Hugo Young: This obsession with history is an affliction for Britain
Fake spats over the Queen Mother and the Falklands mock our future. When Ronald Reagan dies, will Dan Rather wear a black tie?
When Ronald Reagan dies, will Dan Rather wear a black tie? Unlikely. Will American television newsmen be cursed from one end of the print media to the other for their sartorial disrespect? Out of the question. When Reagan dies, Americans will behave with respectful maturity. There will be a big funeral, and many television obituaries. But there will be no collective nervous breakdown over the finer details of the obsequies. That is because Americans have much to teach the British about a healthy attitude to the past.
Reagan, the defiant British may reply, is not royal. He was only a temporary piece of history. He came and went, and held no constitutional role after his presidency. He disappeared, lost to the public mind as thoroughly as Alzheimer's claimed his own mind from himself. Yet Reagan was a head of state. He did enormous things, helping to change world history. He merits far more reflective consideration by the American body politic than the Queen Mother does by the British. But there will be no national frenzy if he's judged by some people not to be getting enough.
Reagan's death will take its place in the scheme of things. Americans have a reverence for their past, but not an obsession with its power to guide the present. They know their history, cultivate their heroes. Washington has a selection of monuments commemorating the greatest of them. They take care of their historic sites, especially those that mark the civil war. Sometimes they seem to want a longer history, and come to Europe looking keenly for it: marvelling at medieval cathedrals, searching for roots.
But for most Americans, the past gets in the way of the future. They look backwards as much in apprehension as celebration. They think hard about the lessons of disaster, such as slavery and Vietnam. The old preoccupation of the American psyche with isolation from the entanglements of the world lives on. But history does not infuse everything they do. Respect for history is not a precondition of contemporary action. The past does not suck them in, preoccupy them, define their sense of self. Hardly any American ever says how much better life was 30, let alone 100, years ago. It's a sentiment I've never heard expressed there. There is rather little nostalgia in America.
The British are still different. Here the national psyche is inextricably defined by the past, the period of national greatness that has gone. For some people, clinging to the past is a way of remembering that life undoubtedly was better however many decades ago. The past and its icons seem to supply the strategies by which we stoically remind ourselves that things, alas, can never be the same again.
The Queen Mother's death expressed that. But what did so even more were the arguments about how it should be talked about. These revealed some deep insecurities. The worry was not just about the tone of the commentary but, underlying it, the very future of the monarchy. Was sufficient respect being deployed? Was the timelessness - the unchangeability - of Britain being adequately recognised? Were we still in touch with that great country where the army was once powerful, the people knew their place, and respect for authority was reliable and might, if only that queenly world could be rediscovered, still be so.
The British dream, whereby the past is required to infuse the present, has not, even in modern times, always been a fantasy. There's something fitting in the coincidence that the Queen Mother died, unleashing all these passions, in the week when memories of the Falklands war are doing the same. The war is relished, if at all, not so much for its contentious substance but the fact that it happened. It proved that the days of imperial duty were not entirely gone. We did it. The 20th anniversary is marked by poignant, sometimes angry, analysts getting to grips with the awful fact that Britain could never do that kind of thing again.
Whether these longings, or this wallowing in the past, reflect the majority mood of Britain is debatable. Each side in the argument claims the nation for itself, but especially those who make the fullest-throated case for honouring the past. My own impression of most people, when they think about the Queen Mother, is that they do not engage with much of this argument. They don't reflect the Guardian letters column, an atypical fount of bile. They soberly recall a pretty admirable old lady, who lived to 101 and did service to the nation, but then they move on. They mark her departure politely, while remembering that she was hardly more of a monarch than Ronald Reagan.
The political class, in which the media should always be included, are another matter. The charge and counter-charge that this very normal death has prompted are more fatuous than in any political argument I can ever recall. The disproportion between the facts and the response seem to reveal editors and columnists who have lost the last shreds of a sense of scale. Their righteous rage at the BBC could not have been greater if the person of the Queen herself had been violated by Greg Dyke. Betrayal has been the word of the week. The betrayal of the people by the BBC is matched only by the betrayal of Falklands veterans by the MoD, when it calmly says it is accustomed to celebrating 25th but not 20th anniversaries of battles large and small.
Modernity does creep in here. The foaming rage of the Daily Mail is part of a topical agenda, to do with trying to dismantle the BBC. We learn that in fact the Royal Family were not at all furious with the way the BBC performed. Prince Charles himself said so. One would suppose not, given the vast output the corporation has set aside on all channels.
Mendacious venom, however, is not troubled by tedious truth, when commercial rivalries are being conducted behind a sanctimonious debate about what is and is not proper. It's hard to imagine the Times, under any other ownership, actually leading Tuesday's paper with a headline about Peter Sissons' tie, reinforced with pious little pictures showing what a good little black-tied boy the Sky presenter had been compared with the burgundy hooligans on BBC1. There are many subliminal routes towards establishing the fake parity of respect that Sky would dearly love to claim.
But essentially the passion is not modern. It is the old British disease raised to new levels of hysteria: of fear for the passing of the past; of sentiment that's always in danger of overspilling into every corner of British life. This is a country that still finds in the past a place of safety. While nobody would want to forget history and still less, of course, undo it, what is better worth remembering is that history can be a curse. In Britain more than most countries, it has been the enemy of the future. Now that our oldest embodiment of history has been gathered, perhaps her finest epitaph would be that she marked the beginning of the end of that affliction.
Reagan, the defiant British may reply, is not royal. He was only a temporary piece of history. He came and went, and held no constitutional role after his presidency. He disappeared, lost to the public mind as thoroughly as Alzheimer's claimed his own mind from himself. Yet Reagan was a head of state. He did enormous things, helping to change world history. He merits far more reflective consideration by the American body politic than the Queen Mother does by the British. But there will be no national frenzy if he's judged by some people not to be getting enough.
Reagan's death will take its place in the scheme of things. Americans have a reverence for their past, but not an obsession with its power to guide the present. They know their history, cultivate their heroes. Washington has a selection of monuments commemorating the greatest of them. They take care of their historic sites, especially those that mark the civil war. Sometimes they seem to want a longer history, and come to Europe looking keenly for it: marvelling at medieval cathedrals, searching for roots.
But for most Americans, the past gets in the way of the future. They look backwards as much in apprehension as celebration. They think hard about the lessons of disaster, such as slavery and Vietnam. The old preoccupation of the American psyche with isolation from the entanglements of the world lives on. But history does not infuse everything they do. Respect for history is not a precondition of contemporary action. The past does not suck them in, preoccupy them, define their sense of self. Hardly any American ever says how much better life was 30, let alone 100, years ago. It's a sentiment I've never heard expressed there. There is rather little nostalgia in America.
The British are still different. Here the national psyche is inextricably defined by the past, the period of national greatness that has gone. For some people, clinging to the past is a way of remembering that life undoubtedly was better however many decades ago. The past and its icons seem to supply the strategies by which we stoically remind ourselves that things, alas, can never be the same again.
The Queen Mother's death expressed that. But what did so even more were the arguments about how it should be talked about. These revealed some deep insecurities. The worry was not just about the tone of the commentary but, underlying it, the very future of the monarchy. Was sufficient respect being deployed? Was the timelessness - the unchangeability - of Britain being adequately recognised? Were we still in touch with that great country where the army was once powerful, the people knew their place, and respect for authority was reliable and might, if only that queenly world could be rediscovered, still be so.
The British dream, whereby the past is required to infuse the present, has not, even in modern times, always been a fantasy. There's something fitting in the coincidence that the Queen Mother died, unleashing all these passions, in the week when memories of the Falklands war are doing the same. The war is relished, if at all, not so much for its contentious substance but the fact that it happened. It proved that the days of imperial duty were not entirely gone. We did it. The 20th anniversary is marked by poignant, sometimes angry, analysts getting to grips with the awful fact that Britain could never do that kind of thing again.
Whether these longings, or this wallowing in the past, reflect the majority mood of Britain is debatable. Each side in the argument claims the nation for itself, but especially those who make the fullest-throated case for honouring the past. My own impression of most people, when they think about the Queen Mother, is that they do not engage with much of this argument. They don't reflect the Guardian letters column, an atypical fount of bile. They soberly recall a pretty admirable old lady, who lived to 101 and did service to the nation, but then they move on. They mark her departure politely, while remembering that she was hardly more of a monarch than Ronald Reagan.
The political class, in which the media should always be included, are another matter. The charge and counter-charge that this very normal death has prompted are more fatuous than in any political argument I can ever recall. The disproportion between the facts and the response seem to reveal editors and columnists who have lost the last shreds of a sense of scale. Their righteous rage at the BBC could not have been greater if the person of the Queen herself had been violated by Greg Dyke. Betrayal has been the word of the week. The betrayal of the people by the BBC is matched only by the betrayal of Falklands veterans by the MoD, when it calmly says it is accustomed to celebrating 25th but not 20th anniversaries of battles large and small.
Modernity does creep in here. The foaming rage of the Daily Mail is part of a topical agenda, to do with trying to dismantle the BBC. We learn that in fact the Royal Family were not at all furious with the way the BBC performed. Prince Charles himself said so. One would suppose not, given the vast output the corporation has set aside on all channels.
Mendacious venom, however, is not troubled by tedious truth, when commercial rivalries are being conducted behind a sanctimonious debate about what is and is not proper. It's hard to imagine the Times, under any other ownership, actually leading Tuesday's paper with a headline about Peter Sissons' tie, reinforced with pious little pictures showing what a good little black-tied boy the Sky presenter had been compared with the burgundy hooligans on BBC1. There are many subliminal routes towards establishing the fake parity of respect that Sky would dearly love to claim.
But essentially the passion is not modern. It is the old British disease raised to new levels of hysteria: of fear for the passing of the past; of sentiment that's always in danger of overspilling into every corner of British life. This is a country that still finds in the past a place of safety. While nobody would want to forget history and still less, of course, undo it, what is better worth remembering is that history can be a curse. In Britain more than most countries, it has been the enemy of the future. Now that our oldest embodiment of history has been gathered, perhaps her finest epitaph would be that she marked the beginning of the end of that affliction.
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