British Guardian parochialism

From some time a go but still as entertaining. James Lileks doing a take-down of ignorant parachute journalism from the Grauniad. From Notes from the the Olive Garden. A sample. The offsets are Lileks' color commentary to the Guardian Journalist prose.

I thought this would be quick - another Guardian column taking some snide swipes at the rude Colonials. But it’s more than that. It’s a Big Sweeping On-Location piece, an attempt to parse the yawp of deep dark America and find the source of Washington’s new chilliness towards its European allies. It subscribes to the laziest sort of parachute journalism: find a Symbol of America, talk to a guy eating supper, and discern the Pulse of the Culture. It’s like the greenhorn Yank reporter who visits an English pub, interviews one toothless old punter bent over his Newcastle Ale, and extrapolates the desires of a nation. (“England may be physically toothless, but when it comes to Irish Nationalism, it still has molars, incisors and the spine to back them up. ‘Kill ‘em all,’ said Liam McSodden, an unemployed shipbuilder who was sacked while still in the womb, but regards himself as part of his city’s proud shipbuilding tradition. ‘We all ‘ate the Irish,’ he added, a nod perhaps to Swift’s modest proposal. His sentiments are echoed by many whose quotes I’ll now take from this stack of papers I got at the tobacconists.”)

Here’s the full horror.
Here’s the Screedly annotated version:

The Olive Garden Italian restaurant looks a little more promising than the dozens of other eating places along the strip mall just off Interstate 20 in Birmingham, Alabama. The discreet hint of Tuscan decor and the passable wine list disguise the fact that there are 476 other Olive Gardens across North America, all with precisely the same menu.

That’s right. It’s called “standardization,” and it makes it logistically possible to run chains that span three thousand miles and simultaneously depend on local suppliers and national ad campaigns. It has its emotional cost, as the European keenly notes. Diners in Maine often put down their Olive Garden menus, stare into the middle distance, haunted by the suspicion that the exact same alignment of foodstuffs is also offered in San Diego. They shake it off and get back to ordering, but the feeling that their veal’s seasoning has been predetermined in a far-off corporate office gives the meal a false and hollow taste.

On the other hand, screw it; you get as many breadsticks as you want. The hot soft kind, too. I mean, if you ask for ten, you get ten. What a country.

This means, presumably, that everyone ordering scaloppine marsala anywhere in this vast continent will receive the same perfectly decent cut of veal served in a subtle mixture of malt vinegar and sump oil. The diner on the next table turns out to be friendlier -

Than who? The host who cold-cocked you when you walked in and demanded a fookin’ Newcastle?

and indeed more cosmopolitan, than the food.

So the veal is decent, but unfriendly. Downright European, then.

His name is Steve Mitchell and he's in the satellite TV business. "You're from England?" he says. "My mother's father came from over there. Well, Denmark, actually. My grandmother's from the Finland side. And my half-sister lives in France." "Have you been over to see her?" I ask. "Hell, no," he replies. "I don't like flying." "What do you think of Europeans?" "Well," he says, "they were good to us after September 11." He pauses. "You know, it's a long way away."

The incoherence of this exchange makes me wonder who’s been hitting the passable wine. If it’s meant to castigate poor Steve for geographical errancy, well, it’s clear what he meant by “there”: Europe. As for Steve’s remark “They were good to us after September 11,” that’s a kind way of saying “and they’ve been miserable shits since Oct. 27.”

And from the Olive Garden it does seem very distant. Indeed, the whole messy and diverse concept of Europe seems very distant.

Around Birmingham, there is nothing but miles and miles of Alabama.

Apparently around Birmingham England, there is nothing but miles and miles of Belgium, Thailand and the Antarctic Ice Shelf.

Beyond that, there is only Georgia, Tennessee or Mississippi, where the speed limit, the price of petrol or the sales tax might vary by a percentage point or two but in essence everything would be entirely familiar to an Alabamian, even down to the (huge) size of the portions in the local Olive Garden.

An Alabamian walks into a Nashville Olive Garden, shaking. The waiter hastens over, alarmed at this white-faced fellow. What’s the matter, friend? Ah’ve been to your gas station, the man stammers. The gas is ten cents higher - ten cents! And there’s no sales tax on bakery goods! ‘S like a whole different world - y’all bring me the lasagna so’s ah can git mah bearings.

"Where do most people round here come from?" I ask Steve. "Round here, I guess." And he's right. Mass European immigration to the US ceased almost two generations ago. In Birmingham, there is as little to remind the white population of its European roots as the black population has to remind it of Africa: European Hair and Nails, the Parisian department store and La Paree Steaks and Seafood, where each table has a miniature stars and stripes nestling between the ketchup and the mustard. That's about it.

Imagine that: immigrants have adopted the civic culture of their new home, and don’t cling to the very tribal distinctions Grandpa left behind in disgust. Traitors.

Of course, Birmingham has an elite who travel all over Europe. But only one-sixth of all Americans possess a passport,

That’s because our nation is HUGE, pal; of course Belgians all have passports;their country is the size of an average American rumpus room. They've burned out every available domestic vacation option by the time the kids are six - whereas this joint is so big our senior citizens retire, buy moving houses, and devote themselves to visiting each of the fifty states. Plus, we don’t need passports to go to Mexico, which one could spend another lifetime exploring. Europe’s wonderful, but sometimes when you think “vacation” you’re not in the mood for rain and indifference, no matter how much aristocratically-commissioned beauty you have.

Read the whole thing.