| E. A. Hanks |   |
Looking For A New England (27 comments )
Shine your shoes folks, the Queen has arrived! To celebrate, everyone is getting spiffed up: the president has set aside his denim for white tie and tails, and the hats at the Derby were even more ridiculous than usual. Everywhere she goes Americans are lining up for the chance to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty, handbag and all.
My love for Britain isn't just evident in my fondness for the landscape, the Tate Modern museum, or John Keats. These are whimsical, certainly romantic characteristics that belong in the wishful thinking category. More practically, I'm fascinated by England as a ex-empire nation.
Eddie Izzard, comedian and pop-historian, has a great bit about the best examples of growing up in England: when sent to a career adviser as a child, every idea he has for a possible future is received with a dour, "Look, you're British, so tone it down a bit." How about I work in the sewage business? "Look, you're British, so tone it down a bit."
Everything in Britain has been toned down a bit. There's never a sense of a major meltdown, because it already happened. No one knows the ruthless force of Britain's empire like Britain itself; Ireland, Scotland and Wales bore the brunt of England's first forays into real estate. Through total domination and the cunning use of flags, England once ruled over hundreds of thousands of people -- now it's known for those kooky plates with the Royals' faces on them, the Beatles and Monty Python. This is the root of my anglophilia: I'm jealous of the naff plates.
England had the empire, lost it, and now goes about its business, trying not to wreak havoc everywhere it goes. It does what it can with the EU, but in a fairly characteristic move, rejects switching to the Euro. Sectarian violence in Ireland, abysmal national health statistics, and a growing population of disenfranchised Muslim citizens show that things are by no means perfect, but no one's worried Britain is going to attempt to mold the Middle East in its own image. At least, less so now that Blair is stepping down. The cowboy school of foreign policy simply doesn't exist over the Atlantic, which is why it was all the more disappointing when Blair threw Britain's lot in with ours and Bush made the "coalition of the willing" a very cozy twosome.
Plates not withstanding, as quiet as Britain is, no one ever thinks of it as a weak country. It's a hefty player in European politics and continues to be a cultural capital. Even Americans, isolated by geography and a general lack of interest in global politics, know that the UK may be our quieter cousin, but it's not a lame duck nation. It's not like it's Canada. (The world would stand to gain a lot if everyone were more like Canada, by the way, if only because then everyone would be more polite.)
Britain has the humility of a nation that knows time in the limelight eventually comes to an end. I think I'd like to be part of a country that's slightly past its prime; there's less pressure, and more free time. Maybe if we stopped being the big kid on the block, our sitcoms would be funnier?
Eventually, Americans are going to have to think back on this time of the second Bush administration, and examine what it is we've done, and who we are because of it. Presidents and prime ministers are not the only people affected by the legacies of their leadership, nations are as well; a president's legacy reveals what a nation let him do. There's no reason to assume we'll ever have some sort of national consensus on Bush's legacy and this war, as there still isn't one when it comes to the legacy of Vietnam, but a nation can always use a little soul searching.
Like it or not, we're the empire now. Our love of arriving with our cavalry in the knick of time, our unbelievable wealth, and a potent cultural currency has made us the new England only with less sarcasm and better teeth. It's sort of like how England was once the new Rome, only with more lace and less vomitoriums.
With China racing down the barrel, growing in power and wealth, we should look to England as a marker of how a post-Empire nation can act. Maybe eventually America could kiss the cowboy hats goodbye, and say "How do you do?" to white tie and tails.
No comments:
Post a Comment