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...