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Books: By Stefan Beck Stefan Beck on All Oiks Now: The Unnoticed Surrender of Middle England by Digby Anderson
Digby Anderson.
All Oiks Now: The Unnoticed Surrender of Middle England. Social Affairs Unit. 92 pages. $22.50. All
Oiks Now: The
Unnoticed Surrender of Middle England,
by Digby Anderson of the Social Affairs Unit, a London think tank,
is little bigger than a pamphlet — 92 pages, including a number of
full-page cartoons. It is a pamphlet, too, in its function and
style. The thing begs to be handed out on street corners. It is no
accident that a British critic tarred Anderson as a
“Jeremiah.” All Oiks is a tirade, good- natured but also deadly
serious, against unwitting facilitators of social and cultural
decline.
Discussing the everyday behavior of Englishmen
in pubs, supermarkets, shopping malls, health clubs, and so on,
Anderson marks and warns against a trend away from what he views as
peculiarly English virtues and toward brutishness. He fears that
England is capitulating to the “oiks.” Yet
Digby’s Grand Remonstrance is not just for the Brits. All
that he describes of manners and attitudes in his country is
applicable to our own. For Americans the book may be a warning shot:
What is happening Over There could happen here, too.
What is an oik? Anderson provides a glossary,
presumably for his stateside audience. An oik is “a cad, an
ignorant, inferior person (colloquial), a chap, bloke (slightly
derogatory)” (Chambers Twentieth
Century Dictionary). Only slightly
derogatory? The word may come from “hoik, to spit” (Dictionary of Slang); it
may refer to “one who pronounces ‘i’ as
‘oi’” (Online
Dictionary of Playground Slang). It is
certainly nothing good: Oink springs to mind.
Anderson clearly wishes to be thought a little
batty, if only because it makes his writing more amusing. His
pronouncements seem to be made ex cathedra from the old
curmudgeon’s rocking chair — we can picture him
brandishing a cane at this horrible spectacle, oik
“culture.” British reviewers skeptical of
Anderson’s thesis have attacked his disapproving tone and
stylistic quirks. They have also avoided engagement with the
argument they underscore. That critical response, though
understandable, is every bit as distressing as the argument itself.
The
book opens with a paean to (now
white-handkerchief-waving) Middle England: “It was a minority
but a sizeable one and it could be relied on to behave and vote
consistently in favour of independence, self-reliance, traditional
values especially with regard to the family, and against high
taxes, trade unions, foreigners and perverts.” Further,
Middle Englanders “exerted strong discipline over their
children. They valued orderliness, punctuality, decency, modesty,
reticence, amateurishness, deferment of gratification, moderate
religion, saving, small shops and speaking properly.”
Anderson makes no attempt to soft-pedal the
fact that Middle England was, in a word, “square”
— and he agrees that it was the expected thing for any
intellectual, radical, or yob to set himself in opposition to it.
Yet he is convinced that “some of those who used to ridicule
Middle England, secretly rather liked it, or, at least, liked its
continued obstinate existence. They . . . were emboldened to
call for its annihilation safe in the knowledge that it would
always be there. Well, it’s now gone.” The cloistering
gates of traditional culture have opened, leaving the oik free to
roam and graze as he pleases. Middle Englanders “have now
gone in the sense that they are no longer socially
significant.” They still exist, in diminished numbers, but
they lack the confidence to assert their culture. Paralyzed by a
malignant cowardice, they now either keep out of the public eye or
ape the ways of the oik.
This surrender, says Anderson, can be seen in
any number of the public spaces that once were the domain of Middle
England. A tragic example is the church: “The c of e was the Established Church
and the church of the established values. . . . There, until the 1970s you could hear the
voice of moderate middle-class values in Received Pronunciation
perhaps a retired major and a local solicitor as sidesmen and the gp’s wife reading the lesson.” Now, he says, the
Anglican church is just another liberal mouthpiece; the ad-libbed
intercessions are “careless, second-rate tosh”; and
sentimentality — anathema to old Middle England — is
the “central characteristic of the entire service.”
Nobody protests this. For that matter, nobody even turns off his
cell phone.
The pub is another of Anderson’s
indicators. He recalls when establishments like The Red Lion or The
Coach and Horses were havens for middle-class sociability
(“largely male and to an extent adult”). That time is
gone, for “when opposing cultural forces introduce musack,
vulgarity, lefty opinions, bad language and aftershave, the
[middle-class regulars] feel still weaker and retreat again. The
retreat ends at home, in front of the television, with a gin and
tonic whose measures are monitored by the wife.” Thus is
(male) Middle England exiled from what once was its primary social
and leisure channel. Pubs are now infested with noisome, bibulous
youth.
At the supermarket, where Middle England valued
shopping lists, meal planning, and price comparison, the oik is
lazy and impulsive: “stewing beef cooked in wine may take two
minutes to make ready the ingredients but it will need to be cooked
anything from four hours to two days before it is needed. What easy
foods allow, then, is not so much time as freedom from the need to
think and plan about food.” In the London Spectator, James Delingpole took
issue with Anderson’s beef stew claim. “It takes at
least two minutes,” he wrote, “just to trim off the fat
and the gristly bits. . . . Even on cocaine or amphetamine
sulphate, neither of which I imagine Anderson takes, I doubt you
could prepare a beef in wine stew in much less than half an
hour.”
This is the sort of hair-splitting protestation
that grates on the sympathetic reader of All Oiks Now. We know the book
is a very skillful piece of anti-oik propaganda, and as such we
should expect it to get carried away, to hector us a bit. It is not
satire, quite, but it looks at the state of things with
satire’s gaze — a gaze that cannot help magnifying as
it scrutinizes.
Granted, many of Anderson’s examples of
cultural decline do seem trivial and have been derided accordingly.
Delingpole’s review was titled “The death of the
shopping list,” which sums up his dismissal of
Anderson’s complaints. A leader in the London Observer (May 9, 2004) mocked:
“Give those monstrously ill-behaved children a pat on the
head and dance along to the new polychromatic mobile phone rings.
Middle England is dead. Rejoice.” The implication is that the
unpleasant trivia of modern life do not add up to a trend. (If they
do, it isn’t a negative one, only a new and different and
perhaps even exciting one.) Still, failure to address the little
symptoms that Anderson bemoans portends that Britain may wake up
one morning to an irreversible cultural illness. American baby
boomers sneered at their parents’ “irrational”
fear of rock music and scandalous new fashions. Now, years later,
many of them are scratching their heads and wondering at the blight
that is today’s popular culture. The cultural shift
didn’t happen overnight, but they are reacting as though it
had.
Surely
a book like All
Oiks, rewritten for an American
audience, would receive roughly the same sneering notice, but in
the long run it would be every bit as welcome. What might we title
it? We lack a word as comprehensively, inclusively insulting as
“oik.” Our cultural put-downs tend to refer narrowly to
things like dress and musical taste rather than to patterns of
behavior. Consider the odious (and, thankfully, almost defunct)
term “wigger.” Its etymology needs no explanation. It
is cocked at a white person who pretends to
“blackness,” who listens to hip-hop music and wears its
associated fashions; but it does not necessarily imply that such a
person acts in the brutish manner celebrated by much of that music.
To be called a “wigger” is to be called a poseur. It is
a criticism of style, not an indictment of behavior. By the same
token, to be called a “redneck” is to stand accused of
wearing flannel shirts and enjoying NASCAR — the term does
not call one’s morals into question.
This is not insignificant. It reveals that
Americans are primed for a message like Anderson’s because
they are accustomed to focusing on details, outward signs. London Times critic
Alexandra Frean accuses Anderson of “focusing on superficial
displays of behaviour, manners, and dress.” These are
precisely the sorts of things on which Americans like to focus.
Anderson decries the phenomenon, every bit as
visible in our country as in his, of the older generation trying to
act like the younger. “The fads of the young,” he
writes, “are often tiresome and ugly. But far worse than any
sartorial absurdities young people themselves may exhibit are those
which occur when middle-aged and elderly people act as if they were
young. . . . There is something pathetic about oldies using the
argot of the young . . . pretending to know about and like the
latest awful tune that is popular with the young.”
To a critic like Alexandra Frean,
Anderson’s complaint about “mutton dressed as
lamb” will seem like the whining of a dogmatic aesthete. Yet
everyone senses, however vaguely, the truth of the matter: The
refusal to dress, as Frean puts it, in “dull sweaters and
sensible shoes” is the outward sign of a refusal to accept
one’s age and, in some cases, one’s responsibilities.
If that sign becomes acceptable, how long before frivolity and
immaturity are acceptable as well? Could it be that Anderson is
not, as the Observer called him, one of the “rheumy-eyed peddlers of
nostalgia,” but rather an uncommonly clear-eyed interpreter
of subtle signs?
The contention that Anderson lingers too long
on trivial problems brings to mind the “broken windows”
theory, transformed into policy by Rudy Giuliani: Crack down on
minor crimes like vandalism and the graver ones will taper off as
well. That theory proved true in New York, and as a result the city
is cleaner and safer than many other urban centers. What Brits and
Americans need now is a similar zero-tolerance approach to the
worst elements of the current culture. Oiks are everywhere, whether
one looks to Brighton on a bank holiday or to Coney Island on the
Fourth of July. We Americans may have our own names for them, but
ours are of the same species — of the same genus, at least
— as the British ones. In Anderson’s somewhat
over-the-top view, the cultural cost of letting them multiply is
akin to the cost of ignoring a plague of locusts. Anderson’s
real flaw is his pessimism — and it is not entirely a flaw,
as it leavens his prose with a grouchy humor: He believes that
Middle England will never return. He may be correct to conclude
that it will never return in its former incarnation, but there is
no reason to doubt that a backlash against “oikishness”
is possible and perhaps imminent. With the proper zeal and
initiative, the trend toward loutish behavior in America could be
slowed or reversed too.
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