Don’t PLUs ever travel?

The acronym stands for ‘People Like Us’, which is to say reasonably cultured, well-behaved, well-dressed, well-spoken folk, the only minority that can be abused with impunity in Britain.

Any British comedian knows he can count on getting easy laughs by simply mimicking educated diction, and no one minds when hearing vicious and unfunny jokes about the toffs.

The PLUs retaliate by striking snobbish attitudes and cracking jokes about the proles, but seldom in public and never in pubs. Make fun of chaps raping their vowels there, and you’ll get punched – no exceptions (good job Penelope never goes to pubs).

Yet every time we drive down to Folkestone on the way to France, we comment on the complete absence of PLUs at the Channel Tunnel terminal. We talked about this once, and Penelope opined that PLUs don’t drive to the Continent. They fly.

However, exactly the same observation can be made at Heathrow, even in the VIP lounge. Every style of legible clothes, tattoos and objectionable accents is represented there, and hardly anything else.

The other day Penelope upped the stakes by suggesting that PLUs take private planes, but since we’ve never been able to afford such luxuries, those fortunate fat cats are certainly not ‘like us’. And in general, class distinctions mostly have to do with culture and style, not money – especially in free-market economies, where refined culture is rather a hindrance.

As Paul Fussell correctly remarked in his seminal 1983 book Class, when JFK said Nixon had no class, he wasn’t talking about money. This must-read book convincingly debunks claims to classlessness often heard in the US.

When we finally get to our European destinations, we have little reason to be proud of being British. Go to Amsterdam, for example, and you’ll see crowds of drunk, drugged up Britons shuttling between coffeeshops (called ‘opium dens’ in the past) and knocking shops. The latter display their wares in ground-floor windows, with gaggles of Britons gawking and trying to decide which STD (called VD in the past) they’d rather contract.

Many bars and restaurants in Prague and elsewhere exhibit signs saying “No British parties”. The owners clearly don’t believe the profits from selling cisterns of lager make up for the smashed furniture, puddles of vomit on the floor, and regular customers being scared away for ever.

And Parisians wince in disgust watching British visitors swill beer and eat nothing but chips in top seafood restaurants (personal observation). One can almost lipread the locals whispering “vulgaire”.

Such is the background against which I evaluate a comment from a regular reader who himself is definitely a PLU — despite being a Scotsman and an Orthodox believer to boot. “Most Americans are vulgar,” he writes. I agree, but with a minor proviso: most American tourists are vulgar, just as most British tourists are prole louts.

Having lived in the US for 15 years and worked in the advertising industry, that paragon of vulgarity, I can testify that most Americans are different in their native habitat. In fact, even the lower classes there treat one another with the kind of civility one has to climb up the social ladder to encounter in Britain.

It’s true that most Americans one meets are woefully ignorant, but let him who has ever chatted with our own comprehensively educated masses cast the first stone.

I also know several Americans who live in France, and they are indistinguishable from our French friends, more or less. I certainly wouldn’t call any of them vulgar, and all of them speak better French than I do.

However, certain traits of the American national character may indeed lead an educated European to the conclusion reached by my PLU reader. Most of these traits come from ideological egalitarianism, with the words “all men are created equal” having by now seeped into the national DNA.

For example, one doesn’t need to have a decibel meter to notice that American tourists tend to talk loudly in public places, much more so than Britons do while they are still sober. When you are in a crowded restaurant, you can often hear every word spoken by Americans sitting at the other end of the large room.

Phonetics may have something to do with that: American sounds are formed deeper in the throat and chest cavity, and hence may take more force to get out. However, I’ve known many soft-spoken Americans in various walks of life: from what passes for aristocracy there to my advertising colleagues.

It’s more likely that the Enlightenment phrase “all men are created equal” has expanded its meaning to “equally interesting”. Thus Americans have been conditioned to assume that anything they say must be of interest not only to their interlocutors but to everyone within earshot. If so, it’s polite to speak loudly enough for the innocent bystanders not to miss a single word.

There you have it: what sounds like vulgar brashness to a Briton may in fact be good manners to a chap weaned on the Declaration of Independence.

It’s not only the volume of American speech but also the style of it that may reinforce the impression of crudeness. The style is also traceable to the aforementioned document: Americans are ideologically committed to using demotic speech.

This is a useful reminder of the universal truth I often mention in various contexts: you can only ever level down, not up. Since the American masses can’t all talk with the patrician style and erudition of people like William F. Buckley, the latter feel obliged to pay verbal obeisance to the former.

This may explain why American speech tends to be more idiomatic than British. Idioms are clichéd phrases to be shared by everyone equally. They are the verbal expression and reinforcement of uniformity, that toxic post-Enlightenment gift that keeps on giving. And since Americans correctly see their country as the flagship of modernity, they like to run idiomatic buntings up the mast as a statement of identity.

Buckley, incidentally, was an interesting illustration to another part of my reader’s comment: “most of those [Americans] who aren’t vulgar are précieux ridicules, like the notorious ‘Boston Brahmins’.”

Since American culture is youthful by comparison to Europe, it tends to display certain provincial parvenu characteristics. These can be summed up in the phrase “if you got it, flaunt it”, the neatest encapsulation of bad taste I can think of. Acting in that spirit, educated Americans are more likely than their British counterparts to show off their culture, specifically the verbal part of it.

Buckley’s articles, books and talk show first taught me how to relate my conservative instincts to corresponding thought, for which I’m eternally grateful. However, he had a tendency to show off his stupendous vocabulary in a rather strained fashion, while trying at the same time to use enough demotic phraseology to preempt too many accusations of snobbery.

That too earned my gratitude because Buckley forced me to go to the dictionary, thereby expanding my own vocabulary. But I can see how British wielders of large lexicons might have felt that was laying it on a bit too thick.

Getting back to the question in the title, PLUs do travel. But these days they are so vastly outnumbered that they get lost in a sea of huddled masses yearning to be well-travelled. But that’s modernity for you, which is another proviso I’d like to add to the comments of my PLU reader.

“The cultural influence of the USA has been disastrous for the rest of the world,” he writes. I’d add just a few words to that statement: “…inasmuch as America spearheads post-Enlightenment modernity”. In other words, America is neither the disease nor the cure. It’s a symptom.

P.S. “With notable exceptions” is a disclaimer I may not always offer but always mean when generalising about various nations and their character.

P.P.S. Headline in The Mail: “Agony for boxer Francis Ngannou as his 15-month-old son Kobe dies just weeks after his heavyweight megafight with Anthony Joshua.”

I hope you’ll join me in protesting against fights between babies and heavyweight boxers. Alternatively, join me in wishing that our papers had sub-editors who’d know how to clarify antecedents in sentences.