John Lloyd

There’s some shuffling of feet going on in Western governments, about this whole freedom of speech and the press thing that democracies are pledged to defend. And who wouldn’t shuffle, after the events of the past week, and of the past 30-plus years, in the Islamic world.

Two quite deliberate provocations were the immediate cause of the deadly riots. One, a video called the Innocence of Muslims, is so technically and dramatically bad that on first viewing it would seem to be something done in satirical vein by Sacha Baron Cohen, all false beards and ham dialogue. The other, the publication of a series of cartoons of Mohammad in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, showed Mohammad in various nude poses. Whatever their quality, they do not just make waves – they make deaths. We can no longer pretend otherwise. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses taught us too much.

The French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said last week that “freedom of expression must not be infringed … but is it pertinent, is it intelligent, in this context to pour oil on the fire. The answer is no.” This formulation, repeated in different ways across the governments of the democratic world, says that states will and must uphold the principle of freedom; but that freedom, once conceded, should be used with care.

The question, which he turns back in large part on the media, is: How should we define “intelligent?” What is an “intelligent” use of freedom in this context?

It certainly does not apply to what the filmmakers did. The Innocence of Muslims seems to have been made by a group of Coptic Christians living in the U.S. The Copts number several million in Egypt (the figure is hotly disputed, with official sources saying there are no more than 4 million, while Copts claim as many as 14 million). And they are like other minorities in the area: Some among them have done well in business and the professions, yet they labor under both official discrimination and popular suspicion. The main producer of the video, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, allegedly hid his identity behind the name of Sam Bacile and claimed he was an Israeli Jew – thus shifting the blame to the most unpopular Middle Eastern minority among Muslims (and putting them at even more risk), deflecting anger away from his own community.

Once unmasked as a Copt, he has put his own community in greater danger than ever. That community has seen what protection it enjoyed under the presidency of Hosni Mubarak weaken in the new order: A Coptic church was bombed in Alexandria on New Year’s Day 2011, and 23 worshippers died. This is a community on very short sufferance: Bacile- Basseley, having failed to palm the fault off on the Jews, has appreciably shortened it further. Intelligent he certainly wasn’t.

Stéphane Charbonnier, publishing director of Charlie Hebdo, the weekly satirical magazine that published a series of lewd cartoons on Mohammad, argues that:

I live under French law, I don’t live under the law of the Koran … it’s plain to see that the sole subject that poses a problem is radical Islam. When we attack the Catholic right, very strongly, no-one talks about it in the newspapers. But we’re not allowed to laugh at Muslim fundamentalists?

In Charbonnier’s argument, radical Islamists are special only because they threaten random violence, as well as targeted violence against those who don’t consider them special. The first full expression of this was the reaction to The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, which used verses said to be uttered by Mohammad commending the worship of female goddesses – verses later retracted by him. Western scholars accept the story; contemporary Muslim scholars usually reject it.

Rushdie, as he makes clear in his just-published memoir, Joseph Anton, bent Verses to fictional purposes only, and thought little of any offense: He saw the Koran, as all religious writing, not as revelations but as texts of their time, created by fallible humans with particular ends in view. He, from a largely secular Muslim family in India, was the first high-profile target of radical Islamism in the West. He lived behind Special Branch guard for over a decade, shuttled from house to house, the target of energetically manufactured hatred. After Rushdie, we cannot say we don’t know the costs of provocation. Was it intelligent to rack them up again?

There is, finally, the issue of what we, the media, make of the freedom we claim. The British philosopher Onora O’Neill has argued that the concept of freedom of expression and of the press, passionately proposed by radicals and liberals from the 17th century to our own day, had to be combined with accountability and a sense of responsibility or it could itself become tyrannous: ”freedom of the press does not require a licence to deceive”, she writes. Where there is clear deception, or worse, clear provocation, the media also acquire a license to kill. An awesome power – but an intelligent one? The answer is certainly no.

The makers of Innocence of Muslims and the little group that put out Charlie Hebdo are testing the extremity of freedom. They live on the margins and have less to lose from giving offense than a large media group embroiled in a scandal that might hit its bottom line. Indeed, they have more to gain: Charlie Hebdo tripled its modest circulation with the Mohammad cartoons. In the case of the filmmakers, we can assume a certain measure of revenge. In the case of the magazine, the calculation of increased circulation could not have been absent (it rarely is in journalism). But the main impulse, here as in other issues, is to shock and provoke.

We know enough about our societies to understand that the margins contribute much, sometimes most, to our freedoms. In the past century, these groups have rallied from the margins and been mocked for doing so: women claiming the vote, the colonized claiming independence, minorities claiming equality and the censored claiming a voice. The filmmakers and cartoon publishers are not in line with these groups. They’re not fighting for a great cause. They’re sticking it to the radical Islamists, and watching them howl.

And yet democratic societies, if they are to be true to themselves, have little choice. What we believe in is freedom of the individual – freedom to do much that is deeply unintelligent, as well as to produce intellectual marvels. Onora O’Neill draws a distinction between powerful media corporations and the single voice of the individual, and privileges the latter: ”we have good reasons for allowing individuals to express opinions even if they are invented, false, silly, irrelevant or plain crazy.” She did not, perhaps, foresee the day when a greater ability to cause mayhem would reside with the silly, false and plain crazy products of individuals and tiny groups, rather than the behemoths of the media.

But that is what is happening. We, most of all in the media, have to consider responsibility as the indispensable adjunct to freedom. But in the end, we must protect the right to free expression against those whose demand for “respect” cannot be assuaged. Little that was intelligent has been published, and nothing but evil has come of it in the short term. But having fought for centuries to achieve freedom to say what we wish, it would be dumb to give up on it. We’re stuck with liberty.

PHOTO: Bangladeshi Muslims chant slogans at a protest rally during a nationwide strike in Dhaka, September 23, 2012. The daylong strike was called by 12 Islamist groups protesting against a U.S.-made anti-Islam film and a cartoon published in a French weekly on Saturday that they say insults the Prophet Mohammad, local media reported. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj 

When the editor of the Irish Daily Star, Mike O’Kane, was asked about his decision to publish a few of the topless photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge, wife of Prince William – a future king of Great Britain, the crown perhaps descending from his grandmother’s snow-white head to his own prematurely balding pate – he replied: “Kate is not the future queen of Ireland, so really the only place where this is causing fury seems to be in the UK, and they are very, very tasteful pictures.”

Alfonso Signorini, editor of Chi (“Who”) magazine in Italy, answered the same question by saying, “first of all it is a journalistic scoop … surely it’s unusual to see a future Queen of England topless? I think it’s the first time in history, so it deserves an extraordinary edition.” (He has 200 pictures of the couple and plans to do more.) Chi is the top gossip magazine in Italy, and like Closer, the original publisher of the pictures, in France, is in the magazine division of Mondadori, owned by Silvio Berlusconi.

Signorini, a former classics professor, is also a TV host and did his boss great service last year when he interviewed, with almost paternal sympathy, Karima El Mahroug, otherwise known as Ruby Rubacuore (“Heartstealer”), an exotic dancer in a Milanese nightclub. Berlusconi is alleged to have paid her, while she was under 18, for sex at one of his “bunga-bunga” parties when he was still Italian prime minister. The charge, of encouraging underage prostitution, is now being heard in a court in Milan. Signorini’s interview, dwelling on her tough childhood and her gratitude to Berlusconi for his wholly platonic friendship and financial assistance – “He behaved like a father to me, I swear” – was itself a journalistic scoop: the first time a prime minister of Italy had been revealed as one who gave selfless succor to a penniless young exotic dancer.

This is steamy company for a Duchess of Cambridge who may ascend to the most magnificent monarchy still extant in the Western world, and unsurprisingly she and her husband want none of it. Much has been made of Prince William’s particular revulsion at the photographs (now widely available on the Web), since they are said to recall for him the hounding of his mother, Princess Diana, and the circumstances of her death – crashing in a Paris tunnel in 1996, pursued by paparazzi.

Diana was surely a victim, and the media did consume her. But she was a victim as Marilyn Monroe was, one of dazzling beauty who was able – from a more solid, better-protected base than Monroe – to set some of the terms of her engagement with the media, turn their avidity to her own ends and use the vast drafts of hot air generated by the media coverage to raise her to global supercelebrity status.

Kate isn’t like that (though it’s early days yet). Where Diana dressed in Armani, Kate buys dresses from stores like Reiss and Issa London, “stores where regular folks shop”, as the Boston Globe writer Beth Teitell put it. The image given is the stylish good-girl look. There’s no turbulence, it seems, no demons clamoring to go public.

But Kate and Diana meet in this: They exist(ed) in an age where media hunger for celebrity images and news remains colossal and where a British princess cannot avoid the market she creates by her mere existence. That market is mainly for images, spiced by whatever small verbal offerings she may make – usually carefully tutored banalities. The market for Diana was worth many millions: her presence on a front page or a magazine cover added tens of thousands to circulation. The long, slow scandal of the breakdown of her marriage put many millions more in the accounts of media owners and made royal correspondents the highest paid, highest status journalists in Britain. A large media hole had been left by Diana’s death 15 years ago last month. The law of media need meant that Kate had to be brought in to fill as much of it as she was able.

The topless pictures have greatly expanded that ability. She has been made, much against her and her husband’s will, an overtly sexual being, the image of whose largely naked body is now the subject for men’s envious or derisive conversations worldwide. (I recently overheard two during a train journey.) Many men play the erotic game of mentally stripping attractive women they see. This has now been done for them, and men’s gaze now will be, for Kate, much more freighted with carnal knowledge than it was before. For one who has not sought that, life from now on will be less pleasant.

No help for it. Even if a court case against the photographer is successful, the image is on the loose. A small mercy for the duchess is that the British tabloids, the main tormentor-allies of her husband’s mother, are in full patriotic cry in her defense. “Prince William’s wife Kate is entitled to feel fury and disgust at those lowlife rags printing pictures of her topless”, fumed the Sun on Sunday, with never a blush. Richard Desmond, who had a porn empire and publishes the raciest British tabloid, the Daily Star, was still more anxious to condemn – the more because the Irish Daily Star, early promoter of the topless pictures, is published in a joint venture between his Northern & Shell Co and Dublin-based Independent News & Media. Desmond says he will close the joint venture, which may mean the end of the newspaper. What more could a man do to show his horror?

The sound of stable doors being firmly bolted was heard all up and down the British Isles this past weekend. But the horse was cavorting elsewhere, across the Web and in editorial offices across the world, where editors see a rare opportunity to put on circulation in a dead time for sales. Kate’s discretion, nice smile and good-girl outfits all went for naught before the power of a long lens and a hungry market. The first future topless Queen of England has stepped into a different world.

PHOTO: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, arrives along with Britain’s Prince William, at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur September 13, 2012. The royal couple are on their second stop of a nine-day tour of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee. REUTERS/Mohd Rasfan/Pool

Western youth are not what they used to be. Richer, better educated, more independent-minded than their forebears –they were once equipped for all conceivable futures.

But now, what future can they conceive?

These are the young men and women for whom the forward march of the generations has halted. Social normalcy was once defined as things only getting better. But now, not. What mixture of circumstances, what global alchemy, can put them back on that track once more?

For us in the older generations (40 years old and up), it is heartbreaking, even guilt-making, to hear of friends’ sons and daughters failing to find or to keep work. We see some of this firsthand, as increasing numbers of young people rely on or move in with their families, sometimes by preference and often out of necessity. Richard Settersten, a professor of human development at Oregon State University, says his research shows the young are:

“not hooked into jobs that provide decent wages, that provide insurance, that are stable and secure … the need to provide for growing adults is placing new and significant strains on a lot of American families, even middle-class families.”

One couple I know, medical researchers in London, have their early- and mid-twenties son and daughter at home. Two of their kids’ friends have also joined them, caught homeless when they could no longer afford an apartment and could not live with distant parents if they were to keep up the unpaid internships they hope will be transmuted into paying jobs.

Some working-class kids got an education their fathers and mothers did not have – and are now finding it doesn’t guarantee a job. For others, even the service and clerical jobs that have largely replaced manual and skilled work are shrinking relentlessly.

Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, devoted part of his somewhat opaque speech in Jackson’s Hole at the end of last month to the need for the Fed to do more to tackle U.S. unemployment: It’s at 8.1 percent, and for youth (16-24) at 17.1 percent.

The rain in Spain is much harder on the young. More than half of Spanish young people – over 53 percent – have no job and little prospect of getting one in an economy in negative growth. The U.N.’s International Labor Organization’s figures, out this past week, showed a youth jobless rate of 17.5 percent this year in developed economies: That figure is due to fall a little, the ILO forecasts, but largely because “discouraged” kids give up on jobs altogether. The ILO had earlier called these people, worldwide, a “scarred” generation for whom jobs were no longer thought even an option – or if they were, they were precarious and low paid.

The West has been, and in some places still is, a great new jobs machine, and remains inventive, entrepreneurial and driven. Yet Indian and Chinese companies are poking into the old Western heartlands: Land Rover and Jaguar, British brands for decades, are now owned by the Indian company Tata; and Volvo, which defined itself as Swedish in its solidity and security, belongs to the Chinese company Zhejiang Geely, which plans to put future factories in China and to headquarter the company in Shanghai. Huawei is now the largest telecom equipment supplier, having overtaken Sweden’s Ericsson; Haier is among the world’s largest electrical appliance makers; and Lenovo is now pressing Hewlett-Packard for first place in PC production. These moves can bring jobs as well as destroy them, but the creation is less than the destruction. We are reduced to hoping that the large contradictions that run through Chinese society – a slowing economy, a vast gulf in wealth, a restive working class, an empowered middle class and a monopolistic Communist Party – will cause a period of turmoil, which will give us some respite from their relentless economic success.

Yet to see only the fundamental and possible fatal flaws in Chinese politics is to ignore the gathering crisis in our own. Western democratic practice presupposed an active electorate – one generally satisfied with the political arrangements as they are, content to leave most details, even strategies, to a political class without interfering too much. It was willing and able to rationally choose between competing political offers according to government performance.

That isn’t what we have now. The distrust and dislike expressed by Western electorates for their governing and most opposition parties is now intense. Everywhere, if in different degrees of intensity, the crisis is being addressed by cuts to what had been social entitlements. Even where one concedes their necessity, the obvious result is that those with not much get less.

And there seems nothing those who are getting less can do as the rich remain rich and usually take care to get richer.

We are at a critical stage. What to do?

First, start at the other end from the young – at the older middle-aged, who are stepping into pension and other entitlements that will load burdens on to their kids. In a much-discussed column, New York Times writer and former Executive Editor Bill Keller argued that “we should make a sensible reform of entitlements our generation’s cause.” Stanford University founded a Longevity Center six years ago with the explicit mission “to redesign long life,” so that men and women can contribute to (rather than take from) the economy deep into their eighties. Laura Carstensen, the director, says that “to the degree that people reach old age mentally sharp, physically fit, and financially secure, the problems of individual and societal aging fall away” – a statement redolent of American optimism, and a great goal.

Second, we should try to get at the rich. (Some have been got at already, most successfully by themselves.) They should be asked to give large portions of their wealth to help solve national and global problems. But many haven’t. We should make sure they know that their vast wealth will, increasingly, put society – and them – at danger: that increased impoverishment will inflame anger and that the social base for their enjoyment of great wealth will erode. Wealth is often the result of hard work and risk-taking, but coal miners, fishermen and nurses know about that too, and usually die in modest circumstances. Guilt and fear are not to be scorned as engines of change.

And for the youth generations themselves: You have more to fear from despair than from life itself. It’s you who need to generate the energy that turns your collective plight into a space for creativity and innovation. Blaming “them” – the politicians, the elders, the teachers, “society” – is deadly. Deadliest is a turn into crime and violence that sets group against group, the scared majority against the angry minority. The memory of London’s riots a year back should teach you that. Above all, your discouraged generation needs courage.

PHOTO: Job seekers wait in front of the training offices of Local Union 46, the union representing metallic lathers and reinforcing ironworkers, in the Queens borough of New York, April 29, 2012. REUTERS/Keith Bedford 

The political gap between Democrats and Republicans is wide and deep, to the detriment of political accommodation in the United States. An idea to solve this: Dispense with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and let Michelle Obama and Ann Romney run instead. They, at least, agree on some things.

Both think they have been given an “extraordinary privilege.” Both claimed they started married life without much (Obama was the more credible on this); both said they were so much in love (with their husbands) they got married despite their circumstances; and both thought their husbands were men of extraordinary, fine character, and intelligence, dedication and warmth.

This remarkable bipartisanship is, however, the fruit not of a reflection on politics but the thinking of their husbands’ public relations teams on what best would help each in the race to the White House. Both women, who appear to possess intelligence and character, have been corralled ruthlessly into a role that insults those gifts: the political spouse.

Political spouses are – pardon the surrender to temptation – spice: They are there to spice up the campaign and, in both the present cases, to “humanize” men apparently seen as remote. This reading, now passed into unquestioned acceptance by the news media, is an absurdity. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are clearly, recognizably, all too human. Mrs. Romney’s husband is a figure – the hard-driving financier who makes huge sums for his company and for himself – now better known and understood than he has ever been. Mr. Obama is a clever, ambitious lawyer who preferred, at least initially, community work to corporate or private law practice – then went into politics. That most people aren’t either of these doesn’t mean we can’t relate to them. Most people aren’t doctors, farmers or astronauts, but we generally relate positively to them as human beings, without their wives telling us that they’re still in love with them.

The speeches were, as the Romneys like to say, “built” – but not just by them. They were built by the campaign’s public relations strategists engaged in the greatest challenge their craft still has in the contemporary world – convincing the people of the United States to elect their candidate as president of the United States.

Public relations surrounds every post of power in most parts of the world now, and not always for the worse. But for present or prospective first ladies, the daily production that is the public appearances of the president and contender for the presidency can only be a shock in the completeness of the control it exercises. The aspirant for high office cannot be ignorant of what awaits him – even if he may believe he can control more than he will. No matter how savvy the wife, however, her life, in most cases, is largely elsewhere.

Of the 12 U.S. presidencies since the war, one can detect three broad categories of first lady:

1. The not-so-public first lady: She who performs the duties of hostess only when entirely necessary. The retiring Bess Truman, reportedly a hater of the role, is the patroness of this group. Mamie Eisenhower, Pat Nixon, and Barbara and Laura Bush also fall into this category.

2. The semi-public first lady, including Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan and Michelle Obama.

3. The entirely public first lady: a category of one – Hillary Clinton.

Kennedy, whose husband was the first TV president, was also the first TV first lady – presenting her comely form and the redecorated White House to the nation through that medium. After her, from the late sixties on, the first ladies were enrolled more and more in overt political support, a duty shouldered even by shy women like Laura Bush. Mrs. Clinton had the hardest row to hoe in this regard – twice “standing by her man” (in the expression she hated), the second time to be humiliated by the brazenness of his public lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. It did not, however, destroy her and seems to have made her stronger: She is the brightest star in the present U.S. administration and remains a contender for the highest office.

The Europeans, often using the same spin doctors’ advice for their campaigns, are pulled toward American archetypes; and some, in a very minor key compared with the U.S., are of some help. But some have been disasters. Nicolas Sarkozy’s marriage to the singer and model Carla Bruni was the fusion of political and show business celebrity. It contributed to the impression he cared more about wealth and glamour than about France. Worse was the revenge Silvio Berlusconi’s wife, former actor Veronica Lario, wreaked on her unfaithful husband, publicly accusing him of having sex with minors – a charge still being played out in the Italian courts.

The three “best” consorts are or have been men: one, Joachim Sauer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s husband, a professor of chemistry, who hates publicity as much as Bess Truman three-quarters of a century earlier, rarely appears with his wife and certainly gives her no cause for public disquiet. Tim Mathieson, husband of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, is an estate agent who’s not much seen. More positively – indeed, a model for consorts – the late Denis Thatcher was his wife’s greatest fan, supporter and encourager but played no formal public role and slotted neatly (if unfairly) into the much-loved role of boozy old buffer. I once sat in front of him at a press conference his wife gave while running for re-election in 1983: At the hint of a challenge in any reporter’s question, he would audibly mutter “really!” or  “disgraceful!” The prime minister seemed to gain strength from it.

The rest of the world’s first partners take their cue from Germany’s first (invisible) man. Liu Yongqing and Zhang Peili, the wives, respectively, of Chinese President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, have their own careers and occasionally travel, often unsmilingly and always silently, with their husbands. Wen Jiabao is said to have been irritated by his wife’s use of her position to boost her jewelry business, but don’t look to have that discussed in the People’s Daily.

Lyudmila Putin has become less visible over the years. Her husband’s rumored affair with the spy and model Anna Chapman does get an airing in the Russian dissident press but has received no public comment from her. Gursharan Kaur has been married to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for over half a century. She is hardly known outside of her country and little in it. Dilma Rousseff, president of Brazil, is twice divorced.

No other political system in the world inflicts the U.S. order of humiliation on their political leader’s partner. No other culture supports a woman (usually) corralled into making of a marriage a piece of sugar candy. Marriages are an inevitable mixture of love and hate, exhilaration and revulsion, achievement and frustration, admiration and contempt. The first, or would-be first, lady’s speech must contain only the first element in these contrasting pairs.

Only in America. The position of first lady is unique, as is the hypocrisy it demands. Given Ann Romney’s humanizing intervention, Michelle Obama could hardly have stayed home. But wouldn’t they hate it? Shouldn’t they hate it?

PHOTO: REUTERS/Mike Segar; REUTERS/Jason Reed

The great Italian caricaturist Altan had a cartoon on the front of La Repubblica last week, in which an Italian is sinking below the waves, shouting: “I’m drowning!” On the beach, a fat man whose swimsuit sports the German national colors, says: “Zat is how you learn, zpendthrift!”

This in a left-of-center daily that is supportive of the crisis plan of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and has set its face against anti-German populism. The press of the right has been less restrained: A recent front-page photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed her with a hand upraised, perhaps to wave — but vaguely reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s minimalist Nazi salute, with the headline “Fourth Reich.” The article claimed that two world wars and millions of corpses were “not enough to quiet German egomania”. This in Il Giornale, a Milan daily owned by the Berlusconi family.

I smiled at the Altan cartoon on an Italian beach, where I was last week, looking about for signs of desperation. They were not dramatic, but observable. Simply, fewer people came. The soaring cost of petrol, which went over the 2-euro mark for a liter, was generally held to be the main culprit for the reduction in the annual hunt for the sun. It was little problem to hire a beach umbrella, to book a table for dinner, even to park. While most summers the political news is absent or silly, this year the Italian papers chronicled, daily, the fever chart of the Italian and European economy, and it was febrile indeed — now a spurt of optimism, now a stab of doom.

The technocratic government led by Mario Monti, distinguished economist and former European commissioner, has seen little of the beach. The elected politicians, free from the usual business of government or opposition, were active, too: The political scene is as boiling hot as the climate. The left remains fractured and struggles for alliances and unity. The new populists, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars movement, remain attractive to many because of Grillo’s attacks on a partly corrupt political class. Yet he calls for an end to parliamentary politics, having run a blog column with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the prewar dictator, that evoked with approval his description of parliament (which he dissolved) as “deaf and gray.”

In the center, a loose coalition of Christian Democrats and secular liberals invoke the spirit and memory of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy’s long-serving postwar premier — who presided over the rapid recovery of the economy in the fifties and positioned Italy as a founding member of what became the European Union. It seeks to tempt Monti into heading the Christian Democrats and running for elected office after his temporary mandate ends next April.

On the right, the immortal Silvio Berlusconi again dominates attention. The near-universal assumption, one that I shared, that his resignation last November, amid jeers and a collapse in the support for his Forza Italia party, meant his political end underestimated his will for power. Or, say the many cynics, it didn’t take into account his fear that if he does not retain some measure of political power he will finally enter the maw of the justice system, which has tried to nail him for a quarter of a century. He has been addressing the still-faithful around the country, secure (he says) in the love of the people and in his country’s need of him. He is on trial in Milan for encouraging underage prostitution, and this past weekend a German model, Sabina Began, told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that he had impregnated her, and that she lost the child in a miscarriage (he denies it). But this is still a country for old men, and at 75, this old man has the money and the media and evidently the stomach for another fight.

For the moment, though, Italy is Monti’s charge and care, and though he cuts and cuts, warns of hardships to come, and has no charisma in any conventional sense, he remains popular among an electorate desperate for him to succeed. And not just with the people: Both Moody’s and Fitch rating agencies lauded him last week, the latter saying he was “credible” and that if and when he leaves the scene, greater risks return. No hint of a scandal has attended him, and nothing serious of the kind in his cabinet, composed mainly of high-end academics. The political circus around him can look tawdry.

But the beasts in the political circus were chosen by the people. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the main center-left party, Partito Democratico, said in an interview with Repubblica last week that Monti had done a fine job but must stand aside in the spring — for “if the idea catches on that politics is not able to take us out of the crisis, we will put ourselves on the margins of the democracies.” Bersani sometimes struggles to present himself as a credible premier if the left were to win the next elections, but he spoke well here. For Italy to continue under the tutelage of the professors would both further weaken the party system and raise deeper doubts than ever that it could produce an elected, efficient, clean ruling class.

But suppose the political class of any color really is incapable of taking the country out of the crisis? In a speech last week in Rimini to a Catholic youth group, Monti spoke about the need to restore Italians’ faith in the state — a faith that can be regained only if the many Italians who now cheat the taxman cease to do so, and others, including the public broadcaster RAI, stop regarding the avoiders as merely crafty, even admirable, for being so. The country, he said — in a rare flash of drama, even melodrama — was “at war” with the tax cheats. “We can’t broadcast, even subliminally, the degraded values which are destroying our society”

The belief that he seeks to invoke is less in the state and more in a citizenship where everyone exercises mutual responsibilities. This unelected, precise, rather lofty man presents the nature and obligations of democracy better than any elected Italian politician I have heard. Many of these will, indeed, share this thought, but the daily battle for power and attention in a political system as complex and fragmented as the Italian, which gives so many privileges to the elected, leaves too little time and will for the observance of democratic ideals.

Italy has put in place a dictator-expert to make politics safe for elected politicians once more. The paradox is that he is better at articulating democratic necessities than the latter have been. The capacity for these politicians to rise to his level and to make politics serve the electorate, through the bad times which will roll on after Monti, is the test of tests before this country — even, given its size and importance, before Europe. The signs that they will are, as yet, fragile: The shadows of doubts about the future fell across the scorching beaches this summer, and are likely to remain.

The great Italian caricaturist Altan had a cartoon on the front of La Repubblica last week, in which an Italian is sinking below the waves, shouting: “I’m drowning!” On the beach, a fat man whose swimsuit sports the German national colors, says: “Zat is how you learn, zpendthrift!”

This in a left-of-center daily that is supportive of the crisis plan of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and has set its face against anti-German populism. The press of the right has been less restrained: A recent front-page photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed her with a hand upraised, perhaps to wave — but vaguely reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s minimalist Nazi salute, with the headline “Fourth Reich.” The article claimed that two world wars and millions of corpses were “not enough to quiet German egomania”. This in Il Giornale, a Milan daily owned by the Berlusconi family.

I smiled at the Altan cartoon on an Italian beach, where I was last week, looking about for signs of desperation. They were not dramatic, but observable. Simply, fewer people came. The soaring cost of petrol, which went over the 2-euro mark for a liter, was generally held to be the main culprit for the reduction in the annual hunt for the sun. It was little problem to hire a beach umbrella, to book a table for dinner, even to park. While most summers the political news is absent or silly, this year the Italian papers chronicled, daily, the fever chart of the Italian and European economy, and it was febrile indeed — now a spurt of optimism, now a stab of doom.

The technocratic government led by Mario Monti, distinguished economist and former European commissioner, has seen little of the beach. The elected politicians, free from the usual business of government or opposition, were active, too: The political scene is as boiling hot as the climate. The left remains fractured and struggles for alliances and unity. The new populists, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars movement, remain attractive to many because of Grillo’s attacks on a partly corrupt political class. Yet he calls for an end to parliamentary politics, having run a blog column with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the prewar dictator, that evoked with approval his description of parliament (which he dissolved) as “deaf and gray.”

In the center, a loose coalition of Christian Democrats and secular liberals invoke the spirit and memory of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy’s long-serving postwar premier — who presided over the rapid recovery of the economy in the fifties and positioned Italy as a founding member of what became the European Union. It seeks to tempt Monti into heading the Christian Democrats and running for elected office after his temporary mandate ends next April.

On the right, the immortal Silvio Berlusconi again dominates attention. The near-universal assumption, one that I shared, that his resignation last November, amid jeers and a collapse in the support for his Forza Italia party, meant his political end underestimated his will for power. Or, say the many cynics, it didn’t take into account his fear that if he does not retain some measure of political power he will finally enter the maw of the justice system, which has tried to nail him for a quarter of a century. He has been addressing the still-faithful around the country, secure (he says) in the love of the people and in his country’s need of him. He is on trial in Milan for encouraging underage prostitution, and this past weekend a German model, Sabina Began, told the daily Il Fatto Quotidiano that he had impregnated her, and that she lost the child in a miscarriage (he denies it). But this is still a country for old men, and at 75, this old man has the money and the media and evidently the stomach for another fight.

For the moment, though, Italy is Monti’s charge and care, and though he cuts and cuts, warns of hardships to come, and has no charisma in any conventional sense, he remains popular among an electorate desperate for him to succeed. And not just with the people: Both Moody’s and Fitch rating agencies lauded him last week, the latter saying he was “credible” and that if and when he leaves the scene, greater risks return. No hint of a scandal has attended him, and nothing serious of the kind in his cabinet, composed mainly of high-end academics. The political circus around him can look tawdry.

But the beasts in the political circus were chosen by the people. Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the main center-left party, Partito Democratico, said in an interview with Repubblica last week that Monti had done a fine job but must stand aside in the spring — for “if the idea catches on that politics is not able to take us out of the crisis, we will put ourselves on the margins of the democracies.” Bersani sometimes struggles to present himself as a credible premier if the left were to win the next elections, but he spoke well here. For Italy to continue under the tutelage of the professors would both further weaken the party system and raise deeper doubts than ever that it could produce an elected, efficient, clean ruling class.

But suppose the political class of any color really is incapable of taking the country out of the crisis? In a speech last week in Rimini to a Catholic youth group, Monti spoke about the need to restore Italians’ faith in the state — a faith that can be regained only if the many Italians who now cheat the taxman cease to do so, and others, including the public broadcaster RAI, stop regarding the avoiders as merely crafty, even admirable, for being so. The country, he said — in a rare flash of drama, even melodrama — was “at war” with the tax cheats. “We can’t broadcast, even subliminally, the degraded values which are destroying our society”

The belief that he seeks to invoke is less in the state and more in a citizenship where everyone exercises mutual responsibilities. This unelected, precise, rather lofty man presents the nature and obligations of democracy better than any elected Italian politician I have heard. Many of these will, indeed, share this thought, but the daily battle for power and attention in a political system as complex and fragmented as the Italian, which gives so many privileges to the elected, leaves too little time and will for the observance of democratic ideals.

Italy has put in place a dictator-expert to make politics safe for elected politicians once more. The paradox is that he is better at articulating democratic necessities than the latter have been. The capacity for these politicians to rise to his level and to make politics serve the electorate, through the bad times which will roll on after Monti, is the test of tests before this country — even, given its size and importance, before Europe. The signs that they will are, as yet, fragile: The shadows of doubts about the future fell across the scorching beaches this summer, and are likely to remain.

“European” is Representative Paul Ryan’s insult of choice for President Barack Obama, and for his policies. Yet the influences Ryan cites, and the thoughts behind his plan for debt reduction, were offered by Europeans of the 20th century. Their ideas, the foundations of which were laid in Europe’s turbulent twenties and thirties, have nearly a century later found an influential apostle in the United States.

Like his European precedents, Ryan the savior-theorist has appeared at another turbulent time. The near-century-old politico-economic school he embraces now seeks to prove itself on ground made fertile by the fearful debt that hangs over the world’s greatest power.

The first of these influences, and the one on which his enemies have most eagerly seized, is the controversial capitalist-individualist Ayn Rand. Rand was born, raised and educated in Russia, during the period spanning the revolution that ruined Rand’s comfortably off family. Although many consider Russians to be non-European, Rand was raised in a secular Jewish family in Russia’s avowedly European city, St. Petersburg, and her educational influences were all European.

By allying himself with the views of Ayn Rand, Ryan has taken a great risk. Rand’s extreme individualist thought, and tutelage of a coterie that formed around her, which included former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, was for long (and still is) derided. Yet she, and her rambling, passionate novel Atlas Shrugged became a kind of semi-underground spur to those who found inspiration in the hero’s determination to succeed.

Along with Rand, Ryan cites less controversial figures – Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, protagonists of the Austrian school of market economics, and their disciple Milton Friedman (the only one of Ryan’s galaxy born in the U.S.). From them he has taken a strong aversion to socialism of even the mildest kind, a horror of debt and its effects, and a belief that, loosed from an interfering state, all active individuals will strive to better themselves, and thus society. Those who can, do, but those who don’t would be classed as parasites – and, as Greenspan put it in a letter to the New York Times in 1957 – if they “persistently avoid either purpose or reason”, they will “perish as they should.”

Ryan will not, of course, go that far, and may not believe it. Yet even if time and politics rub away the more abrasive edges of his plan, it will remain radical, and has already been endorsed by Romney, who might be president by early next year. It’s to be taken seriously, not just because of the serious labor entailed (lots of labor went into the Obama debt-reduction plan) and the popularity it enjoys on the right – but also because it chimes with a major, popular stream of opinion in the U.S.: a doctrine of self-sufficiency, individual liberty and responsibility – thundered from a thousand pulpits, woven into a thousand western films and country-and-western songs, and underpinning a thousand political speeches. The framers of the Constitution and the drafters of the Declaration of Independence (Europeans in descent all – or at least British, which some British think is not the same thing) saw the necessary conditions for a free existence in liberty from monarch and established church. Those who settled the land, and slew large numbers of Native Americans to do so, saw in their, or their forebears’, work a justification of their beliefs – and first among these a belief in themselves. However self-serving that belief could become, it has retained its power.

In Europe, that quality doesn’t exist – or at any rate, there’s too little of it for a politician like Ryan to make serious headway. The free-market capitalism of his gurus was as heretical in Western Europe as it was in the U.S. – until the seventies. That’s when, in a Britain labeled the “sick man of Europe” by its neighbors, Margaret Thatcher publicly embraced many of the same figures as Ryan. In the 12 years of her successive governments she reduced the power of the unions (never recovered) and privatized state industries and services – as well as boosted the status of entrepreneurs and small-business people. Yet she could not make any serious inroads into the state education system and certainly not the National Health Service, which survived, beloved and intact, to be a centerpiece of Britain’s Olympic opening ceremony.

“Thatcherism” did not begin and end in Britain: Unions’ powers have declined, and privatization practiced, everywhere. But as a political force, it has proved treacherous to those politicians who tried to embrace it. Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy both pronounced themselves economic liberals, but Sarkozy faltered in his program and lost power, while Berlusconi’s political longevity depended on his not forcing through a free-market program, allied as he was to parties whose base would not stand for it. European conservative leaders like Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt and Germany’s Angela Merkel, the continent’s dominant figure, are centrists. Between the governing style of social democratic administrations and center right or Christian democratic ones, there is little to choose: Both believe the lower and working class must share in the fruits of the state’s wealth and use the machinery of the state to ensure it.

This composite doctrine, with its amalgam of socialist and Catholic social teaching, has no serious challenge from the liberal right (though it does, on different grounds, from the illiberal far right, which is just as wedded to state provision as the mainstream). In part this is because voters wish to preserve the benefits they have and reward those parties that retain or increase them. In northern Europe, it is also because a culture of hard work and low indebtedness remains. That culture is the product, according to Professor Steve Ozment of Harvard, of a Lutheranism that remains strong in social attitudes, if no longer in fervent faith. This is expressed, says Professor Ozment, in “love of one’s neighbor through shared civic responsibility” – love, that is, that depends on the neighbor being responsible, not a “parasite”. Where these attitudes prevail, borrowing usually stays low and state provision is less abused. Angela Merkel, a Lutheran pastor’s daughter, will tend to remind her neighbors of that.

So who needs Paul Ryan if we still have Martin Luther? Actually, Europeans do need such a figure to set forth his stall, so that we can reflect on what of value there is in it. Indeed, we probably need one more than the Americans. There are many parasites – to put it less abrasively, many who abuse state aid, many who avoid paying the taxes that sustain them, and many who are chronically dependent on the government. We may wish to retain state provision, but we also need to believe that liberty lies in individual responsibility – or we ruin the state itself. Europe has produced many figures who told us this was the case. It’s time to stop exporting them and benefit from their wisdom ourselves.

The British like to think of themselves as self-deprecating, and normally they’re right, even if much of that is a self-compliment. But now, with Britain winning more Olympic medals than it had since 1908, self-deprecation has been jettisoned. It ended the games on Sunday with the third-most gold medals after the U.S. and China, and the fourth-most medals overall, with Russia just ahead.

This was good for a midsize, broke country. As the third spot seemed increasingly like the final result through the last week, the Brits became increasingly delirious. BBC commentators, normally schooled in judicious and balanced commentary, were shouting their larynxes out as the medals rolled in: When Sir Chris Hoy, the cycling tyro, won his sixth gold medal in the keirin (speed-controlled) race last Wednesday, the “commentary” melted into a stream of hysterical liquid sound.

Yet if the British did very well in the games, the BBC did badly in what it is supposed to be best at: being fair, balanced, neutral and objective. Frankly, it went ape.

On BBC Radio Four’s Media Show, Roger Mosey, who headed the Olympic coverage, was asked why impartiality was nowhere to be found, and wasn’t that a problem? He protested that the news coverage was impartial, but added that “when you see Chris Hoy getting his sixth medal, it would be nuts for the national broadcaster not to be rooting for him.” He’s wrong about the coverage: When a Brit won gold, it was top of the news for hours, relegating the destruction of Aleppo (and everything else, including the slower destruction of the euro) to second place. And he was wrong about it being nuts, too.

There were some protests, but unfortunately often grouchy ones. Patrice de Beer, a former London correspondent for Le Monde, wrote last week of the “farcical jingoism” of the modern Olympics, asking rhetorically – “is it not the task of analysts to keep their heads cool when faced with a tidal wave of ‘sporting nationalism’? And to warn of the rude awakening … that will come when the games are over?” British commentator Nick Cohen made much the same point in Time: “Outsiders see a confident country. For this brief interlude we may believe it ourselves. But not for long.” Their point was that this was ugly chauvinism. But in predicting that it would all end in tears when reality returned, they came across as killjoys, Puritans eagerly anticipating the payment of the wages of sin, seeing the enthusiasm as a distraction from the necessary long brood on our deeper problems.

But a protest also came from another, astonishing source: the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson. He had clearly worried that the BBC had ceased to be a broadcaster and become a fan, and he told his senior executives so. The head of news, Helen Boaden, sent a memo to all journalists, noting that Thompson was “unhappy” and that he had “issued a directive that this needs to change … so you need to get cracking.” It’s often hard to read the BBC runes, but so careful was Boaden to emphasize it was his, not her, unhappiness, that it seemed likely she wasn’t entirely on board with her boss (who leaves soon and sees his once-great power draining from him).

It’s understandable that the British Broadcasting Corporation, most of whose income comes from the law-abiding majority who pay their £145.50 ($227.30) annual license fee, would find it hard to keep a balance as good news, a rarity in the UK this past year or more, kept emerging from London. It must seem especially so to the commentators who were in the stadiums and the halls where the events took place, infected by the delight of their compatriots. To do other than join in would seem to invite a lynching.

Yet the Corporation doesn’t usually go “nuts.” In a series of military engagements – when Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falklands in 1982, when Tripoli was bombed by U.S. planes based in the UK in 1986, when British planes bombed Belgrade in 1999 and when Britain joined the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003 – both Conservative and Labour governments saw BBC balance as unpatriotic. British servicemen and women were risking their lives, and the politicians cried that the national broadcaster was nuts to pretend neutrality. Not so, the management would doughtily respond: We must insist on our right to give both sides’ version of the conflict due weight.

The contrasting approach of the world’s greatest public broadcaster to its nation at war and to its nation at sport should give it, and all journalists, pause. Sporting triumphs merit objectivity much less than deadly warfare. We like to tell ourselves that we who work in free societies help keep these societies free by being independent of the state, by not wrapping ourselves in the national flag. But whether at the public broadcasters or in the larger private media sphere, we are prisoners not of the state, but of our customers. It’s a position more or less accepted by newspapers, but it’s true, too, of public broadcasters, even though they hate to believe it of themselves. For public broadcasters, when push comes to shove, journalism is at the service of national enthusiasm.

One kind of journalism escapes this: global journalism. It’s the kind done by the corporation that publishes this, Thomson Reuters; by its competitor, Bloomberg; by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune – and even, in its global garments, the BBC World Service and BBC World TV. These media speak to readers and viewers who wanted widely differing outcomes for the Olympics, and so the news is objective and the comment balanced. This isn’t a Thomson Reuters contributor enjoying a self-serving moment: The global players are prisoners too – of an audience that has no single national allegiance. Just as the BBC can’t escape the burden of being patriotic, so the global players can’t indulge in it.

I’m not tempted to be as much of a grump as de Beer and Cohen: If we have to have a hangover when we remember, once more, that we’re broke, so what? For a few crazy weeks we’ve had relief from the sore head we had. But I’m with Mark Thompson: As the 18th-century French statesman Talleyrand put it, “surtout pas trop de zèle” (above all, don’t go over the top). A measured tone is better. Indeed, if one were being cynical, one could argue that it’s actually (sneakily) more patriotic: It shows the Brits think it’s normal to be great.

And we the media have relearned an old, uncomfortable, lesson: When the piper really wants a tune, we play it.

Around the time Vladimir Putin started his first term as Russia’s president in 2000, a man named Gleb Pavlovsky appeared on the Moscow scene. Pavlovsky was a former dissident in Soviet times who called himself a “political technologist”, a highfalutin term for spin doctor. That isn’t to diminish him: Spin doctors in different administrations all over the world are among the most interesting political figures of contemporary times, because their job is to give a narrative about the government and the leaders they serve.

In doing so, they help give the narrative to the leaders themselves, who may not have worked out quite what they were going to do with power, since they were too busy getting and keeping it. They are the necessary middlemen between political power and the media. The media need a big story, and the spin doctors, or political technologists, are there to provide it.

Vladimir Putin, the man chosen by former President Boris Yeltsin to succeed him, didn’t know what to do when he arrived. At the time Pavlovsky moved into the Kremlin as his aide, the new president was – as Pavlovsky later said – consumed with anxiety that he would not succeed in imposing his will on a Kremlin still full of aides who were not his choice. Putin, remember, was still less than a decade away from being a middle-ranking, surplus-to-requirements KGB officer.

I spoke to Pavlovsky several times early in his tenure, and the narrative he gave was a persuasive one. It was that Putin, after the roller coaster that was Yeltsin’s Russia, would give security, stability and a chance for the society to recover both from Yeltsin and from Communism, to develop a middle class, to discover the joys of consumption. “It was,” he told the charismatic Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev last May, “about stability as a social construct, as a way of organizing society”. He was valuable enough to be kept on after Putin’s two terms, as an aide to Dmitry Medvedev in his one-term presidency. But then he went too far, saying openly that it would be “absurd” for Putin to return – and he was out.

Being out may account for the sharpness of a recent remark, reported by the New York Times. Pavlovsky believes that the third Putin presidency is now “selecting the harshest” choices in dealing with dissent, and in doing so, “the system is informing us that it is changing the rules”.

Changing to what? In his new book, Strategic Vision, Zbigniew Brzezinski called on the West, especially Europe, to develop a closer relationship with the vast neighbor to the east – but recognized that Vladimir Putin’s vision “is a backward looking combination of assertive nationalism, thinly veiled hostility towards America for its victory in the Cold war and nostalgia for …superpower status”. He likened it to Mussolini’s Italy: not a Nazi (or Stalinist) dictatorship, but relentlessly, determinedly authoritarian. If indeed he does make the “harshest choices”, Putin will be writing a new narrative, very much his own, and it will be a disturbing one.

Two of these choices will concern figures who are iconic to our present times – a blogger and a feminist punk rock band. The blogger, Alexei Navalny, has emerged in the past year as a leader of the mainly youthful rebellion against Putin that erupted when his third presidential term was confirmed. He has been accused of theft of timber worth $500,000 from the Kirov region, whose government he was advising, and the penalty could be 10 years in prison. At the same time, the band Pussy Riot is charged with various counts of hooliganism, after storming into the huge Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, close to the Kremlin, shouting “Mary! Get rid of Putin!” and dancing in front of the altar before being removed. That prank could earn them seven years. As the writer Andrei Nekrasov commented, “the trial’s message is simple: an insult to the leader is an insult to God”.

These choices are nominally for the judges on the cases, but no one believes they are anything but Putin’s. Indeed, Putin has already pronounced on the Pussy Riot case, saying while on a visit to London that, “I don’t think they should be judged too severely for this … I hope the court will deliver a correct, well-founded verdict.” In so saying, he shows himself in favor of some kind of punishment – but not an excessive one, which might reflect badly on his regime. Most important, he is underlining that the choice is his to make. It would be a bold judge who didn’t take note. Navalny’s case is more serious, both in the nature of the charge and the challenge he poses. If the harsh choice ends up being made in his case, then the direction of the Kremlin becomes clearer.

Yet the direction of Russia isn’t. I was at a gathering last week of some 150 mainly young men and women at an institute outside of Moscow, held under the auspices of the Moscow School of Political Studies, a civil society NGO. (I’m a member of its advisory board, with Russians and a few other foreigners.) I’ve been attending these conferences every year since I was a correspondent in Moscow in the first half of the 1990s. When they began in the early nineties, our talks on democracy, civic behavior and free speech were received, mostly, with acclamation. That’s long gone: The participants argue, challenge and dissent. Mostly well educated with jobs in government, companies and the media, many prize order as much as democracy, and they certainly don’t see the West as benign. Presently, they tend to agree with their government that the West is fomenting rebellion in Syria and that Russia strives for peace.

But they were not all, or even mainly, Putinites. They were mixed. Some liked Navalny, some not. Some thought Pussy Riot was cool, some disapproved. All seemed to speak freely. When Krastev told them that they had lost a country – the Soviet Union – they agreed. They did the same when he told them that the lesson of the 1990s was insecurity, lack of money and no state support: Stability, now, was all. When, by contrast, I gave what I thought was a ringing endorsement of a free press, the questions were cooler, skeptical.

They were, in short, rather more “Western” than they were when they thought that all blessings flowed from the West. They were thinking for themselves. Putin expresses what some of them want. But my sense was that if he constantly makes the harshest choices, he will lose the grip he presently still has on his country. The members of this new generation of Russians are not Western liberals, but they’re not Soviet sheep, either.

PHOTO: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (L), Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina (R), members of female punk band Pussy Riot, attend their trial inside the defendents’ cell in a court in Moscow, August 3, 2012. President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that three women on trial for a protest performance in Russia’s main cathedral should not be judged too harshly, signaling he did not favor lengthy prison terms for the Pussy Riot band members, Russian news agencies reported. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

It was rude of Mitt Romney to cast doubt on Britain’s ability to successfully host the London Olympics, but it wasn’t stupid. His briefers on the London trip will have had files full of stories from the British papers, whose front pages had little else on them for days but forebodings over security lapses because of a screwup by G4S, the company hired to keep the Games safe. Britain hasn’t, in the past few years, been distinguished for excellence: Why assume the Games would be an exception?

For any foreigner, especially any American, alert to British events over the past year or two, these stories play against a backdrop of the perception of the British capital as “Londonistan,” a place whose tolerance of radical Islamism spills over into fatally dangerous carelessness. A city where, almost exactly a year ago, gangs of young men and women roamed the streets for several days, smashing shops, looting their contents, burning buildings, beating up passersby and isolated policemen. To voice doubts on U.S. television about London’s safety is not stupid, because doubts are in order.

Three institutions central to the world’s opinion of the United Kingdom have been and remain very badly shaken. These are the armed forces, the press and the banking system – three systems that, for two centuries or more, evoked real pride for the British people. The damage done – in two cases self-administered – has projected images of Britain that sharply contradict the sturdy, trusty, intelligently skeptical stereotype that the British like to think is a mirror of themselves.

The military is the outlier: It has not been the author of its own fall from grace, and is still thought of as efficient, well-equipped and well led. The wounds to its pride and efficacy have come from political considerations, of which the most important was to pull out of Iraq with an unconvincing rationale that the job it was doing, around the southern city of Basra, was done. In fact, its exit meant a U.S. brigade had to be deployed to cover the gap in security, despite the U.S. military itself being hard-pressed. In Afghanistan, a British withdrawal – this time in step with a similar U.S. exercise – is scheduled to begin next year. Several senior officers warn that the Afghan forces cannot provide security. Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Helmand, was quoted as saying in May that the local military “are not close to being able to take over from Western forces unaided, and I don’t believe that they would be able to contain the insurgency unaided by 2014, which is the date we are due to leave.”

Back home, the numbers of military personnel and bases and the ability to project force have been slashed so deeply that a slew of senior commanders have resigned, some remaining tactfully silent, others loud in their protest that the British armed forces now lack the capacity to fight even one, let alone multiple, large actions. Britain, with France, had been an at least partial exception to the somewhat dubious decline of Europe’s ability to pull its weight in military engagements (a cause of increasing concern to a vastly indebted U.S.) From having been a partial solution, Britain joins the problem. It will, said a report last autumn from the Royal United Services Institute, “never again be among the global [military] superpowers.”

The mess of the press has no politicians to blame, even if politicians were too eager to bow to its power. The Leveson Inquiry – set up to investigate the ethics, behavior and political heft of British newspapers after the News of the World scandal – has revealed, over the past nine months, a much greater underworld of tabloid phone hacking, bribery, blackmail and radical distortion. British journalists thought their press had some of the most robust, fearless, revelatory, pomposity-pricking newspapers at the popular end of the trade, and that it had the best analytical journalism in the world at the other end. Where the latter can still be defended, the former can’t, or at best only with major qualification. The low opinion many American journalists had of British popular papers – and in the view of some, not just popular papers – has received a long, embarrassing confirmation.

Most recent, and in the long run most potentially damaging, has been the revelations that Barclays Bank indulged in various forms of fixing the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, the most important money market rate in the financial world. It was an American, Bob Diamond, Barclays’ chief executive, who took the rap after Westminster legislators had a cathartic explosion of contempt at a committee hearing. But it was London, with its light-touch regulation and the apparently threadbare tradition of gentlemanly conduct, that provided the context. Diamond and his colleagues would have been less likely to be as free to get away with fixing the rate to benefit themselves in New York: investigations continue, and worse may follow. London kept the job of setting the rate because of its centrality to global financial transactions. Reputation is all in such a case, and London’s trembles on the brink, a much more troublesome danger than the loss of the already doubtful reputation of the tabloids.

As this is written, Mitt Romney’s fears of an Olympic disaster are unfounded. The games started well (if not, yet, for the host nation in the medals tally); security has not been breached; the opening ceremony, a skillfully orchestrated post-modern mélange heavily dusted with that famous British humor, was a nice counterpoint to Chinese triumphalism last time. Britain is a considerable country yet, with large reserves. But in the long last act of the second Elizabethan Age, it becomes clear that much that distinguished the country needs new scripts and better acting. Not, or not mainly, by the overburdened politicians but by citizens, who have to live up to that proud name. When the Olympic circus leaves town, it may, if all continues to go as well as its opening, help restore some lost reputation. Pride can come after a fall – so long as the fall is understood, and the causes repaired.

PHOTO: U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is recognized by pedestrians at Grosvenor Place in London, July 27, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed