As has become my habit, I promised at the end of today’s column that if you came to the blog, you would find it with relevant hypertext links.
Circumstances have prevented my getting that done this morning. I’ll do my best to have it up later in the day.
Sorry about the lag time. Have a good Sunday.
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.
Heartland not as homogenized as some may think
There he was, just bold as brass, sitting on the steps of a hardware store on East King Street in 
Shippensburg, Pa.: a Yankee soldier. Not the kind of thing I see every day back home.
As I walked farther along, there were more of them. The buildings I passed dated to 1863 and earlier, and some had displays in the windows evocative of the period. Three young men in Union blue lounged against a storefront, but straightened and answered me with “sirs” when I asked about their unit and its intentions. (You’d have thought I was General Meade.) They did this even though I slipped and addressed them as “y’all.”
They were getting set for a commemoration that local folks call the “March to Destiny.” There was no major battle here, but this small town makes a huge deal of the fact that Confederate troops merely passed through the town on their way to the collision at Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863. The entire top half of the front 
page of that day’s Shippensburg News-Chronicle was devoted to this.
The towns of rural central Pennsylvania practice historical preservation with a vengeance. But they don’t fixate purely on 1860-1865. The downtown area of nearby Carlisle — home of the U.S. Army War College — is just block after block of intact, 18th-century buildings still in active use. Historical markers don’t let you forget that here lived “Molly Pitcher,” and on that corner, George Washington assembled militia and led them forth to crush the first attempt to contest Federal authority with force — the Whiskey Rebellion.
I saw this repeatedly when personal business took me through that area last weekend. And in Gettysburg itself? Glenn McConnell would never make a profit from memorabilia against that kind of competition.
I’ve lived and traveled all over the South and spent a spell or two out West. But except for a few days in New York and the occasional stop in a northern airport to change planes, I had not been north of the Mason-Dixon line since the 1960-61 school year. And even then (I was in the second grade), I never got out of the Philadelphia metropolitan area.
Big cities — and their suburbs, and especially the retail strips — tend to look all the same. But get out into the country — miles from the nearest Barnes & Noble or Bed, Bath & Beyond — and you find the real flavor of a region. It is there that you can be startled by the ways things are different back home (and sometimes, by the odd ways in which they are the same):
Architecture: Houses, especially in the older areas, are built right on the road. Like tenement dwellers, people are much given to sitting on their stoops to watch folks go by. If they lack stoops, they pull a folding chair onto the sidewalk and sit there. This suggests a variant of sociability to which I am not accustomed.
Culture: Carlisle is a place of contrasts. It is home to Dickinson College, the first college chartered in our newly independent nation, in 1783. (Distinguished Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, helped found it.) In the same town, you find Carlisle Events, a place that was holding a huge car show (which filled every motel room for many miles). It featured a car once driven by Dale Earnhardt. It was like Darlington in a parallel universe.
Cuisine: We ate at a fairly nice place in Shippensburg where I had the largest pork chop I have ever seen in my life (not just thickness, but length and breadth). I had to struggle a little to decide what to have with it, as there were at least five varieties of fried potatoes alone on the menu — regular, shoestring, home, steak and sweet (and I’m sure I’m forgetting one). That doesn’t count mashed and baked. We had a filling breakfast at the decidedly unMcDonaldesque Middlesex Diner, but did not have the nerve to order scrapple. Nor did we try the grits advertised on the menu; I did not trust that they would know how to fix them.
Traffic laws: The speed limit on Interstate 81 up there changes with dizzying frequency. And good luck getting onto 81, as they don’t believe in giving you room to get up to speed and merge. In fact, some on-ramps actually had stop signs at the points where they joined freeways. But the very oddest things I saw were the “no parking” signs in Carlisle, distributed seemingly randomly along the curbs: “No Parking 3:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. Thursday,” or “æ.æ.æ. 8 a.m. to Noon Wednesday,” or the same time Tuesday or Thursday. The only one that made sense was “No Parking Anytime,” accompanied by “Prohibido Estacionar,” just in case.
Liquor laws: There is no beer or wine in convenience stores. None. I asked a clerk about it, and in heavily accented English he said if I wanted a beer, I should go to a bar down the road and ask for takeout. I think he was serious.
Retailing: For that matter, there aren’t many convenience stores/gas stations. One night, driving all over town and up and down the interstate, I almost despaired of finding one open before running out of fuel. Could this be related to the fact that they don’t sell beer? Could that make such businesses that much less profitable? Is the connection between drinking and driving that pervasive? Could this help explain fatality rates in South Carolina?
Manners: While I got honked at several times when I executed truly stupid maneuvers because I didn’t know where I was going, on several occasions I ran into driver behavior that was so considerate and deferential it was downright odd. My wife and I stood on a curb on the main drag of Shippensburg, looking up and down and wondering whether we wanted to cross there, and a truck stopped — right in the middle of the block — to let us proceed in front of him. The exact thing happened twice in Carlisle — once when we were on foot, once when I was about to pull out of an alley. The cars clearly had the right of way, but stopped dead. It was so odd as to make you suspect a trick of some kind. But they were just being helpful.
It’s almost enough to make you think there are ways in which folks up north are more polite than we are. Almost. One wouldn’t want to get carried away on such thin, subtle evidence.