Travel Reference
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The aristocrat, rather similarly, justifies his august status by devoting himself to the well-
being of his tenants and lackeys. He makes a point of being pleasant to his servants, where-
as vulgar upstarts of stockbrokers make a point of being rude to them in order to demon-
strate their superiority. Only low-bred types are snobs. The word began as a term for a shoe-
maker, and was then used to refer to the socially inferior. It meant not upper-class people
who despise lower-class ones, but lower-class ones with a grudge against upper-class ones.
Because he can do what he pleases, the aristocrat is a kind of anarchist, and thus has more
affinity with the poacher than with the gamekeeper. He understands that genuine power
does not need to make a display of itself, any more than real men are constantly fretting
about their sperm count. True authority is so firmly entrenched that it can take itself for
granted, like so many of the things the British regard as precious.
The United States is neither a particularly comic society nor an especially tragic one. It is
too affirmative to be tragic, and too much in love with heroism to be comic. When it comes
to affirmation, the can-do spirit is one of the great divides between the United States and
Europe. At my son's American school, there was a poster on the wall that read “Success
Comes in Cans.” In some quarters of the States, the word “can't” seems as offensive as the
word “Communist.” Success in the States also comes in CANIs, which for one American
self-help writer means Constant, Never-Ending Improvement. Since there are always more
goals to strive for, what he is in fact promoting is a life of perpetual dissatisfaction.
Failure is not an option, as the typically American word “challenge” suggests. Being
buried up to your neck in excrement while famished crows peck at your eyeballs is not a
problem but a challenge. “Challenge” suggests that problems exist to test your mettle, and
are thus to be regarded as positive rather than negative. Problems are not a problem. It is
not a problem if chemical warfare breaks out in Mississippi, but a God-sent opportunity for
you to “come out of it stronger.” The current British equivalent of these pious clichés is
“learning lessons,” which is a coded way of admitting that you have committed some atro-
cious blunder. If the police have shot dead a whole class of kindergarten children under the
impression that they were a gang of armed drug dealers, there are “lessons to be learnt.”
The passive voice is compulsory. That you may have something to learn is the closest you
can decently come to apologising in an age when nobody apologises much any more.
Any society which calls its prisons “correctional facilities” is excessively optimistic.
Prison hardly ever corrects anyone. Wherever possible in the States, you are expected to
affirm. When asked how your holiday was, it is not really done to reply, “Dreadful.” My
daughter once attended an American pre-school in which the teachers were trained never to
speak negatively to the children. When asked how they responded to bad behaviour, they
replied piously, “We don't react.” A small boy who was punched in the face by a fellow
pupil received the compliment, “Thank you, James, for not reacting.” The way to handle
trouble, in other words, was to pretend that it wasn't happening. My daughter, being of a
mischievous turn of mind, instantly exploited this permissive spirit by letting off all the fire
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