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Stereotypes in the snow
The British are the most reckless and the least stylish skiers
I have just returned from avalanche country. I had thought we had managed to avoid it. The village in southern Germany, near to the Austrian border, where I took my son snow-boarding at half term was a long way from the dangerous places we had been reading about. Besides, it was the village of a close German friend, an expert skier, and she said that avalanches were extremely unlikely, even though the snow was the deepest it had been for 30 years. And I felt that if there is anybody likely to take a sensible and efficient approach to the danger of the elements, it must be the Germans. Such are the stereotypes that we live by.
In the event there was a real risk of avalanches. All the cable cars up the mountains were closed for the last three days we were there. There were no disasters and no one was hurt, but there was one avalanche, rather frighteningly soon after a large group of young people had a party in what was to be its path; it seemed with hindsight that that road should not have been open.
So there we were, snowbound. We thought of going home early, but the railway line was closed. This was nothing to do with the snow; a couple of miles down the line two trains had smashed into each other headlong, killing two people and injuring many others; the points had been switched incorrectly.
When my friend and I tried to find out about trains, two days later, we were given constantly conflicting, muddled information. Had we taken official advice, or the advice from my hotel, we should certainly have missed our plane. My stereotype, as stereotypes do on better acquaintance, began to shift.
There is something about skiing that makes one think hard about national stereotypes - perhaps because one is so dependent on local people. One depends on them in the smallest ways and the largest - from advice on the best kind of sock to advice on how to avoid cruising over precipices; in between are hundreds of little transactions about tickets and timetables, of ski hire, restaurant booking and things to do with small children.
The way these services are provided make all the difference to the success, and the safety, of a skiing holiday and, of course, say a great deal about the people providing them. My conclusion is that there's no place like America.
American ski resorts put the European ones to shame. The experience of going to Colorado last year was a revelation. Supposedly sophisticated Europe has absolutely nothing on supposedly uncivilised America when it comes to snow. I had assumed it would all be rather brash and boring: we only went for the snow-boarding culture. I was entirely wrong.
Although it is, I admit, wearing to be told without ceasing to enjoy yourself, there is something very soothing about the efforts Americans make to ensure that you do. In Snowmass, which is not far from Aspen, everything was made as easy for us as could be; at the bottom of the lifts (very fast, no queues) there was usually a charming young man to help you get on. Up the mountain there were more charming people offering free glasses of hot spiced apple juice, and even other charming people called "ambassadors" to ski with you and show you round the mountains, absolutely free of charge. We began to feel that they actually wanted to have us there.
Not so in Europe. In Europe skiers are treated by the locals like a blot on the landscape, which I suppose we are. None the less we are their bread and butter. With all apologies to those many kind and delightful people I have come to know, even they will agree that the treatment you get in Europe's ski lifts and ski schools is all too commonly offhand and grumpy. My Bavarian friend told me that while on a drag lift with someone else, the supporting bar broke off. Being excellent skiers they were able to get back down the hard way and even to retrieve the broken bar. But when they showed it to the lift operator all he could say, curtly, was: "That happens sometimes." To their protests that they could easily have been hurt, he replied that there was a perfectly good hospital.
I can't help admiring this tough, self-sufficient approach. The British tend to have it too; they are the most astonishingly reckless (and the least stylish) on skis. Our soldiers are notorious for heroically throwing themselves straight down the slopes, as absolute beginners. A Bavarian hospital orderly I met agrees; he told me the local hospital is often full of them.
There is something that resists the idea of eliminating all risk and discomfort on the slopes, and taming nature almost completely, as in the American way. But one can't help feeling that the Europeans probably couldn't do it, even if they tried. My impression of the French, in a low-cost resort, was perhaps the worst - cynical, inefficient and rude. The Swiss struck me as equally cynical, but not so rude and considerably more efficient. But all Europeans are quite happy to allow far too many people up the mountains and the figures of injuries in European ski resorts are astonishing. When it comes to skiing, and to manners, the Old World has a lot to learn from the New.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, February 28, 1999 | Comments (0)
Full-frontal effrontery
The youthful Utopian female anger of the 1970s was appropriate; in its maturity, such anger seems adolescent, self-dramatising and irrelevant.
Germaine Greer has just announced that it is time to get angry again. She announced it in this paper on Monday, in one of a series of extracts from her eagerly awaited and heavily embargoed new book, The Whole Woman, which The Daily Telegraph has been publishing this week. However much one admires Professor Greer, and however much one may think she has added to the gaiety of nations, and certainly of this nation, it is difficult to avoid feeling that what she really means is that it is time for her to have a big success with a book again.
I hope she does. I cannot help admiring her, but nor can I help suspecting that anger - hers or ours - is simply a means to that end. Anger may be useful to professional controversialists and self-publicists (not excluding columnists), but I don't think it has very much to offer reasonable women trying to work out how to run their lives. The start of 1970s feminist fury was exhilarating, and Professor Greer expressed it flamboyantly, with all the energy of her youth. But there has been huge change, for better or for worse, in the 30 years that followed The Female Eunuch. Feminists have won all kinds of battles. Infinitely more self-aware, hugely more free and equal, women today need not anger but pragmatism to guide them through their opportunities and their handicaps. There is no clear target for any feminist anger. There is no simple explanation for the wide variety of frustrations that women feel; besides, men feel them, too. Young women understand that they have many more choices and much more respect than their mothers had.
The youthful Utopian female anger of the 1970s was appropriate to the early stages of late-20th-century feminism; in its maturity, such anger seems adolescent, self-dramatising and irrelevant. The same might perhaps be said of Professor Greer, though I do not like to think so. I prefer to think of her as a national treasure, a performance artist.
The truth is that, although Professor Greer is clever, well educated and scholarly, her real talent is for histrionics, and her real desire to shock, even now. And it is hard to be shocking at 60. She could have had (indeed has had) a very successful life as an English don, hugely sought after as a delightful friend, lover, gardener and cook. She could even have been a serious feminist writer. But that wouldn't have been enough. She needed a stage. Like several of her Australian contemporaries, who came here at much the same time, such as Clive James and Barry Humphries, she was a comedian who wanted nothing so much as the attention of the Poms. And like many of that group, she will give up practically anything for a good phrase. There's nothing wrong with that. She has almost always been surprising, appealing or exciting; it has been a brilliant 30-year performance, in this country at least. If she has been wildly inconsistent - and she has - that doesn't matter in a performance artist. She can always be relied on for startling effects; she is a television producer's dream. She has a wonderful repertoire of abuse, invective, charm and self-parody.
One of my favourite images of her is from a time when she was publicising her book about the menopause. She had just discovered the miseries of ageing and becoming invisible to men whom for years she had denounced for ogling her, and had defiantly announced her intention of becoming a crone, as she put it. She turned up at some television studio in front of a large audience in a hideous grey granny bun, flattie shoes, grey jersey, knee-length grey shorts and laddered black tights. And this from a woman who had posed nude for Dutch porn magazines in the 1960s and been the lover of the famous and the beautiful. (I noticed that this fancy did not last long.) The only problem with the posturing has been that it has meant that no one has taken her seriously. That is perhaps her tragedy, and perhaps, if she is genuinely angry these days, that is why.
If one is trying to think seriously about the predicament of women, Professor Greer always has been an unreliable guide. The Female Eunuch was full of brilliant insights. I remember the admiration and pleasure with which I reviewed it as a teenager for Granta; it was true that women had been bound up with distorted ideas of romance, turned into dependent, deodorised, depilated and debased sex objects. Women didn't realise how much men hated us, she said. My teenage self agreed entirely. But then Professor Greer flaunted her body in group sex sessions and in porn photography. Was she a sex object or what?
And she seemed to have no problem getting on with men, some of the most interesting men in the country at that. She advocated free sex, group sex, any sex, and the right to contraception and abortion. Later, in Sex and Destiny, she denounced all those things, and accused Western doctors of indulging in "an orgy of cutting and burning" of reproductive tissues.
Yet in this scathing attack on Western society and tribute to more tribal cultures, she said absolutely nothing - apart from a mention in a footnote - about the millions of women mutilated by clitoridectomy; instead, she recommended tribal forms of contraception, such as abstinence or anal intercourse. This was just before public awareness of Aids, admittedly, but I had an entertaining time making respectable family planning gurus blush by asking whether they could endorse her recommendation of anal intercourse as a contraceptive technique. Meanwhile, in Sex and Destiny, Professor Greer eloquently laments the infertility inflicted on Third World women by promiscuity and abortion, the very freedoms she earlier advocated.
In her new book, Professor Greer, the hyper-exhibitionist of yesteryear, attacks young women for their sexual exhibitionism - "pure conformism" - and actually sneers at Courtney Love for claiming that displaying her breasts is subversive. The effrontery is astonishing. And once again she makes sweeping attacks on Western medicine and body images, as if all societies had not mutilated women in the name of beauty and always favoured beautiful men and women.
It is hard to know where to begin with such inconsistency and such terrible lapses of common sense and judgment. Perhaps this is what the late Angela Carter meant when she called Germaine Greer a clever fool. I prefer to think of her as a brilliant jester, who entertains us with hyperbole and flights of fancy, but occasionally startles us with a profound insight. It is certainly not time to get angry, not even with Professor Greer.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, February 25, 1999 | Comments (0)
Party political wedding
The solution is to scrap all tax allowances and simply tax us less
National Marriage Week. How the heart sinks. William Hague supported it, and the media have been full of it. Mr Hague took the opportunity of announcing new policies to use the tax and benefit system to encourage marriage. At the same time a lot of publicity was given to a survey claiming that women are fed up with family life; seven out of 10 feel the demands are too great, though eight out of 10 believe marriage is essential to stable family life. Another investigation, by the Mental Health Foundation, claimed last week that the breakdown of the traditional family is a major cause of unprecedented levels of mental illness among children. One in five children under 18 supposedly suffers from what's annoyingly known today as a mental health problem.
There you have it. The same old, familiar, intractable set of problems. Even if the studies sound deeply unreliable, we can all see some truth in them somewhere. Working mothers are often exhausted, their children often neglected, their marriages a burden. Middle-class working women often live the lives of overworked Victorian skivvies. The network of social support that families used to provide is frequently full of holes, perhaps beyond repair. That is partly because women who work no longer have time for anyone or anything outside their own front doors. It is also because since the war the welfare state has usurped the role of the family.
Now, at last, the family has been recognised for what it always was - the best and most efficient form of social security. The state, which for so long displaced the family, is now at last anxious to reinstate it. Politicians, for good reasons and bad, want to. Mr Blair wants to. Mr Hague wants to. The only difference between them is that Mr Blair makes meaningless nice noises, while Mr Hague has concrete proposals about the tax and benefits system. But I feel it is all doomed to failure.
The real problem is politicians' irresistible impulse to tinker. What we have now is a mish-mash of tax and benefits, demands and allowances; every time a problem emerges or an injustice is denounced, yet more tinkering goes on, yet another allowance is created, another special case, another tax break, an increase in child benefit. What it gives with one hand the state takes away with the other, in transactions of ever-increasing complexity.
William Hague himself said last week that he thinks that a good start in supporting marriage would be to juggle tax and benefits to favour married couples. For instance, he suggests letting married couples transfer an unused tax allowance if one partner stays at home to look after children or invalid relations. Of course that would support stay-at-home married mothers (or fathers), and it is a courageous suggestion; however, it would be shot down by unmarried people with families, by the childless, by the gay adoption lobby and by liberals everywhere.
What's wrong with it, and what's wrong with all these tinkerings, is the assumption behind them. It's an assumption that even Conservatives make, despite years of Thatcherism. How often does one have to say this? It's the assumption that it is the business of the state to interfere, more and more, in our private lives. Yet we all know that the more the state interferes, the more it tinkers with one unintended consequence after another, the more Hydralike anomalies that appear, the more bureaucracy that breeds, the worse will be the problems and the higher the taxes. The obvious solution is for the state to stay out of our private lives, scrap all tax allowances and simply tax us less. Let us keep more of our earned income. Let us have less government, more freedom and more personal responsibility. Let us make our own compromises with life.
The state really should not be encouraging anybody to do anything, other than to keep the peace and to obey the law. For years it has been encouraging welfare dependency and single parenthood and divorce, by making tax and benefits concessions to them all. That was clearly a disaster and should have been warning enough about the unforeseen dangers of state intervention. It would be so much better, and simpler and fairer to bring down the entire Gothic edifice of allowances and group benefits and special dispensations.
It's true that a lower standard income tax rate would yield less revenue, but then so much less would be needed, (the tax and benefit system would be so much cheaper to run). It's also true that many people would find themselves ineligible for benefit, but that would be a very family friendly policy. People would be driven to rely on families, wherever possible. People would be forced to accept that it takes two people at least, and a long time together, to bring up children. They would have to accept that it is not the job of the state to stand in for an absent father or to provide subsidised childcare: with more disposable income they could pay for their own, or not, as they chose. Divorce and deliberate single parenthood would still be an option but not at public expense. Benefits would go only to sick and disabled individuals and to those in unmistakable need.
This would mean that we could afford some of life's essentials, such as good schools, good health services and adequate old age pensions. But politicians cannot be dissuaded from tinkering, or from thinking they know best. How the heart sinks.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, February 14, 1999 | Comments (0)
It's the multiculture, stupid
As an idea, it cannot work and those who, like the Prime Minister, think that it can, are often misled not only by good intentions, but also by ignorance.
This country is in a state of tremendous confusion about the idea of multiculturalism. Even the Prime Minister, now spiritual leader to so many, seems to be in a terrible muddle. He says that he is all for celebrating multiculturalism, and he thinks it's really great. The only problem is that he doesn't mean it. He may think he does. But he cannot, or he would not have spoken as he did about the notorious remarks of Glenn Hoddle.
The Prime Minister's unsophisticated behaviour during the Hoddle affair showed that multiculturalism cannot work, and that those who think it can are often misled, not only by good intentions, but also by ignorance. It was ignorance on Tony Blair's part to assume that, just because he found a certain religious view deeply offensive - the broadly Hindu view that the disabled are reaping what they sowed in a previous incarnation - everyone else would feel the same. Had he known that many respectable British voters adhere to such a belief, he might have kept his mouth shut. The fact that he didn't is proof that our multicultural Prime Minister, and his advisers, are ignorant about what multiculturalism actually involves.
I don't think this ignorance is particularly surprising. Even quite well educated people in this country are remarkably ignorant of other religions and cultures. That became clear at the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: most people had not the slightest idea about Islamic thinking. Yet somehow this ignorance did not then, and does not now, stop people insisting that multiculturalism is the only way forward for Britain. I can suppose only that a great many Westerners are so unthinkingly ethnocentric that they assume that all other peoples subscribe, deep down, to the same values as their own.
One would have to make this assumption to celebrate multiculturalism as an active good. But it is wrong. Mr Hoddle's views are truly offensive to Mr Blair, as they are to me and to millions of other people. One might believe passionately in the freedom to express such views - I do. But how is it possible to celebrate such views as equal, when they offend against one's own most strongly held beliefs and against beliefs that are central to one's own culture? Minorities ask themselves the same question about mainstream British culture, as the Rushdie affair indicated.
Yet only last week, a paper was published by the Institute for Public Policy Research calling for a multicultural rebranding of Britain. The author, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, argues in True Colours that Britain is at a historic crossroads and that multiculturalism ought to be made a positive part of the country's identity. "There is now a real opportunity to redefine ourselves," she writes. With all due respect to Ms Alibhai-Brown, I believe this is a serious mistake.
A major problem in discussing this is that multiculturalism has become a weasel word. To say you are against multiculturalism is now tantamount to confessing to racism. To suggest that the host culture should take a tolerant precedence is now unacceptable. Even to suggest that Britain is not yet, in fact, a multicultural society, since only about six per cent of us belong to ethnic minorities, is to sound like a racist. Actually, one can condemn racism, as I do, without subscribing to multiculturalism - I believe that this is the position that most civilised people of all races hold.
One can accept, as I do, that there are all kinds of different people in this country and that diversity is both invigorating and fun; all our lives are the richer for it. One can believe strongly in equal rights, free speech and religious tolerance on all sides, as I do. In fact, this tolerance has its limits in mainstream culture here; for instance, female circumcision is still illegal in Britain - it is not just another "lifestyle choice".
True belief cannot be indiscriminating. To give equal value to someone else's opposing belief is to devalue one's own, and vice versa, as in the case of poor old Mr Hoddle. What is the point of holding dear a belief, if one has learnt to believe that someone else's is just as good? It leads, in the end, to a strange sense of apology about oneself; when combined, as in our case, with guilt about the Empire, it seems to be leading to a loss of cultural nerve. It has already led to a loss of a sense of national identity. Ms Alibhai-Brown talks of creating a new multicultural identity. But identity has to do with a sense of sameness. That is what the word means. A loose political identity can perhaps be built on having the same nationality and the same rights. But a real cultural identity means a cultural sameness, a cultural coherence. Diversity is at odds with identity, by definition.
Ms Alibhai-Brown calls on the Government to lead public opinion and create a new multicultural consciousness. In so far as she is concerned to fight racial prejudice, one can sympathise with her motives. Otherwise, I find her proposals alarming, and bound to add to the terrible division and confusion that already reign, particularly if they are to be carried out by a Prime Minister as deeply confused and ignorant about multiculturalism as Mr Blair has so comically shown himself to be.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, February 11, 1999 | Comments (0)
