somewhat inured to such horrific incidents.
So who knows what happens next. But one thing is clear: You don’t (same expletive again) with the Brits and hope to accomplish anything. You won’t get fear, or surrender (as in Spain) or even the polarizing hatred that Osama bin Laden hopes to sow between Mideast and West. The lads in the pub are just not going to give you the satisfaction.
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