Out, Damned Lout

Policy Review, Feb/Mar 2005 by Beck, Stefan

At the supermarket, where Middle England valued shopping lists, meal planning, and price comparison, the oik is lazy and impulsive: "stewing beef cooked in wine may take two minutes to make ready the ingredients but it will need to be cooked anything from four hours to two days before it is needed. What easy foods allow, then, is not so much time as freedom from the need to think and plan about food." In the London Spectator, James Delingpole took issue with Anderson's beef stew claim. "It takes at least two minutes," he wrote, "just to trim off the fat and the gristly bits. . . . Even on cocaine or amphetamine sulphate, neither of which I imagine Anderson takes, I doubt you could prepare a beef in wine stew in much less than half an hour."

This is the sort of hair-splitting protestation that grates on the sympathetic reader of All Oiks Now. We know the book is a very skillful piece of anti-oik propaganda, and as such we should expect it to get carried away, to hector us a bit. It is not satire, quite, but it looks at the state of things with satire's gaze - a gaze that cannot help magnifying as it scrutinizes.

Granted, many of Anderson's examples of cultural decline do seem trivial and have been derided accordingly. Delingpole's review was titled "The death of the shopping list," which sums up his dismissal of Anderson's complaints. A leader in the London Observer (May 9, 2004) mocked: "Give those monstrously ill-behaved children a pat on the head and dance along to the new polychromatic mobile phone rings. Middle England is dead. Rejoice." The implication is that the unpleasant trivia of modern life do not add up to a trend. (If they do, it isn't a negative one, only a new and different and perhaps even exciting one.) Still, failure to address the little symptoms that Anderson bemoans portends that Britain may wake up one morning to an irreversible cultural illness. American baby boomers sneered at their parents' "irrational" fear of rock music and scandalous new fashions. Now, years later, many of them are scratching their heads and wondering at the blight that is today's popular culture. The cultural shift didn't happen overnight, but they are reacting as though it had.

SURELY A BOOK like All Oiks, rewritten for an American audience, would receive roughly the same sneering notice, but in the long run it would be every bit as welcome. What might we title it? We lack a word as comprehensively, inclusively insulting as "oik." Our cultural put-downs tend to refer narrowly to things like dress and musical taste rather than to patterns of behavior. Consider the odious (and, thankfully, almost defunct) term "wigger." Its etymology needs no explanation. It is cocked at a white person who pretends to "blackness," who listens to hip-hop music and wears its associated fashions; but it does not necessarily imply that such a person acts in the brutish manner celebrated by much of that music. To be called a "wigger" is to be called a poseur. It is a criticism of style, not an indictment of behavior. By the same token, to be called a "redneck" is to stand accused of wearing flannel shirts and enjoying NASCAR - the term does not call one's morals into question.