Downton: The Ice Princess Reigns

Okay, I admit it:  I would not miss an episode of  Downton Abbey if it meant walking through a blizzard to see it. Lately, in northern New England that exigency has not obtained and tonight  I hunkered down to watch Lady Mary wreck the life of her sister, cut her father for having treated Barrow shabbily and finally face her inadequately funded suitor to say she has reached the conclusion she and he are in love with each other and they may as well act upon it and get married.

For his part, her young swain declares his heart is pounding and he is passably well pleased she has accepted his proposal after all,  and why don't they get married before the license he has obtained expires.

Thus concludes one of the more bloodless plot lines in all of Downton. There are touching moments along the way, in fact one of the most touching of all, when Mary, the ice princess,  actually reveals a genuine emotion, going to the grave of her first husband and asking him to forgive her for falling in love with someone else.  This is a surprise, because at no time before this moment has anything suggested her hesitation to accept a new man had anything to do with her having not made peace with the loss of her first husband. 

The best lines belong to, of all people, Edith, who has grown remarkably, and who explains her surprise appearance for Mary's wedding by saying simply the time will come when their parents are dead and only Mary and she will remember Sybil, their dead sister,  or their parents or even Carson and the whole life they had at Downton and those bonds of time and memory are unbreakable.  It is Downton's finest scene.

All this reminds me of why I am so grateful to be an American, grateful my forebears did not stop in England but stayed on the ship to America. 

 When I was 25, I got to spend two life changing months in London, where I learned the Brits are not just Americans who talk funny, but are very different from us.

I realized as an American I am more materialistic, more driven than Brits, but I was also more inclined to challenge authority, and to question the way things are and ask why things cannot be different, more likely to speak my mind directly and to be less inhibited than Brits. Of course, that was 40 years ago. Things have changed in the UK since. 

A medical school professor spent considerable time with me and my fellow American students, and invited us out to his clinic in Uxbridge and after much effort on our behalf,  I asked him one day why he had been so kind to us. 

"What?" he asked, not understanding my question.
"Well, you've spent time and gone through considerable trouble to arrange teaching sessions for us, and you get paid nothing for it and as far as I can see the only return you get is our gratitude and we're not even British students. It's not like you are improving care for the U.K. We'll go back to the States, and what we learned here will benefit people you will never see."
"That," he said, with one of those faint British smiles you are not even sure is there, "Is such an American thing to say."
"And that," I pointed out. "Is not an answer."

Then he sighed and said, "If you must know, I wish I had just even one student of your quality."
This surprised me, because I thought the British students were very observant and very bright, if not always motivated. They did all clear out at 5 PM no matter what, where the American students stayed late, writing notes, checking on patients.

"Well," I reminded him, "Your students are four years younger than we are. And we go back to a system which provides great incentives."
"You're talking about the money," he said. "I don't believe that. Our students say the same thing. We don't work too hard, but then again, they don't pay us much.  But that's not it really:  We just do not draw the first rate students into medicine."

"If that's true, then it must go back to incentive," I told him. "My grandfather worked in a sweatshop, sewing dresses. My father went to college and got to be middle class. I'm going to take the next step up. Not that we have classes in America as you do here, but I'll be upper class insofar as we have one. Medicine is not just a job for me, it's a vehicle to social advancement."

Whenever the economy is roaring, medical school applications in the US fall. When times get tough, applications soar.  Hard driving people do tend to follow the money. Much as we like to think people go into medicine because it's a calling, and it is true in some cases, in the grand scheme of things, incentives count.

The Brits of Downton reflect all that.  Being to the manor born, or being stuck in the place you were born were part of Britain then, and if that has changed, then it is recently.  

This is the attraction of a Bernie Sanders' message:  a society in which the few live opulently and the many are told they have no real shot at a better life is a pretty dismal place, for everyone, rich and poor alike.