A Letter to London

Thinking about a great old city, yesterday and today, with Western Civilization in decline.

Dear Old London,

I remember the first time I walked into University College and saw the wax dummy that held Bentham’s bones. I was a Yank in a strange land, a wayward philosopher with something to prove. Decidedly not a utilitarian, I approached Jeremy, anyway, and rubbed his stand-up sarcophagus for luck.

Nearby, the British Museum was glutted with stolen treasures. I remember thinking you are timeless, full of great ghosts and things that are beautiful and true—even if the empire had been a mixed bag.

I got charcoal bogeys from riding the tube. There, I learned to avert my eyes and stifle my smile. Your pubs crawled with footballers and merrymakers. Your red phonebooths and double-decker buses cut through the greyer days. Your chip shops, doener stands, and curry places warmed my guts, but all was not halal.

Your leaden skies, like an ancient canopy, threatened my Carolina blue mood. I bought beers but never an umbrella, so I’d be baptized from time to time by Anglican tears. Yet you were always there, like a monument to time—Big Ben, your sentinel, standing watch, with Parliament in his blindspot. Alan Moore conjured a thousand Guy Fawkeses for a world without good guys.

V is for Verity.

Unlike America’s adolescent cities, you were mature, but very much alive then. But decades later, my friend wrote me a missive through an imaginary miss:

Riding back into London on the train.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Train cramped like rats, “planned engineering works”, engineering death traps, soon to blow.

Nonononono.

Don’t fucking sit next to me.

Palestine windowpanes, paranoia kicking in, serial killer fetishism everywhere, come and murder the overlords please because it can’t get worse.

It can get worse.

Imperial debris, death around the corner, abandon ship.

Blood Sappho seeks slaveland auction everywhere, burn my eyes and begging the blind for forgiveness.

Called Dad, told him I’m here. “Get the fuck up here immediately”.

Is she alive, is she dead?
Am I?

City like a graveyard, no trust, postcard blues, rich pickings for the birds.

You were once the center of the world. No trust. And the birds are rich pickings.

Listen. Is that another call to prayer? Another colony of hijabs pushing prams? Do you miss the Sikhs? The Jamaicans? The football hooligans and snooty sloans? Where have they all gone?

When I met you, it had been a boom time, as the Brits were still enjoying the feast Thatcher and the entrepreneurs had set before them. Canary Wharf was still shiny and new despite the IRA having bombed it. You would eventually find other bombers in your midst. You endured the Blitz, and you would endure the rest. But in those days, at least the rubble belonged to Blighty.

To whom do you belong today? Another dinghy. And another. And another. For every lost public house, a mosque. Mums and dads will have to sell their farms to pay for subsidized stays of military-age men in country estates. Dare to dissent? “Wake up, Mum—the Sharia Bobbies are here!” Anyone who objects is a racist. Orwell’s down the memory hole. Franky went to Hollywood in ‘84. Dad’s sitting in solitary.

The meek shall not inherit the detritus. Inshallah, the Tate Gallery and British Museum await the coming Day of Iconoclasm.

I’d pass the old Battersea Power Station on my way to and from class. It was desolate and decrepit then, a symbol of the industrial revolution—of imperial glory. It was haunted. Today it is a shopping center. Oddly though, London, the rest of you looks a bit like Battersea did back then, only haunted by the living. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that depends upon the parts.

The Fabians were always there, waiting like ticks to drop onto the body politic. Now they’re clinging to Downing Street and Westminster, having wrested a bloody mess from the Tories who forgot how to be Tories. Where are the Whigs when you need them, ole friend? They abandoned Edinburgh, too,

Purple-haired Amelia is an avatar of a fed up people—the granddaughter of Johnny Rotten, now MEGA, now hated. Sometimes she takes the train with Olivia and lurks in the alleys—her eyeshadow the ash that coats St. Paul’s.

Is she a symbol of hope or hope lost?
I cannot say.
I’m too far away.

What would Bentham say today if he could see that the greatest good, whatever that means, is going, going, gone? Would he maintain that all this rights talk is but “nonsense upon stilts”? Would he wear a keffiyeh and hiss at the Jews? Or fling up two fingers toward Oxbridge before taking the first cheap flight out of long-lost Luton?

I still care for you, London. And I will until you are no longer. But this fog you’re in is different.

Maybe I’ll be dead when they rename your corpse, like they did Constantinople and Volgograd. Where does a city’s soul go when it dies? Perhaps you’ll enjoy a renaissance—sparked by a goth girl with purple hair—that is, if she doesn’t end up in the back of a lorry to be dragged to a place where her cries will be ignored.