Courage Fades, Like a Boner

British television is no safer from the plague of reality shows in the US, save for the fact that we only have 5 channels (well, 3 really, BBC1 and BBC2 would never go for it) on which to broad cast such fare. In fact, ITV (The People's Channel) actually reverts to live coverage of a communal house during it's night-owl Big Brother block. There's this show, Bad Boys, where delinquent young yobs are sent off to military training. One of the exercises i saw them forced to perform was to hold a red pencil in between their nose and upper lip, no hands. Hence, the expression, "stiff upper lip." I don't know the history of this practice, but i suspect it plays on the conception to reap something humiliating to the cadets. Stiff upper whatever.

So London endures it's second bombing and the world watches the upper lips of the Brits. These particular rucksacks went off with a bit of a pbbhht, the detonators not setting off the rest of the homemade explosives they had left behind for their fellow commuters. Two weeks ago 4 bombs on public transport killing 50-some folks seemed to evoke "Blitz Mentality", i.e. "stiff upper lip", i.e. keep it moving. But these more recent attacks, despite their weakness, have not produced the same sentiment. Editorials are going off in all the papers, from The Guardian on the left to the Financial Times on the right, that "the captiol's mood is less sure", and that "the defiance has begun to fade."

After the 7th of July, Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, comes out and cries an invective against the bombers: "Londoners will not be divided by the cowardly attack," he said, his voice angry and raw. "They will stand together in solidarity ... and that is why I'm proud to be the mayor of that city." Of course, Livingstone isn't terribly popular, but that's beside the point in a crisis.

I said that most "can't be bothered" to worry about the national mood or how the occurence of terrorism affects London life. And those people will, largely, continue to be unbothered. The people who would be bothered by this sort of thing, well, now they will.