Blighted Albion

Via everyone's favorite "smart conservative" Ross Douthat, I see that Zadie Smith is sounding a lot like Jonathan Coe in The Closed Circle (as well as someone called Theodore Dalrymple) in her take on contemporary England. They all seem to think that it's undergone a weird transformation in the last 10 or 20 years, and that whereas English people used to be polite and well-behaved and basically content, they're now all rude and angry and antisocial. And it seems sort of true. I don't have any big thoughts on how or why this has happened but it seems like more and more people are starting to notice it.

Wait, so the part about not having any big thoughts on this was true at the time i wrote it, but untrue 5 seconds later. I began to notice something in the air in English culture right around 1993, but i thought of it as positive. It had something to do with the football league getting richer and more open to foreigners, and something to do with London starting to be a hip cultural capital type place again, and something to do with alot of new buildings going up and French and Italian cafes popping up on every street corner. And people seemed better looking than they had previously been, a trend which seems to have continued to this day. Anyhoo, I know this is all impossibly vague, but i kind of think that stuff is not totally unrelated to what people like ZS and JC are identifying now in a much more negative way. And the way it's related, maybe, is that the idea of a world where you could get rich easily and watch satellite football and eat Italian food outside somehow got confused with the idea that there were no longer any rules at all, and all the norms of civilized society sort of got thrown out the window. This is all very jumbled up and is starting to sound weirdly conservative but what you can do? Help me out here.