DOES ANY COUNTRY have more reasons to be proud of itself than Great Britain? Twenty-five years ago the United Kingdom was a basketcase. Its economy was a shambles, the IMF had to take over its fiscal policy, and its people lived in cold flats with bad plumbing. Today, Britain has one of the most vibrant economies in the world. Unemployment is lower than in Europe, and investment is higher. The nation’s capital is gleaming, its teeth are healthy, and its culture is dynamic — the Academy Awards ceremony had more British accents than Harrods. Yet Britain is tongue-tied on one subject: itself.
Granted, the country can still put on a mighty display of jingoism. If you are watching a race on the BBC and a British runner comes in 11th, don’t expect to find out who ranked in the top 10. If a British au pair kills an American baby, the Brits can still work themselves into a tabloid-thumping lather defending the au pair. But Britain can’t seem to speak intelligently about its national accomplishments. Its elites are so afraid of coming off like John Bull superpatriots, they can’t express mature national pride or subtle ideas about their national identity. Not that we are any better. America is similarly inarticulate when it comes to itself. It’s just that our shortcomings are not so on display, because we are not throwing a big national celebration to herald the millennium.
It was Margaret Thatcher who came up with the idea for the Millennium Exhibition that is now being built in Greenwich. In 1987, just after her third electoral victory, Mrs. Thatcher declared, “You’ve got to make the millennium some kind of target. All of us are trying to think of [a celebration] now.” It’s not hard to imagine the direction Mrs. Thatcher was headed. The 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition sealed Britain’s place as leader of the Industrial Revolution. The 1951 Festival of Britain celebrated Britain’s emergence from the trauma of World War II. A Thatcherite millennial exhibition would pay homage to Britain’s rediscovered spirit of enterprise, which had reversed the course of national decline.
But Thatcher’s government didn’t survive to do much planning. Under John Major, responsibility for the project was picked up by deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine, an ambitious wet. Heseltine went ahead with the technical planning — he selected a site, approved the massive Dome that will be the exposition’s central feature, and began the prerequisite environmental cleanup. But characteristically, the Majorites gave almost no thought to what should go inside the Dome or what the exposition’s message should be.
A year ago, Tory ministers held secret meetings with the opposition. It was clear that Labour was about to win the coming election, and the government wanted to persuade the Labourites to go ahead with the project once in office. Most of the shadow cabinet was opposed, but John Prescott, an old fashioned, gruff, pint-o’-beer guy who would soon be Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister, was enthusiastic. He got conservative journalist Simon Jenkins, a member of the exposition commission, to write a letter to Blair to sell him on the plan. Cleverly perceiving the essence of Blairism, Prescott told Jenkins to frame the letter around Blair’s children. What sort of experience would children have in the Dome? How would they be inspired? Blair was won over, and the project was off to the races — imbued in turn with the styles of three governments: the virile and sometimes grating big think of Thatcher, the empty technique of Major, and the mushy big think of Blair.
Blair assigned the project to his minister with ego but without portfolio Peter Mandelson. Mandelson is the resident genius of British politics, a sort of campaign guru and policy maven rolled into one. He is also the grandson of Herbert Morris, who was the head of the 1951 Festival of Britain. As Mandelson reminds people every 15 seconds or so, that festival met with tremendous scorn when it was first proposed. But it became enormously popular with the British people and ultimately quite profitable for the Exchequer.
It was Mandelson’s job to figure out what should go inside the Dome. Now, some might argue that a government has no business rounding up $ 1.3 billion for a big exposition if it has no idea what it hopes to accomplish beyond throwing a telegenic party. But the decision to go ahead had been made. The Festival of Britain had been about the permanent features of Britain, the qualities that saw the nation through crises like the Second World War. So it had pavilions on the Land of Britain, the Sea and Ships, the Minerals of the Island, and one on the national legends and spirit called the Lion and the Unicorn. Mandelson’s 2000 Dome, by contrast, has themes but no central vision.
Part of the problem is that most of the planning was assigned to architects and designers. Wonderful though they may be as individuals, these people as a group are about as anti-nationalist in their thinking as anyone can be. They spend their professional lives working on various projects around the world, then moving on. I hey are more connected to the floating global community of show business than they are to any nation. So in the 2000 exposition, unlike its predecessors, Britishness is lost under platitudes about the shrinking global village, the fragility of the earth, and the brotherhood of man. There is no reason for the British government to be spending money to add to the flood of noble sentiments on these themes. Meanwhile, the one section of the show that is devoted to British identity — annoyingly called uk@now — is being designed by a French architect.
In addition to being anti-nationalist, show-business people and designers are averse to making any argument, to coming to a point. Their idea of a festival is apt to be a spectacle with nothing to say.
The supposed theme for the Millennium Exhibition is “Time’s Arrow,” which is fitting enough for Greenwich and the year 2000 but doesn’t actually tie you down to anything. So the installations, which are still only half designed, have names like Dreamscape, Serious Play, and Spirit Level. Dreams, play, and spirit are fine. For the designers, these concepts lend themselves to eye-catching display. But they are also vague, intangible, and conducive to sentimentality. Is it possible to imagine leaving an installation called Spirit Level with anything more than a sense of fuzzy uplift?
It’s also significant that the designers have renamed the whole affair. It is no longer called the Millennium Exhibition. Now it is the Millennium Experience. An exhibition suggests some authorial figure presenting visitors with an organized body of information, which they can accept or argue with or ignore. An experience, on the other hand, is more democratic and less hierarchical, and it has no unifying point. People just wander around and experience whatever they experience. Some sections promise interesting bits of knowledge — how the body works, what the schoolroom of the future will be like, how environmental damage is assessed — but it is hard to see how this will be distinct from the stuff people can pick up in a book or on the Internet or at another exposition or theme park.
Inside the Dome, the dominant feature will be an enormous sculpture: a ten- story, seated human figure, watching a five-story baby crawl. This figure would seem to require the designers to make a concrete decision: male or female? At the moment, they have finessed this. The figure is androgynous. It looks a little like a puffy man, but it could be a formless woman. The mocking British press has fallen all over itself to come up with names for the thing — the “boobless floozy” and the “hollow hermaphrodite” being two of my favorites. Pictures of 1 million children will be pasted on its thigh.
On February 24, Tony Blair presented the general outlines of the Dome Experience at the Royal Festival Hall, the spot where the 1951 festival plans had been unveiled. The British press responded with a tidal wave of scorn. This started out as a low rumble echoing down Fleet Street, then built slowly and relentlessly upon itself, with words of disgust piling on smirks, cynicism, and ridicule, until it became a towering wall of bad vibes. And now it has come crashing down with a deafening noise on the head of Peter Mandelson.
Critics hit the project from every conceivable angle: for being too Disneylike; for falling short of Disney standards; for diverting attention from the needs of the poor; for being grandiose; for being pop-culture obsessed; for being too cheerful; for being anti-environmental. Blair tried to strike back at the “cynics and snipers,” but the onslaught was relentless. Still missing, moreover, was any suggestion of what an exposition marking the millennium should be. Or what sort of ethic could unify the British nation.
Finally, a few brave heads began to poke up above the parapets. “I am a member of the most reviled and outcast minority on these islands, harried through the streets, silently pitied by generous-minded relatives and the object of sniggering derision at parties,” wrote one Andrew Marr in the Independent: “I am rather in favor of the Millennium Dome.” Eventually, some editorial pages began wondering how the country could make the best of what had been begun.
But Britain — like the United States, one suspects — has lost its capacity for intelligent national pride. Instead, the Dome Experience will exemplify some of the most recognizable aspects of contemporary culture. It will be a mixture of visual wizardry and verbal backwardness. It will accumulate great masses of diverse information and synthesize them very poorly. It will be technically amazing but largely ahistorical. It will probably be fun, but it won’t be memorable. It will be flimsy and shallow, dumbed down for the sake of phony populism.
Past expositions presented visitors with an interpretation of their national identity and helped them integrate recent accomplishments and current aspirations into the story. All of that is missing from the Millennium Experience, and only disjointed images are left.
David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
