There is an odd conservatism in the common perceptions of life in
other lands. I grew up among English people who still thought of
France—a rather stuffy and puritanical country in the
1960s—in terms of the “Gay Paree” of seventy years earlier, a
place of unbridled license and monocled boulevardiers swilling
champagne at the Folies Bergère. In the same way, many Americans
carry in their minds an image of England as a polite and
civilized land, where impeccably courteous David Niven types sit
around at their clubs in antique leather armchairs sipping port,
while, at the other end of society, stoic cockneys converse in
rhyming slang and cheer each other up with cups of tea in the
parlor. In fact today’s England is a rather coarse and violent
place, whose crime statistics now surpass the United States’ in most
categories (homicide being the principal exception). The nation’s
everyday culture is dominated by the most brutish of proletarian
values: politicians like Tony Blair from perfectly sound
bourgeois families affect the dropped aitches and glottal stops
of the slums, while the old codes of chivalry, patriotism, and
restraint have been shoved aside in a snarling, clawing assertion
of “rights.” American jaws drop when I say, in response to
inquiries, how much I enjoy the comparative tranquillity,
security, and civility of life in the United States and the exquisite
manners of Americans—especially in the South, the best-mannered
large region in the English-speaking world.

The older, tranquil England of the American