11:38 am
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An hour later, so I’ve made the rounds of a few blogs.
To judge from this e-mail on InstaPundit from a Londoner near the blasts, they’re having an easier time getting their work done today than I am:A few blocks away from the initial bomb blast, the offices of my company have remained open. In many ways it’s the safest thing to do, best to stay where people can keep track of you. Everybody at the office is trying to get their work done as best as possible (difficult with a number of staff unable to get in this morning). Life goes on, and everybody is making plans of how to deal with the crisis in a calm manner. Nobody is trying to leave the office. Unless we’re specifically targeted we’ll stay put and do our best to ignore the threats.
Good grief! I don’t know whether I find that admirable, frustrating or just confusing. But then, we’re not them. Clicking on a link on Hugh Hewitt’s blog brought me to the book “London at War,” of which a critic said:
Ziegler (Mountbatten) tells the epic story of the British capital’s wartime ordeal largely through the words of contemporary Londoners. The dominating drama of this elegant narrative revolves around the German air raids, the underground culture of the bomb shelters and rescue crews where common purpose cut across class lines. Despite widespread death and destruction during the blitz and the threat of invasion, the plucky Londoners not only maintained business as usual but kept alive their cricket matches, held debutante balls and availed themselves of an extraordinary array of entertainment.
I’m remembering that when I was channel flipping on 9/11, I happened across BBC-America, where an English anchorman was interviewing an American reporter in England. The anchorman asked in a somewhat pointed way (which I didn’t understand at the time) what the reporter thought the American response would be. The reporter said something like, “Well, I think that the United States will see from this that it needs the support of the rest of the global community.” We think what? Not even close. But that was apparently what the BBC wanted to hear, and it just proved to me how little they really understand us.
In the same way, perhaps, I have to just understand that I may not understand. Here is part of the response from Tony Blair:
It is important that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised nations throughout the world.
All correct, but … I don’t know. Too correct? I guess I’d like to hear conviction, I’d like fewer words with more behind them. I think Blair has shown himself to be a gutsy leader at times. I just hope that the English people will catch a little of that and not use this time in fussiness. I’m not imagining for a moment that there will be much of a pause — from our journalists or theirs — before people are encouraged to blame their own government, to vent their hostility — or whatever passes for hostility in a land where everyone tries to get back to work several hours after a bomb attack — on their own foreign policies and consider themselves deserving no less somehow.
But I nurture a small hope that there will begin to be an undercurrent, perhaps away from microphones and television cameras, that doesn’t buy into that. And the only way that I can think of that I would know that has happened is if there is a significant increase in English men joining the armed forces. That may sound just hawkish, but it’s the only way I can think of right now that the ordinary people of a country could announce their grit.
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