Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
word generally familiar to Americans. To be bloody-minded means not to throw up barri-
cades in the streets but to be doggedly, persistently, perversely non-cooperative. The British
have a special affection for people who are cussed, cross-grained and curmudgeonly. It is
an echo of their Nonconformist past. The icon of British liberty is the citizen who causes
a motorway to be re-routed because he will not give up his one-acre vegetable patch. This,
not someone who jumps off a bridge to save a drowning child, is the British definition of a
hero. The other kind of hero in Britain is someone who jumps off a bridge to save a drown-
ing dog.
The well-regulated nature of American life goes hand in hand with its moralistic outlook.
Compared with the Irish, Americans are by and large a judgemental people. There is a good
deal of sermonising and sententiousness. A certain self-righteousness is never far from the
American soul. So-called interventions are not unknown, in which the whole of one's ex-
tended family, along with several busloads of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and ran-
dom strangers along for the ride, break down your front door and spill into your living room
to warn you of the perils of smoking the occasional after-dinner cigar.
This would never happen in Britain. Instead, the British would allow you to die in the
gutter, pustular and emaciated, for fear of interfering with your privacy. They would let
you perish friendless and unaided for roughly the same reasons they would not dream of
speaking to you in a railway compartment. It is not that they are hard-hearted, just that they
believe in minding their own business. Their ethic of live-and-let-live can escalate to lethal
extremes. They go to extraordinary efforts to pretend that other people are not there, like
men and women under hypnosis whose fingernails are being pulled out by a pair of pliers
but who do not react because they have been told that they are alone.
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