In the September 2000 New Criterion, I published an article
about the town of Walsall and its fantastically bad new art
gallery (“Crudity Beyond Belief”). I passed what I thought was an
uncontroversial aesthetic judgment upon that unfortunate town,
namely that it was very ugly.
Had I suggested that Akron, Ohio, was not the Paris of the
Midwest, I doubt that
it would have caused much stir even in
Columbus, Ohio, let alone in the nation as a whole, but such is
the unutterable small-mindedness of England, and such the
inward-looking, trivial, and contemptible nature of its media of
mass communication, that when the unimportant news that I had
described Walsall as being “like Ceausescu’s Romania with fast
food outlets” finally spread via a wire service, I was for a day
or two the object of public vituperation and personal abuse
that was both absurd and mildly sinister. In the space of a few
hours, I was contacted by about twenty radio stations, a number
of television stations, and several national and local
newspapers.
An outraged luminary of the Walsall town council told me over
the airwaves to “bugger off”—a phrase with which he
was so extremely pleased that he repeated it, apparently, many
times in my absence. This is what nowadays passes in England as
both wit and debate.
The outraged defender of his town’s honor said that Walsall was
full of hard-working people who paid their taxes: as if this fact
were in contradiction