Home at Last

The Manners of Celebrity demands, for males at least, that the person be precisely three days unshaven, the hair artfully uncombed but not quite pasty on one side (as having just arisen from disordered sleep). The shirt must be open at the collar, the suit jacket must simply be seen to be expensive, and a ragged pair of jeans must be worn beneath.

But the above is mere celebrity—painful as it must be to live that life. The real aristocracy today lives virtually at Downton Abbey. For us, of course, the obligatory study is The Manners of Downton Abbey, available for $19.99 on DVD; it only takes an hour to master the arts; it might take longer to read Downton Abbey Rules for Household Staff ($14.99) and to teach its contents to our virtual servitors.

PBS, this time of year, well ahead of Christmas, sends us shopPBS.org, its magazine, where our virtual aristocracy may be physically spruced up by buying all kinds of products. All Seasons of DA now available may be purchased alongside Christmas at Downton Abbey ($16.99), a raft of books to start our own DA Library (A Year in the Life of Downtown Abbey ($29.99), Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (ditto), The Chronicles of Downton Abbey ($19.99), and The World of Downton Abbey (ditto)).

The newest addition to our growing collection is Downton Abbey Teas, 30 bags for $12.99. The categories are “Bates’ Brambleberry Tea,” “Mrs. Patmore’s Pudding Tea,” “Christmas Tea,” “Lady Cora’s Evening Tea,” “Grantham Breakfast Blend Tea,” and “English Rose Tea.” For a mere $77.94 (shipping may be free), we can have all six flavors.  The savvy buyer, however, may obtain a free sampler by buying Season Five first. Oh. These teas are a “PBS Exclusive”;  don’t waste time trying to buy these tea products at Kroger.

I’m personally much attracted by the Miniature Downton Abbey Snow Globe ($12.95), complete with a Downton Abbey Quote book titled Wise Words. And if you’re feeling contrarian, I’ll accept, with equal pleasure, the Miniature Downton Abbey Light-up Castle with sound track and Quote Book.

But, surprise, we aren’t even close to being done yet! There are in addition 26 other purchasable reminders that Downton Abbey is physically real. Of these the most expensive (unless that’s a typo) is Downton Abbey Fragrance ($244.99), the least expensive is a Round Jute/Polypropylene Storage Basket ($10.99). There is jewelry, lace, gloves, towels, and even a Downton Life Cotton Oven Kit (also $10.99); I could use one in making our croutons around here. The Downton Life Cotton Apron carries the following slogan: “My second HOME is Downton Abbey.” Well, they have our number at PBS. Obviously.

Finally, there is a kind of show stopper. It is a DVD, priced at $19.99. It is displayed right next to another DVD titled Secrets of the Manor House; the two are related. The show stopper is titled Secrets of Highclere Castle. What? Highclere Castle? What is that? Well, it turns out to be the actual setting of Downton Abbey, the actual physical place. It turns out to be a real location with a real lord and lady (Lord and Lady Carnarvon) who, mostly, expend their energies keeping it intact (link). And what a great achievement it was, for them, to get BBC to turn it into Downton Abbey. We’ll have to visit there, visit our second home, as soon as it becomes safe enough to fly again in the unreal world where we’re obliged to live in actuality.

Déjà Vu

CNN presented a show yesterday titled GPS Road Map for Saving Health Care. The GPS there stands for “Global Public Square.” It was a well-done comparison of heath care programs around the globe, including the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and Switzerland. But I kept having a powerful sense of déjà vu—if not the genuine kind. I really remembered seeing something quite like this. As one segment ended I went to tell Brigitte what the next country on the list would be. Sure enough. I had been right. And after the show ended I said to her: “I’ve seen something very much like this, very much. The same absolute content, same sequence—even some of the people interviewed are the same.”

It turns out I was right; I did the digging this morning. Back on April 15, 2008 PBS’ Frontline presented a program called Sick Around the World. That program had segments on health care as delivered in the United States, UK, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland.  President Obama signed our health care bill on March 23, 2010, thus two years later. CNN’s program, presented by Fareed Zakaria, was quite excellent, Zakaria’s summation correct and eloquent. Such shows, however, have zero influence on actual political behavior. The reason for that is another interesting subject.

Temper, Temper

Temper, temper inveterate

Defender of obscure mysteries.

Okay. Buddhism is not a subject

Suitable for TV coverage—

Least of all if commentators

Are professors of religion

And a shrink. It’s only PBS.

Cartoons appeal to every inner

Child. The music is sitar-like

Soothing. The hard won truth the Buddha

Reached seated beneath that Banyan tree

Amounts to saying that we’re all right

Just like we are if only we embrace

Our Gaia Mom and we are nice

To one another while we ignore

All of that kinda bad stuff that

Just happens to come down.

The Buddha, by David Grubin, shown on PBS December 2010. Available on DVD in a library near you.

St. Peter, Paul, and Mary

In other words the Public Broadcasting System is having its Christmas-season fund-raiser. This means that the Public TV programming changes, becomes more popular. In turn I learn what popular means. It means André Rieu, Celtic Dancing, Jazz, lectures on Diet-Health-and-Self-esteem, lectures on Wealth-Management-Wills-and-Heirs, Pop, Rock & Soul, and … Peter, Paul, and Mary. Alas, Mary Travers is now only alive on film; she passed in 2009. At least two decades and probably longer, fundraising time brings these people whom—was it the teens of our own children? Probably—we somehow missed. We checked out of “folk” when Pete Seeger waned and haven’t kept up with later Woody Guthrie wanna-bes. But we loved Pete. The PBS slogan is Be more. But when they are soliciting for funds—which is what “public” means in the United States, richest-country-in-the-world-etc., my temporary slogan is, Be less. Be less and wait until As Time Goes By resurfaces again; no matter how often we see those episodes, the pleasure remains entirely undiluted.  

Another Piece Breaks Loose

My subject is a powerful, persistent tendency in American culture, but the occasion is a particular event announced today, the “privatization” of Nightly Business Review by its owner, the public TV station in Miami, WPBT-TV. Another particle of a public something has broken off in a relentless process of erosion. The Public Broadcasting Service is the successor of National Educational Television; NET came into being in 1954, thus three years after my family’s arrival in the United States from Europe. It’s not really surprising that people with our background would have found in NET and in PBS later a welcome sign of something that we understood and valued. We found—and let me restrict that “we” to my mother, father, and their children—the relentless commercialism of America something rather alien by contrast. We came from a world where transportation, not least the railroads, communications—including telephone, postal services, radio, and television—were publicly operated and, further, a realm where the public sector dominated, with the widest possible public approval, virtually all aspects of social life. Let me put it like this to you: the notion that “starting your own business” could possibly be a desirable goal in life would never have occurred to anybody in our extended family—but I hasten to add that we are, really, but a random sample of the European population.

This is an example at the micro, the personal level of a genuine culture clash. You never actually loose this sort of feeling once you have grown up with it and experienced its operations in real life. You cannot simply choose another cultural form as you can opt for another brand of something. Life in a commercial culture, with its idealization of the half-truth of individualism, its instinctive revulsion from the “public” retains an irritating quality for someone who has internalized another system of values.

To be sure, the European cultural feeling—and its associated value system—is a minority phenomenon in the United States as well. If it were not, PBS would never have been founded. We ourselves—and in this “we” I now include my wife and children too—have found this system of values nobly represented in many public institutions, not least free education up to and including the university level, in the GI-bill and, generally, in the U.S. military culture, in the intentions behind the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in the FDA, in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, in the U.S. Coast Guard, in the U.S. Postal Service, in Unemployment Insurance, in Social Security, and in much else.

Some of these institutions predate the Great Depression, others were greatly influenced by it. The constituency behind these programs and initiatives is substantial and, by its existence, works as a brake on the dominant tendency of this culture, which is to fly apart into a thousand pieces. What are these pieces? I think of them as quasi-communities, narrow, self-centered, blinkered interests. They are so blind and stupid that they are able to relate to one another only by means of a market and the brutal and repeating battles of so-called democratic politics. They share no value except greed for money and for power.

In my time I’ve seen the gradual weakening, the piece-by-piece erosion, of virtually every institution that we value. PBS has become the Begging Channel with still limited but more and more explicit advertising. Free university education went the way of the Dodo long ago. The GI-bill has lost its outlines. The U.S. Postal Service was partially privatized and now trembles on the brink of the real thing if we will let it happen. We’ve deregulated the airlines and, but for the saving collapse of Enron, might have completely ruined public utilities too. Freddie has taken to drink, Fannie to prostitution, and the Good Lord save the FDIC. The Good Lord save the Interstate Highway System, too, and all those other things that still make life civilized around here. Oh. There is the National Park System, another endangered species. It does not surprise me, therefore, that we have contrarians among us who secretly pray that things will get worse—so that at least some of the good will remain.

It is curious how in some cultures what seems to me a destructive tendency always seems to have the edge (and, yes, it has some benefits as well) whereas in others (e.g. in Russia) the tendency is always in the other direction (and, yes, that way lie some real evils too). I’m sorry to see NBR go private. It has served us for thirty-one year, but now—you may be sure of it—it will undergo deformations caused by the change. Why did it go private? For lack of sufficient corporate sponsorship. Corporate? Of course. The kind that PBS was founded on was public. But public, in this culture, is a nasty word. It’s something mysterious, I think; it’s something in the air.