On both sides of the Atlantic, colonists and colonies alike are reeling from assaults on our democratic institutions both physical and political, though a recent stay in London encouraged an idle thought about why we were so hell bent on separating ourselves from what was clearly a spectacular culture as the Pritzker Prize finally found its way to architect Richard Rogers.
Terrorist plots throughout the UK have made the normally showcase weeks of late June and early July edgy and tinged with sadness. Britain's terrorists are home grown but seem to be doing the more toxic Quaida version of tea dumping in the harbor, claiming repression from what most think of as a benevolent, enlightened realm. Just watching Blair thrust and parry in the Commons (even though he supported Bush, his wrong headed circumlocutions sound so thoughtful and intelligent) just hours before the seamless transition to Gordon Brown was a painful reminder of just how short we fall as our administration embroiders on the doublespeak du jour and as millions of dollars are spent on endless pre-primary campaigns instead of being put to better use. Some are laying blame for the current Islamic foment at the feet of the immensely talented and humane observer, Salman Rushdie, rather than at the doors, for example, of our wildly unrealistic imperialists in Washington.
The terror-inducing assaults on our own freedoms are no less deadly for they come in the guise of sage men in black robes who claim to be doing the best thing on our behalf: rolling back the educational, reproductive and academic freedoms that we have been enjoying since I was a girl.
More than anything, I want to believe the solitary bus rides that my friend Eddie Vanderlip took from downtown New Rochelle to our more north-end elementary school beginning in 1961 when he was only 10 were not in vain after all. (New Rochelle was the first city to have court ordered school integration as a result of a suit brought by black parents) . Eddie was chosen as the first elementary school-aged child both for his intelligence and his poise at being able to handle the heavy mantle of forced desegregation. Each day he boarded a big yellow school bus that passed from the urban downtown of our gritty suburb to the leafy sidewalks of my own, much newer neighborhood. The image of Eddie, the only passenger, getting off the bus, is indelible, his ready smile making this difficult situation not of his own making into something very positive for us all. Eddie proved that there was a way to even out the playing field even back when duck and cover drills were part of the weekly lexicon.
I want to believe that the son of our high school biology teacher Mrs. Schwerner, did not die in vain in Mississippi (yes, that Schwerner, Michael, who was murdered with his friends Chaney and Goodman ) when he was simply trying to help people shop at their local grocery store or go to the polls.
I want to believe that the children who would have been born since 1973 to girls too young or too poor or just not ready to make sense of the overwhelming burdens of parenthood emerged later in better, more propitious circumstances from the wombs of women really ready to be mothers.
I want to believe that the extraordinarily positive, hard working, impoverished minority students I have been mentoring for the last fifteen years who attend the most crowded, underfunded, poorly managed Los Angeles schools and who get scholarships to college won't now have to give up their dreams of being given the chance to make their way out.
Now that the pound is fully twice the dollar, Americans are the poor cousins from across the sea; no fewer than three of my cab drivers (this was before I abandoned taxis entirely for the bus -- travel alert: taxi rides from Heathrow into the city are over 120 dollars) were planning on taking their holidays in the US this year for the first time. Things have been headed this way for a while and I will be curious as to how graciously we will be able to handle the roles of ugly and poor Americans at the same time.
Though Damien Hirst's hyped up diamond skull (if you were thinking the art world has gone crazy, this is indeed the place to prove it: to get into the new, very lovely White Cube gallery behind Fortunum and Mason which was totally empty when I arrived, I had to go back out to the rear and take a ticket, stand on a three- person line behind ropes for about ten minutes, be escorted upstairs to the black room where the solitary skull is displayed in the round, deposit my bag at the door, wait until everyone was ready to go back down etc) is the ultimate bling, it actually pales in comparison with the really moving portrait of his newborn baby that is the less heralded part of the exhibition in the downstairs galleries.
On the plane ride home I spent eleven hours with the Princess Diana which does indeed affirm that the British royals were probably the best thing we did manage to separate ourselves from. Yet our own version of royalty, the Bushes, make the Queen look positively enlightened.
The death heads on my mind this Fourth of July are not diamond encrusted; they are on our troops and innocent civilians in the middle east, in the conflicted regions of Africa and increasingly, closer to London and to home.