London Riesling Diary: Day 2 – England’s Violent Dreaming

I would be hard to find a more boring scene to present to you than the above corner of Bromley, the London suburb where I – also David Bowie – come from. The point is that I could have used another photo taken in another part of the Great London Area that would have been virtually indistinguishable from this one. It was a bland place when I grew up there, but it has become much more bland since then. Every time I come here to visit my mother this simple fact shocks me again. However, that’s not all I experience when I’m suddenly immersed in the world I turned my back on a quarter of a century ago. There’s a very different, parallel shock I experience through the British media and on the streets. This results from the fact of, acceptance and glorification of violence. The only place I was ever violently attacked was on a street corner in London almost indistinguishable from the above. Thankfully a friend pulled my drunken attacker from me after he’d landed only one blow to my head and a young woman who saw what happened stopped her car and rescued us before the youth’s friends could join him.

Bad as this kind of violence is, the way, for example, the British media make bombing Iraq seem the most natural and moral thing to do is worse still. That British troops first entered the territory that is now Iraq (then a province of the Ottoman Empire) just over a century ago on November 6th, 1914 and was it occupied by the British again (although it was then a neutral country) during WWII is forgotten. The standard formula British politicians use for this kind of forgetting is, “it’s time to move on,” and their catch-all motto for our participation in military adventures far from these shores is that we must, “punch above our weight,” in world affairs. George Orwell had some pertinent words to describe this kind of talk: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Of course, in the leafy suburbia where I grew up all was and is not evil. And it was here that I developed my own way of looking at the world. A good part of British creativity – also, for example, David Bowie’s music – grows out of this leafy suburbia, that is a reaction against it that would be impossible without it. If you doubt the relevance of my words to David Bowie’s music I suggest you listen to ‘Life from Mars’ on the ‘Hunky Dory’ album, which rather precisely describes the world he and I grew up in.

On rainy, grey winter days like today on which England looks all brown, grey and (absurdly for the season) very green I wish myself back to Berlin or New York where I feel free from the weight of British history’s ballast of violence. Of course, the histories of both Germany and America are also laden with ballast of the same kind, but there I feel a sense of detachment from it when I think about it, because those are not my national identities. Oddly, both those cities were also important for David Bowie. His album ‘Heroes’ was the soundtrack for my first immersion in Germany that same year, 1976. When ‘The Next Day’ suddenly came out in 2013 I immediately recognized the New York I was then exploring. Listening to it now it sounds doubly appealing due to the distance.

I will have more to say about England and Germany on January 29th. So watch this space on that day!