Adam Nicolson,
writing in the London Daily Telegraph, makes a
connection between the death at 88 of Captain Philip “Pip” Gardner
— one of the last 16 surviving holders of the highest British
decoration for valor, the Victoria Cross — and the dying English
habit of understatement. In the battle for Tobruk in 1941, Captain
Gardner was wounded as he saved the life of a fellow officer with,
as his V.C. citation said, “complete disregard for his own safety,
despite his wounds and in the face of intense fire at close range.”
While convalescing in hospital afterwards, he wrote to his father:
“Don’t get alarmed and think I am badly wounded. Just a few odd
bits and pieces in my leg, neck and arm, nothing serious.”
Similar comments can be read almost every day in the obituary
pages of the “quality” British dailies which, unlike their American
counterparts, have adopted the admirable policy of obituarizing at
some length, and with an account of how they got their medals, all
the holders of all the major decorations that Britain awards. A few
weeks ago the Telegraph ran an
obituary of Michael Singleton, an eccentric schoolmaster and
winner of the Military Cross, which is second only to the V.C. in
prestige, in which it was said that “a burst of Luftwaffe fire left
his body sprinkled with German shrapnel. When a doctor submitted
Singleton to an X-Ray in the 1960s, his sole reaction was to
exclaim: ‘God Almighty!’ Singleton murmured: ‘Oh, it’s just a bit
of Krupp’s metal.’”
Americans are generally more likely to exaggerate than
understate. It was said during the war that much misunderstanding
between allies was occasioned by the fact that Americans didn’t
understand that when their British allies described a situation as
“a bit sticky” they probably meant that it was truly dire. In
rhetorical terms, ours is a culture of hyperbole, while theirs is
— or was — one of meiosis. For even in Britain, such modesty
seems now to be outmoded. Nicolson points out that younger Britons,
like Americans, would not make light of great deeds, their own or
others’, but overstate them with encomiums such as “f******
brilliant.” Even the language describing the circumstances of his
deed in Captain Gardner’s V.C. citation “is minimalised, suppressed
far below what any of us would now use. What would a modern
description of ‘fraught with great difficulty and danger’ sound
like? Full of words that tried to mimic in their violence and
extremity the conditions they hoped to describe….We have lost, or
are at least in the process of losing, the habit of understatement
as a means of conveying the nearly indescribable.”
But there is something about heroism which demands
understatement, in America as much as in Britain. Dorothy
Rabinowitz writes in
the Wall Street Journal that, among the recipients of the
Congressional Medal of Honor and their families, there is a firm
prejudice against using the word “win” or “won” about the medal.
“‘Won,’ ‘winning,’ ‘winners’: they are all words that smack of
contests, games, and luck, explains an official with the
Congressional Medal of Honor Society.”
Maybe the reason we have lost the knack of understatement is
that we don’t have many heroes to teach us that understatement is
an essential part of heroism. Real heroes don’t puff themselves up.
But how often do we get a chance to see real heroes? Ms. Rabinowitz
advances the claims of Sergeants Shugart and Gordon, who both
received the Congressional Medal of Honor for almost unimaginable
bravery in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, but they, alas, are no
longer around to be modest about their deeds.
Andrew Bacevich of Boston University told Thomas E. Ricks of the
Washington Post last month that, in America, “military
fame has lost its durability” — which is a politer way of saying,
as Ricks does, that “America no longer puts anyone up on a
pedestal.” This is not unconnected with the fact that we have
thrown away our vocabulary of superlatives on actions that fall
short of superlative for the sake of promoting “self-esteem.”
But it is also owing to the curse of “cool.” The grown-up
culture — insofar as such a thing exists any more — has so far
adopted the values of the youth culture as to take on its practiced
pose of world-weary cynicism as the foundation of moral and
political thought. So in his “Doonesbury” comic strip, Garry
Trudeau recently suggested that the Democrats are prepared to “send
any number of young Americans to their deaths” for sordid electoral
reasons and that the president and his advisers, in privately
making the charge against them, laugh uproariously at their own
cynicism.
That, so Mr. Trudeau wants us to suppose, is simply the way he
thinks the world works. He’s not going to be such a chump
as to suppose than anyone in politics really acts from principle
and in what he believes to be the best interest of the nation. I
wonder if Trudeau, any more than those war protesters who compare
Bush to Hitler, really believes this? But such shallow
sophistication doesn’t rise to the level of belief. It is merely an
attitude, and it is of course compounded in its effects by the fact
that the media culture has such a vested interest in what it
invariably but tendentiously calls “free speech” — by which it
means blanket approval for anything anyone wants to say — that
there is almost no constituency within it for voluntary
restraint.
Restraint of any kind — one of its kinds is understatement —
is dull; outrageousness (note, by the way, the extent to which
“outrageous” in the vernacular of “cool” has become a word of
approval) and excess are interesting. “Cool” is what it used to be
said that people like Captain Gardner were under fire. It meant
that they were calm, restrained, unemotional, that they “kept their
wits about them” and so were likely to be of use to others in a
crisis, instead of making a spectacle either of their feelings or
of their cleverness.
Nowadays, however, “cool” seems to mean something like the
opposite — being “outrageous” and overstated and calling attention
to oneself — and so is the heroism of the media. Having themselves
no sense of duty or obligation to any higher principle than their
own interests, the media naturally presume the same in others and
resist even the most modest attempts to revalue and refurbish a
becoming sense of reticence, modesty and understatement.
Regrettably, we are soon likely to have fresh examples of heroism
to take the silly grins off their faces.
