The other day I saw someone wearing a shirt that said, "I hate Michigan so much, I'd root for France to beat them." Ahh, France. Where would American nationalism be without you?

The left-wing blogs have been full of criticism of various Fox News types for measuring possible benefits of the London bombings. But Brit Hume and his buddies would be surprised, I think, to find an ally in Pierre Assouline, who blogs about literature for Le Monde. I've put the translations between the originals:

I honestly don't have too much to say about this, or rather, I don't think that much I can say will be new. A few things, though, just to make sure they're clear:

1. What you see here is exactly what will allow the terrorists to "win." Contrast this sort of reaction--which is of a piece, I think, with the American ones that take 9/11 as an occasion to build fences along the southwestern border, to deny visas to foreigh students, and the like--to London mayor Ken Livingstone's insistence that the terrorists will not destroy the city''s openness (a statement not without its problems, to be sure, as E Wesp pointed out a couple weeks ago).

2. The hostility to multiculturalism should remind everyone that hostility to forms of cosmopolitan culture is not a unique property of the American right. The notion that "multiculturalism" is a specifically British idea might, however, surprise a few Americans who imagine that the pressure to miscegenate comes from the continent and those under its influence. The notion of Anglo-American "multiculturalism" you see here is to some extent the historico-cultural residue of the mutual intertwining of the UK and the US, much of which has to do with a relation to otherness and diversity built up through a colonial experience that turned out quite differently (and was run quite differently) than the continental ones of France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, or Portugal. Differently, mind you, not necessarily better, then, though I like the Anglo-American residue now.

3. A couple years ago my department rebuilt its undergraduate curriculum. Among other things, the committee got rid of the Chaucer and Milton requirements. Apparently there was some discussion about also dropping the Shakespeare requirement. My favorite colleague managed to convince the committee not to do so (I may be making his role more decisive than it was, but it's how I like to imagine it) simply by pointing out that dropping Shakespeare had, at other universities, produced a huge public outcry against the university, the department, the loss of standards and of the canon, etc. etc. Indeed my own undergraduate institution, when it dropped its Shakespeare requirement back in 1993 or 1994, was the subject of articles and editorials in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Shakespeare is of course fantastic, but it nonetheless continues to astonish me how important his name has become over the past 100 years or so as a figure for the "loss" of forms of culture. These forms are, to be sure, protean: Shakespeare always means "tradition," but what "tradition" means changes--now something like an immigrant-free national culture, now intellectual standards, now literature itself (as against "culture"), now Britishness, now history... Shakespeare is always what some "we" is about to lose. Chaucer and Milton on the other hand, elicit a collective shrug from the politicians and the public.

4. The name "Shakespeare" is why, finally, Pierre Assouline, writing a blog about literary affairs, manages to say something about the London bombings. By drawing a line from the "loss of Shakespeare" to multiculturalism to terrorism, Assouline puts together one of the more compelling equations of our time. The violence the equation does to difference (the difference between terrorism and the loss of Shakespeare, for instance) is clear. I do not equate that violence with the violence of blowing up people, at least not today and not for me right now. Though unequal, it nonetheless seems to me responsive.