Logging on from the Starbucks opposite the British Library again...taking time out from an orgy of newspaper reading (and from the library itself, where I am trying to figure out a line on illustrations of Milton during the eighteenth century, not going anywere at the moment sadly)...whenever I'm in Britain I find myself immersed in the dailies, this time the Guardian and the Independent...the press here creates a whole world of its own....mainly it's a soap-opera created by beat-up after beat-up (at the moment the Dr Kelly versus Alistair Campbell versus BBC embroglio)...but there's also a sense in which the culture is being created in continual commentary on itself, a process doesnt exist quite in this way anywhere else...much of the commentary is forced and silly (the demands of continual journalist production are unmeetable)...but none the less it adds up to something: a thereness (a phantasmal thereness) which doesnt exist in Australia or the States....there are good material reasons for this of course...the press here is national and manically competitive, a majority of the population adheres to more or less traditional British identities, and and the middle-class at least need constant reinforcement of their class difference....
The Guardian has gone off though...like all the papers it carves out its own audience, partly a real one partly one that it imagines for itself and conjures up rhetorically....but it's become complacent...it addresses its readers as a bunch of liberal consumers...intelligent, hip, socially concerned, affluent...in a word, self-satisfied...and the real heart of modern culture is lost...its self-loathing, its longing for something else...which you wouldnt expect to catch sight in a newspaper, except this one takes itself so fucking seriously....
Another thing: why isnt the criticism of the politicans who led us into the Iraq war going anywhere in Australia?...it as if the political culture there has a double-layer of cynicism...nobody cares because everyone knows the Howard government is a US lapdog (cynicism layer one), and nobody cares because nobody believes what the Bush administration say anyway, their real motives aren't expressible in the public sphere (cynicism layer two)...so shameful (and I guess in some places, ashamed) silence...

Am sitting in the Starbucks across the road from the British Library connected to the web wirelessly and feeling very amazed, cool and complacent....my love affair with London isn't over....only real time in the States can make you really appreciate Britian...here people assume that they belong to single society, in the US the terms under which people will participate socially seem always under negotiation: that's the basic difference....it's true that capitalism there is more efficient and has, as they say, colonised more of the life-world so that money rules everyday life to a greater degree than it does here, and it's true that, for instance, over there blacks have their own culture and dont connect to whites in ways which are just not the case here so that whenever a white man (or even more woman) meets a young black man walking towards him on a lonely street late at night there's trepidation..but all that's secondary: it's the relations between individuals and community which is key to differences between the places...of course in the end there are benefits to the US's individualism too, especially for loners....but here in London (as against NYC) it's nice to bathe in at any rate the perpetual promise of a collectivity we all share...even if most people on the streets are transients...tourists, students whatever... and what about Australia????...why have I always been so indifferent to it???