Like millions (maybe that’s an exaggeration) of others, I tuned in to the premiere of Downton Abbey’s third season on PBS Sunday night. The series is in many ways a reiteration of Upstairs, Downstairs back in the seventies, which ran until—well, I think it ran itself to death. finally. This kind of explication of English social hierarchy appeals mostly to Americans for obvious reasons: We’re deprived of that sort of nobility. “You address me as ‘Lord’ by reason of the fact that I’m an earl, the son of an earl, etc. I don’t ‘earn’ it because I don’t have to earn it; it’s mine by inheritance, by right, by birth.”

Americans traditionally put that sort of thing down, even as we crave it. It’s at the heart of American anglophilia, though not its sole source. There are other things at the heart of American anglophilia as well—primal, more or less subconscious, ancestor worship, for one, but this craving for an aristocracy, for class-structuring based on birth, is hard for us to explain to ourselves. Intellectually, we disapprove of it entirely, but that doesn’t make it go away. The character Cora, Lord Grantham’s wife, personifies this phenomenon. Daughter of American super-wealth, like many daughters of that time, she marries an English earl to gain that nobility of which she evidently felt herself impoverished. Cora is American wealth and power seeking the “right” to be wealthy and powerful. We’ve never really believed we have such a right, not even if we “earned” it—maybe because we earned it. Denial is useless; it’s part of the most hardened proletarian—and I confess I was delighted to discover that my paternal grandmother was descended from a Sir Gayre in Scotland. We love titles. Titles=entitlement. Lady Dena Hunt, donchaknow.

Meanwhile, it’s the nobility of the downstairs folk that everyone—characters both upstairs and down—really believes in. And we, the viewers, believe in the upstairs folk only when they recognize that it’s the downstairs folk who possess “the real thing,” and humble themselves to deserve the allegiance and reverence of those downstairs. The slave has ever been the master. We all know that. It’s not a revelation to us. It goes back to “He who would be greatest among you must be the servant of all,” and arrives today at “the servant of the servants of God.” Tolkien reflected on the nobility of the lower classes at great length following his harrowing WWI experience and his first-hand witnessing of the heroism of lower-class English “batmen” (an old term for those orderlies who carried the swords of their officers).

I think, on the whole, I prefer to be one of those Americans who enchant themselves like Cora with a desire for a “right” to what I have, rather than one of the modern English, who, in their socialist debunking of the aristocracy, have chosen to keep their aristocrats as something like household pets. Now that they’ve got them housebroken of any notion of “right,” they keep them—and keep them in their place—as pets, as just another of those things like rock stars, or sports and film stars, which, in their childish appetite for celebrity, they take out like toys to play with on occasion, as objects of amusement, gossip, distraction. Distraction from

what? That’s a question I think some, though very few, of the English ask themselves now. That which they’ve not yet discarded completely, like their Christian faith, they’ve beaten into impotence and irrelevance, leaving them with only with their own vulgarity.

A new character was introduced this past Sunday night, Cora’s garish and gaudy, outspoken and domineering, filthy-rich American mother, along with her slatternly maid. (I don’t remember the character names of either, but the mother was played masterfully by Shirley McClaine—brilliant casting.) Her role was that of ridiculer. As the dowager countess played by Maggie Smith—more brilliant casting—said, “She goes like a homing pigeon for the soft English underbelly.” McClaine represented “the new,” ejecting “the old.” That character, ironically an American, was England’s own future self. Exhibitionist, vulgar, and pathetically made-up, she reveals to the Granthams’ dismay that she cannot save Downton, even if she wanted to—a turn of events more like prophecy than plot. In one scene, the dowager countess dozes in a chair, until she is serenaded into wakefulness by McClaine’s crooning, “You made me love you.” However the writers may have meant the scene to appeal, it was a seduction, poignant, sad, even tragic—at least, so it seemed to an American.