dailytelegraph.co.uk
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Why anti-Americanism divides the classes
By Mary Kenny
YOU will have no difficulty locating anti-American feeling in the British media, or in British society, as exemplified by the now notorious and shameful Question Time which spewed hatred and blame on the USA, immediately after so many innocent people there had lost their lives. That was only a very blatant example of anti-American sentiment which exists in this country in many more subtle ways.
However, anti-Americanism is almost exclusively confined to the upper, or upper-middle, classes. It comes from Oxbridge (and public school) intellectuals, your Hampstead and Islington chattering classes, your Guardianistas with the holiday home in France, and also your old colonials resident in the shires. Rarely do you find anti-Americanism among the British masses, among the lower-middle classes, and least of all, among the proletariat.
For the ordinary folk love America as they love everything American. See the Waynes and the Sharons, dressed in their bright pink shell-suits, departing from Gatwick for their hols in Orlando, Florida, with the kids all prepared for trips to Disneyland. While the fastidious may regard with distaste the McDonaldisation of the globe - my dear, there's one at the foot of the Great Wall of China, Quel horreur! - the British masses feel a warm glow of reassuring familiarity when they see the red and yellow arch of Ronald McDonald hove into view in some funny foreign place, such as France.
This class division on the United States is partly to do with language. The elites are, by definition, better educated and don't mind speaking, or trying to speak, in a foreign tongue. Your old colonials may well have a bluff command of Urdu or Swahili and regular visitors to Chiantishire will rattle off in talkative Italian, especially to show off when ordering a pasta in a London restaurant.
By contrast, the British masses have no inclination whatsoever to learn a foreign language, much though they may be chided by ambassadors from Continental Europe for failing to do so. Why should they? English is the world language, or at least the language of the world that is of any interest to them. They'd rather watch paint dry than watch a movie in a foreign language - why bother when all the films worth seeing are already in American anyway? The beauty about visiting America, after all, is that you can be in a foreign country, and still communicate in English. That is what makes America so accessible, and what makes American culture so easy to understand.
The swells may denounce American "cultural imperialism", but American culture at its most imperialistic is exactly what the masses like. Leave aside the educated elites in New York, New England and parts of the West Coast, and what you get in America is a version of proletarian culture. You get the big, the brash, the glitzy, and the obvious. You get busty blondes in rhinestone-studded jeans. You get Las Vegas. You get instant gratification, Nashville music, easy manners, open hospitality and big cars. You get hang 'em high justice and quickie divorces, simple patriotism and simple faith and trash television selling eternal optimism and celebrity inspiration. American culture is successful because it simplifies the complicated; our educated bien-pensants claim the masses are being exploited by American cultural imperialism, but the masses chose it as their own.
Anti-Americanism here comes from both Left and Right - Enoch Powell and Tony Benn both deplored the spread of American power and influence. There is still a lingering regret, as glimpsed in a wonderful scene in The Madness of George III (Nigel Hawthorne turning the globe with a rueful sigh), that the Crown should have lost this fabulous land. For the colonial English, there is always an element of the upstart about American braggadocio. For the old Left, who have never forgiven America for trouncing communism, there is the payback agenda of opposing everything American, even if that means embracing Saddam Hussein himself.
In Corelli Barnett's book about the end of empire, The Collapse of British Power, he claims that in Britain, the upper classes always had more involvement with the "coloured Empire" - the Indian sub-continent, black Africa - whereas the lower classes always had more feeling for the "white Empire"- Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Similarly, today, the elites have taken up the "Third World", while the masses genuinely love the empire of the United States |
