R.J. Stove

No writer has more deeply researched the decline of America’s WASP, or more vehemently mourned it, than has my friend Paul Gottfried. Reading his most recent observations on the topic, I am impressed not simply by how accurate they are, but by how little resemblance the process of American WASPs’ collapse bore to the process of Australian WASPs’ collapse. While the Australian WASP is as obviously dead as is the American WASP, he was killed by different methods.

So different were these methods that in themselves they rebut the cliché which has fallen from a million Aussie lips since the 1960s: the idea that Australia is America’s 51st state, a condition to be hailed or condemned according to personal disposition. The more one studies Australian history, the harder it becomes to interpret it in terms the average American would comprehend.

Yes, Americans might once have been so impressed by antipodean fondness for the secret ballot that they called it “the Australian ballot.” Yes, Jack London and Harry Bridges might have regarded Australian socialists as brothers-in-arms. And yes, Sex and the City 2 is as loathsomely omnipresent in Sydney as in San Francisco, St. Louis, or Seattle. Overall, nonetheless, any honest Australian should say of Americans what Chesterton said about the French: “I love [them] as the most foreign of all foreigners.”When I visit America, I am rendered (in Clive James’s happy phrase) “catatonic with culture shock.”

When people get to my age (48), we are warned about the wrinkles, the hair loss, and the sleep difficulties, not to mention the price of beer-belly-evasion being eternal vigilance. What we aren’t warned about is a more unfortunate condition still: the embarrassing tendency to drone on in public about events which nine out of every ten hearers are too young to have heard of, let alone to remember.

Sir Harold Nicolson, diarist and George V’s biographer, amazed his readers in 1948 -- upon turning 60 -- by announcing that he was old enough to have seen Tsar Nicholas II, “surrounded by his bodyguard of enormous Cossacks, blessing the [River] Neva.” Similarly, I find myself more and more acquiring a mythic antiquity in young people’s eyes, for no better cause than that I have vivid memories of Nixon’s resignation speech and the Berlin Wall’s collapse. These memories, in turn, set me to thinking about my own undergraduate life, which, unfortunately, is best described in the words by which British poet Philip Larkin summed up his own youth: “a forgotten boredom.”

I should love to possess a Damascene conversion in my résumé, the way David Horowitz metamorphosed from Ramparts head-kicker to shrill neocon without the slightest hint of incongruity, let alone of anything so vulgar as contrition. Sorry, no dice.

If one wanted further proof of the mainstream media's relentless tabloidization, the coverage of Wolfgang Wagner's recent death would supply it. Born in 1919, Wolfgang was the composer's grandson and, from 1966 until 2008, the Bayreuth Festival's supremo. New Yorker columnist Alex Ross, long established as an author and researcher of quality, did the best of any commentator for a major print outlet, writing, inter alia:

Take a moment to register that astonishing fact: the grandchild of a man born in 1813 survived well into the 21st century. The enormous elongation of the Wagner family line -- the composer's son, Siegfried, was born in 1869, and Siegfried fathered Wolfgang in 1919 -- is symbolic of Wagner's enduring cultural power. ... The Wagner festival will undoubtedly undergo substantial changes as the next generation of Wagners takes charge, but I would not wish it to change too much. There is no harm in feeling the presence of the past, in all its smoldering complexity.