Angry Men

Sloane Square is a neatly laid out quadrangle in London’s borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Quiet streets are lined with high fashion labels, and carefully plotted plane trees provide shade and leafy overhead. Hardly, in other words, the place for revolution. It takes some imagination to think that it was here where John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” premiered in 1956. Osborne’s play took a harshly realistic look at working class life, marking him as one of several British playwrights and novelists in the late 50s who had grown disillusioned with the way their government was running things. “It’s best to be a rebel so as to show ’em it don’t pay to try to do you down...Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death,” one book bluntly put it. Publicity materials for Osborne’s play invented a label for the group: they were to be referred to as the “Angry Young Men.”

I’ve jumped an ocean and half a century to bring forward this episode only because it seems so strikingly relevant. In a curious trick of history, the American Tea Party—those who protest Obama’s tax policies by evoking 1773’s colonial steeping of three shiploads of British loose leaf in Boston Harbor—have much in common with their ex-antagonist country’s Angry Young Men. They’re deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. They think (justifiably) that nobody takes them seriously. They lack any theoretically rigorous suggestions. And yet their frustrations point to a real complaint with the way things are being done, one that deserves far deeper engagement than it’s being given.

“Have you not seen pictures of their rallies?” a friend back home asked me. I have; they’re absurd. Like any gathering of the politically discontent, the movement has its share of loonies, guys in tar-and-feather just as happy smearing Obama as handing out Oswald conspiracy pamphlets. But the Tea Party still isn’t just some barmy half-brother of the GOP. Genuine Tea Partiers find much to blame with both major parties; beneath the noise, there’s a serious desire to re-examine the nation’s core values. They’d like to find their way back to those John Wayne-style golden prairies where strength, independence, and cleverness are rewarded, rather than suspected. Surface theatrics aside, the Tea Party is nearly alone in asking serious questions about the meaning of politics in America. After all, it takes a great deal of gravity in one’s mission to confidently employ such public, attention-grabbing techniques.

So how does this play in England? It’s hard to say; across the pond, the movement doesn’t get much press. Of far more interest in the past few weeks has been the Cadbury-Kraft merger, generally accepted as a regrettable, yet inevitable, victory of Yankee spray cheese over Britain’s more discerning palate. America is viewed with a sad indulgence—a nostalgia for the once-upon-a-time when it was an unruly little brother rather than a cold, efficient capitalist machine—even if it did bite the hand that fed it crumpets.

But Brits might fondly recognize in today’s Tea Partiers some of the old colonial intransigence, so oddly like that of their own Young Men. It’s telling that the names of anti-fascist writers like Ayn Rand and George Orwell are so often invoked. In Tea Party eyes, the problem is simple: the U.S. government won’t leave well alone. All they really want is a bit of land and a house, maybe a firearm or two, and certainly the freedom to do as they like (within legal limits) without any civil servant nosing in. And they’re not willing to take any threats to that sitting down.

The Angry Young Men—even if they were just a couple of malcontent writers with a grab-bag of social gripes—ultimately succeeded as a purifying force for Britain. The great kick they aimed at the nation’s too-comfortable posterior helped send it flying into the next, culturally revolutionary decade. As long as the Obama administration apes the Churchill cabinet in continuing to demand sacrifices and a cut of each month’s paycheck without results, there will be a similar reaction—and as the movement this time isn’t quite so literary, there’s no guarantee it will behave quite so well. That’s what the Tea Partiers and the Angry Young Men really share: the desire for some display of humility from a government all too willing to collect our money, and not willing enough to explain just why we should let it run things.

Liberal tendencies notwithstanding, I can’t help but admire the defiance of this opposition and its belief that it’s the principle of standing on one’s own two feet that matters most. In the 1962 British New Wave (and Angry Young Men) classic “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” based on the book by Alan Sillitoe, Colin Smith is a boy at reformatory whom the director’s primped to win a cross-country race against a nearby prep school. Coming down the last stretch, he’s got a solid lead; no one doubts he’ll win. As he tires, images run through his mind of his bleak life: his harried and shrill mother, his dead father, the cash he swiped from a bakery, the copper who nabbed him, the condescending director who’s dangled the prospect of an Olympic future or at least better treatment in the present. A few yards from the finish line, he stops. A crooked grin spreads over his face. The second-place runner passes him. Life will deal him a hard blow for not compromising with those in charge, but he’ll never be anybody’s blue-eyed boy.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House currently studying abroad at the University of Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.