Sunday NY Times piece on British Snobbery, for all you little plebs and gits

[Warspite]

£15 a bottle for champagne for an institution that does a lot of hospitality and entertaining of visiting dignitaries does not sound untoward.

[Brazen]

£15 a bottle for champagne for an institution that does a lot of hospitality and entertaining of visiting dignitaries does not sound untoward.

Well quite. Even Lidl is charging £17.99 a bottle. I'd take a few off their hands at that price.

There's a lot of inverse snobbery happening in the media of late. And, to be fair. actual snobbery (the white van man incident for instance).

[Richard Hakluyt]

The peers pay for the stuff anyway. The argument is that merging the catering services for the Commons and the Lords would lead to efficiency savings. It appears that the Lords are not impressed with the champagne available at the Commons' bars and restaurants so have stymied the merger.

[Malthus]

Allan Quatermain? Isn't he essentially a professional hunter? In the books he's described as a bit of a hobo - hardly the best example of posh. 

Professional big game hunter = posh hobo.

Seems reasonable enough.

 

Read "King Solomon's Mines". He's not the stereotype of the "great white hunter" in a pith helmet and spats - more like a genuine backwoods type, who eked out a meagre living in poverty by hunting (which is why he agreed to go on a hair-brained rescue mission - he was being paid 500 pounds to do it, which he wanted to pay for his son's higher education - and paid in advance, so if he died it wasn't a big deal). It is funny to see him quoted as an example of "posh".

It is also, considering the time it was written, very refreshingly non-racist - almost surprisingly so.

I'm glad you think so.

Another good one from Haggard is Nada the Lily, all the leading characters in it are non-white. They are adventure stories so the non-white people are portrayed as quite different and exotic, but inferiority does not seem to come into it.

It's a good one - very violent but actually based on a certain amount of fact (the rise and fall of Shaka Zulu - a story as bizzare as any fantasy fiction).

I'm thinking of this passage from the beginning of King Solomon's Mines:

I, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman, make oath and say — That's how I headed my deposition before the magistrate about poor Khiva's and Ventvögel's sad deaths; but somehow it doesn't seem quite the right way to begin a book. And, besides, am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman? I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers — no, I will scratch out that word "niggers," for I do not like it. I've known natives who are, and so you will say, Harry, my boy, before you have done with this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who are not.

For the time it was written, the notion that Black Africans could be as much "gentlemen" as rich Whites stuck me as pretty progressive (also note that he corrects his own language to avoid a racial slur: "I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers — no, I will scratch out that word "niggers," for I do not like it."). 

It is interesting that, as far as I know, most of the various film versions of the story were less progressive than the book - for example, they tended to introduce a White woman as the love interest.

[Martinus]

Quatermain always gave off a closeted vibe to me. But then it could be just his Britishness.

[Capetan Mihali]

I like to think I'm usually pretty savvy with this kind of trans-Atlantic cultural stuff, but the "white van/flag" thing is completely mysterious to me.  While on the other hand, it seems like there is pretty much an instant consensus among all British (or at least English) people about what that tweet was supposed to convey, and that it was very improper, could really hurt Labor, etc. 

I broadly understand the media narrative about it, but what is the specific problem with that tweet, at the nuts-and-bolts level?  Could someone decode it for me?

[CountDeMoney]

I like to think I'm usually pretty savvy with this kind of trans-Atlantic cultural stuff, but the "white van/flag" thing is completely mysterious to me.  While on the other hand, it seems like there is pretty much an instant consensus among all British (or at least English) people about what that tweet was supposed to convey, and that it was very improper, could really hurt Labor, etc. 

I broadly understand the media narrative about it, but what is the specific problem with that tweet, at the nuts-and-bolts level?  Could someone decode it for me?

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/what-is-a-white-van-man--362022467695

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/29/opinion/kenan-malik-a-collision-with-white-van-man.html?_r=0

[Capetan Mihali]

OK, so I'm with every single other American on this one.  

Hmm, I never knew that "white-van man" was a thing.   So I guess our "Joe the Plumber" would be 'Joe the White-Van Man' if a junior novelization of the 2008 election were given a British reprint.

Thinking back, it was interesting in my neighborhood growing up, with cars parked off the street but right out in front, to see the different work vehicles people parked in front of their houses at the end of the day.  But generally it was kind of a class signifier in the upward direction, since it usually meant you managed or owned the business, didn't just work there.

[Sheilbh]

I like to think I'm usually pretty savvy with this kind of trans-Atlantic cultural stuff, but the "white van/flag" thing is completely mysterious to me.  While on the other hand, it seems like there is pretty much an instant consensus among all British (or at least English) people about what that tweet was supposed to convey, and that it was very improper, could really hurt Labor, etc. 

I broadly understand the media narrative about it, but what is the specific problem with that tweet, at the nuts-and-bolts level?  Could someone decode it for me?

I think the MSNBC bit CdM linked to is good. This from the Atlantic was also good:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/image-from-rochester-the-3-word-tweet-that-cost-a-politician-her-job/383036/
Especially the bit they quoted from a longer (less relevant) old NYT piece that caricatures white van man:

In his hands he has a wheel; in his ears, rings; on his arms, tattoos; and in his heart, loathing for anyone he sees through his windshield. ...

Once in the driver's seat, he considers red lights relative and his own authority absolute. His vocabulary is the kind represented in newspapers by asterisks, and the hand signals he uses to find his way are the kind that tell everyone else to get lost.

The other point is that they're both quite common things. There's lots of white van men about - all the tradesmen for example - and it's not uncommon to see people with the English flag. But the flag especially is far, far more common outside of London.

So the problem is the person who's tweeting it. She's the MP for Islington South - Islington's actually got a particular reputation of a certain sort of metropolitan centre-leftism, it's where the Blairs lived in the nineties, so Islington has connotations of champagne socialism. The flag and the van which go together in a British mind to create a clear image of that person - basically a Sun reading builder (that image was more or less spot on once the press started covering the guy whose house it is). And the fact that she thought the image was so extraordinary that she took a photo of it and tweeted it.

Add to that the line 'image from Rochester' where Labour would lose heavily and UKIP would win and there's almost a subtext of 'well this is the sort of voter they have here'.

I felt incredibly sorry for journalists from other countries who had to cover that story though

[Sheilbh]

Hmm, I never knew that "white-van man" was a thing.   So I guess our "Joe the Plumber" would be 'Joe the White-Van Man' if a junior novelization of the 2008 election were given a British reprint.

Not far off, but if the argument with Joe wasn't about redistribution but 'clinging'.

Here's an image of Dan Ware, the white van man in question, which does match the stereotype:

[Syt]

Is he a friend of this dude?

[CountDeMoney]

OK, so straight out of Central Casting, London Branch Office.

[The Brain]

Is he a friend of this dude?

No, they have a "special" relationship.

[Martinus]

Hmm, I never knew that "white-van man" was a thing.   So I guess our "Joe the Plumber" would be 'Joe the White-Van Man' if a junior novelization of the 2008 election were given a British reprint.

Not far off, but if the argument with Joe wasn't about redistribution but 'clinging'.

Here's an image of Dan Ware, the white van man in question, which does match the stereotype:

So, she was right? He looks like scum of the Earth. Why is this controversial?

[garbon]

Is he a friend of this dude?

Well that guy is holding flag upside because he is angry at America.