The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the late
Douglas Adams enjoyed worldwide popularity, but like much of
British pop culture parts of it were lost on those of us outside
the Isles. In particular, one character, who appears human and
(when the novel begins) lives on Earth but is in fact an alien,
goes by the name “Ford Prefect,” selected because his early
research suggested it was a common name that would be “nicely
inconspicuous.” Since the Ford Prefect was released in the UK but
never in the U.S., the joke — that the alien has mistaken
automobiles for a dominant Earth species — goes over many American
readers’ heads.
I thought of the Adams books in the wake of the London terror
attacks yesterday, in particular the slogan on the front of the
eponymous guidebook carried around by interstellar adventurers
facing ever-more-ridiculous problems: “Don’t Panic.” It’s a version
of that classically British trait, stoicism — “stiff upper lip”
and all that. As Andrew Sullivan explained yesterday, “Brits regard the best
response to outrage to carry on as if nothing has happened. Yes,
they will fight back. But first, they will just carry on as
normal.”
As Bob Tyrrell reports,
by the afternoon all of London was doing just that. A Londoner
emailed Kathryn Jean Lopez, “I’m writing this
sitting in my office in London working as normal… The
overwhelming feeling round our office is ‘Is this best they can
do?’” Another emailed Sullivan, regarding the disruption in
public transportation, “Work’s over but there’s little chance of
getting home right now. Most of us are just going to go to the pub
until the traffic has died down. It’s not callousness or
indifference to carry on as normal, it’s quiet defiance.” One
British blogger noted how packed the local waterholes were at
two in the afternoon: “Nice one, Al Quaeda — you profess to be
from a teetotal religion, and you’ve given the pub trade a massive
mid-week boost.”
Notice how the Brits maintain their sense of humor (or humour,
if you prefer). It calls to mind how The Weakest Link, the
British game show, caused an uproar in Asia. The domineering host
disparaging contestants intelligence and dismissing them with a
stern “you are the weakest link — goodbye,” was, to Britons (and
to many Americans), absolutely hilarious. But when the same shtick
was tried in Hong Kong and Thailand, audiences were appalled.
Asians come from a “face culture,” where values are driven by pride
and shame and such treatment was genuinely humiliating to
contestants; a Thai schoolteacher wept after losing and begged her
students not to think her stupid.
Islamist terrorists also come from a face culture. They no doubt
expected this attack to be humiliating and demoralizing; one
Islamist website made the absurd claim that Britain was “burning
with fear and terror” in the wake of the attack.
The fascist monsters are wildly mistaken. One might say that
they just don’t know what a Ford Prefect is.
