Sunday, Nov. 16, 2003

Why We're Marching

By LAURA BARTON

The flags have been strung along the mall between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace, the Stars and Stripes dancing a lazy waltz with the Union Jack in the watery November light. The streets have been swept, the streetlights polished, the palace guest rooms plumped and aired. But into the frame of this handsome picture will march tens of thousands of dissenters. We'll be snaking through the streets of London this week in one great hissing body, along Holborn and the length of Aldwych, on to Trafalgar Square. We'll be angry. And we'll be venting mostly at one man: George W. Bush.

This viperous throng can't be dismissed as one of those dreadlocked, manifoldly pierced mobs that convene at G-8 summits and punk-metal shows. It'll be more like February's antiwar march, when everyone from schoolchildren to pensioners to Barbour-jacketed middle Englanders mingled with the stilt-walkers and the henna-haired on the streets of London. Even my most apathetic friends, those who would sooner not be roused from their comfortable office blocks on a wintry afternoon, have every intention of trekking into central London to jeer the President.

I'll be there too. Since I have just spent three honeyed weeks on holiday in California, it might seem a little contradictory for me to say that. But though our grist is principally with President Bush — we don't like him or his war — for some of us the line between anti-Bushism and anti-Americanism is becoming blurred. Upon hearing that the President and his circus were coming to town, I felt the way many of the residents of Hartlepool on the northeast coast must have when they learned that 13 redundant and reportedly toxic U.S. Navy "ghost ships" were sailing toward their docks to be decontaminated and dismantled. Must we always do America's dirty work? So I'll be on the Mall with the rest of the welcoming committee, ensuring that George W. gets a taste of good, old-fashioned British hospitality.

Our objections to the state visit, with its kowtowing and red carpetry, say as much about our feelings toward Tony Blair as they do about our feelings toward Bush. It's hard to describe how far Blair has fallen in our estimation since the vim-filled days of 1997, when he was elected and partied with our Britpop stars and our lungs barely felt big enough for all the fresh air being breathed into them. It was the first time my friends and I were old enough to vote (I'm now 26). We had lived most of our lives under a Conservative government and were itching to shake off its fusty gray mantle. We really thought Blair and New Labour would change the world for the better. Over the intervening six years Blair has disappointed my generation many times, but it was the war with Iraq and the love-in with the Bush Administration that sealed it. He isn't ours any more.

So now we're fed up with our government and our monarchy's willingness to draw Bush to the British bosom. And we're none too happy about Bush's plans to treat our country like a photo opportunity for his 2004 campaign. But what is really different this time is that today we don't feel, as we once did, that in Blair we have a mouthpiece for the nation. We don't trust him, in his little tête-à-tête with Bush, to put forward our opinions. And so we have concluded that the only way to make ourselves heard is through megaphoned chants and soundly stamped feet.

Of course it is impossible to deny the British passion for America. We wear it like a pink-cheeked teenage crush, casting low, lingering glances over the Atlantic. We adore its films, its music, its television shows. We have fallen for its intoxicating twang, its ghetto fabulousness, its Jennifer Aniston hair. We still love to take our holidays across the pond, eat syrupy short stacks of pancakes at diner counters and buy hot dogs on street corners, the way we dream real Americans do.

But none of that matters so much right now. Though our hearts still beat for the land of the free and the home of the brave, we fear something larger is at stake — that Bush's War on Terror is not about liberating the oppressed so much as spreading homogeny, ironing out those troublesome creases to create a smooth, uniform way of life in which our wants and needs and opinions are all chosen from U.S.-approved merchandisers. We worry that America values diversity (and three weeks in California do remind you how multicultural the U.S. can be) because it means more things to sell. After all, a world that aspires to the same broad set of dreams is so much easier to bring into line; if we all dance to different versions of the same tune, it makes the Pied Piper's job a whole lot easier.

We British are famed for our stubborn eccentricities, our gleeful idiosyncrasies. And this week, what we will be saying with our raised voices, our hastily scrawled placards and our makeshift costumes, is that we don't want to be part of Bush's dream factory. We will not hop along in his wake asking to play. We are not another star for his spangled banner.