London in May

I visited London in mid May, but never got around to publishing this post until now.  The purpose of the trip was to visit Chris, an old friend from Sewanee who works in finance there.

The flight into England was one of the most beautiful that I have taken yet.  The plane coasted over the French countryside, the English Channel, and then the island of England.  Though the day was bright and clear, low woolly clouds hung over the farmland, an irregular patchwork of green and yellow fields knitted through with lines of trees.  When I landed, my time in London began with a few pints.

I spent the following day in the London History Museum, which exhibits artifacts from the city from when it was a bunch of stinking cavemen squatting in a marsh to its place as a modern international capital.  The exhibits on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were the most interesting, especially in terms of city planning and growth.  London's government and engineers had to support a city of millions without modern medicine, transportation, plumbing, electricity, and trash services.  How they somehow made it work was fascinating, and after many hours, I wandered over to St. Paul's.

That night, I met Chris, his girlfriend, and one of her friends at a restaurant that serves large platters of sliced steak, fries, and a green salsa made of garlic, parsley, and butter that would make an torn old shirt taste great.  After ordering and enjoying a few bottles of wine, we made friends with the neighboring tables.  Next to us, a girl was introducing her boyfriend to her parents for the first time.  The conversation was painfully awkward -- they had obviously not drunk enough for the occasion -- so we stepped in the discussion, offering observations about England, American coffee, history, and so forth.  It broke the ice, and even the father was laughing by the end.  I hope that they will look back on the dinner not as that awkward first engagement, but as that time some nutty American drunk crashed dinner.

The evening reinforced my theory that everyone should learn a new language.  Not only for reasons of understanding different people and cultures, but because speaking another language will inevitably score the occasional free beer and allow you to flirt with waitresses -- women who are paid to talk to you -- around the world.  Our waitress was from Rome, beautiful and warm as most Romans are, and I only regretted I didn't have more time in London for a little romance and a side of steak.

Over the following days, I made brief visits to the Globe and the Renaissance galleries at the V&A with various friends.  We walked through a photography exhibit at the Tate that displayed photographs of the nineteenth century British campaign in Afghanistan alongside photographs of the recent years of conflict there.  While the photographs were fantastic and the exhibit enlightening, at in the final room a video was playing that showed the modern photographer at work while he discussed the causes, effects, and state of the war in Afghanistan.  Like many modern artists, the message at the core of his work was a misconstrued derivative of politics.  Throughout the video he complained about and denounced political situations that he presented in purely in black and white terms, as if the global stage could be reduced to a system of morality as clear as Star Wars.  Moreover, when the artist produces no evidence to support such conclusions -- that is besides the photographs of an ugly country that he personally took and selected -- the argument suffers further.  Photographs can be used as evidence to support a case, but they rarely form a case alone, especially in international politics.  Policy dictates action and is one of many causal course for the physical appearance of a country.  I doubt the Afghanistan was rife with rainbows, waterfalls, and butterflies before 2003.  It was probably as brutal a place as when the photographer found it in 2010.

On Saturday, we drank cider and ate ostrich burgers in the markets, and the saw wedding led out of Southwark Cathedral with bells and bagpipes.  After wandering through the city on a cloudy, blustering day, we went to Brick Street that evening for a curry.  Lining the sides of street are curry houses, each one displaying signs and reviews touting their authenticity and superiority to their neighbors.  As you walk down Brick Lane, young men run out of each restaurant and try to convince you to eat there.  This is when you negotiate your dinner, often with four or five representatives trying to outdo each other.  We arranged for two rounds of beer, rice, gnan bread, and a curry for £10 before even walking into the restaurant.  After a vindaloo that would make your eyeballs sweat, we had a big night on the town.

On Sunday afternoon, we went to Evensong at Westminster Abbey.  Father Lawrence's son, Ben, is one of the Queen's singers, so as friends and family, we were allowed to sit in the choir directly across from the performers.  Unlike many old churches, especially those in Florence, Westminster has kept its ornate, enclosed choir that a rood screen separates from the western nave.  The rood screen separates the massive vault within the nave into semi-discrete spaces, which render the whole more beautiful and rational.  At the beginning of Evensong, the singers approached the choir from the nave hidden and singing plainsong.  It was the most beautiful part of the service.

Monday was my last day in London, and I spent it at the Imperial War Museum meditating on the horror and the glory of war.  War demands the best of individuals and countries; they must survive through ingenuity, strength, and perseverance.  In the twentieth-century, technology developed alongside ideologies of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism, leading to the will and power to kill human beings on a massive scale. Such technology reached its zenith with atomic weapons, which have rendered the amassing of troops and by implication warfare on a large industrial scale obsolete.

Since war can no longer be waged on a large, industrial scale, it has been regulated to other sectors besides the military, most notably the economies of countries.  Aggressive conflict is more rare and fought with scalpels rather than broadswords, and terrorism and genocide have become the unfortunate recourse.  During WWI, 90% causalities were soldiers, now 90% of war casualties are civilians.  There will never be a world without war; aggression and fear are too deeply rooted in humankind.  Rules of engagement will last only until someone learns how to use them to their advantage against an enemy.  The solution?