The barbarian invasions -- from Britain

If the British have decided your seaside resort is a good place for a holiday, poor you. From the NYT:

Even in a sea of tourists, it is easy to spot the Britons here on the northeast coast of Crete, and not just from the telltale pallor of their sun-deprived northern skin.

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

"They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit," Malia's mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. "It is only the British people -- not the Germans or the French."

Malia is the latest and currently most notorious in a long list of European resorts full of young British tourists on packaged tours offering cheap alcohol and a license to behave badly. In Magaluf and Ibiza, Spain; in Ayia Napa, Cyprus; and in the Greek resorts of Faliraki, Kavos and Laganas as well as Malia, the story is the same: They come, they drink, they wreak havoc.

"The government of Britain has to do something," Mr. Lagoudakis said. "These people are giving a bad name to their country."

[snip]

In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part, the authorities said, in an alfresco oral sex contest.

Lovely. Meanwhile, is there a connection here? Just a little one?:

The report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.

It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.
[snip]
The report's author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, said: "In short, women are abandoning the church.

"Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.

Dr. Aune's conclusion: once the Church of England gets women bishops, that'll fix things. It's hard to believe anybody still believes this, but there you are. I bring this story up in context of the lager-louts-on-holiday story to highlight the possible link between the loss of traditional faith and the rise in barbaric behavior among many British. Of course that can't possibly explain it all; they're just as secular on the Continent, but it's only the British who behave so horribly en masse on holiday -- or are they? A Dutch TV producer friend of mine told me a few years back about having filmed a documentary on young Dutch holidaygoers in Spanish seaside towns; they recorded drunken couples having sex on the beach with crowds of other drunken Dutch gathered 'round cheering them on.

UPDATE: Mercy! I do not assert that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has turned the nation of C.S. Lewis into the land of drunkards and witches. Good grief. The point I was trying to make by citing a study by a UK academic (who was making a different point with it) is that there is likely a connection between the steep decline in Christianity and the degeneration of public morality. That's all. I've never seen "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and have no position on its cultural importance.