Anglophilia

The American Anglophiliac gene should be rounded up and eliminated. All those fuckwits who beat the stuffing out of me for having an English accent between the ages of 9 and 16, only to decide- once I'd actually made a concerted effort to learn American diction and lose it for once and for all- that it was cool all along.

I've got a very good idea. Ship all Anglophiles to the UK, preferably London. Have them wait in queues for everybloodything, have them stuck on the tube for hours at a time, make sure their drinking gets cut off at 11pm, subject them to British beaurocracy and the glories of the class system, and then don't allow them to go home again when they start crying for daddy.

Similarly, take all British Americanophiles, round them up and ship them into the deep South somewhere, and have them shot at by toothless rednecks for sport. Then again, it didn't work for Paul, did it?

God, I want sleep.

It's an ongoing myth that I'm an Americanophile. So I've dated one or two Americans: I don't think I qualify. I don't eat cheeseburgers, drink Bud or do any of the silly things a British person would imagine being American to be.

But anyway, on the tube home last night I was standing next to a party of six American tourists. The tube was crammed, and really horrible, and one of them remarked to me: 'Isn't it cute when it's busy like this?' I smiled sweetly and all, but wanted to rip her eyes out...

Anglogphilia isn't as bad as those Americans who believe their ancestors are Irish and take trips to see the Book of Kells though. That's really weird. I don't think there are that many irrational anglophiles anyway, those who like everything about England.

And there are no irrational anglophiles who like everything about the UK? Uuuhhhhh... you were on the tube with an American who thought it was cute? You really are tired, aren't you?

And I'm not working my way through the States! Good grief. I wouldn't be doing very well if I was! Mind you, Alaska would be a challenge...

Which is maybe why I never became an ak-tor, when I was little I always wanted to be the princess.

Yes, but Kate, you're British, remember?

Smart Americans are Anglophile, but smarter ones are Anglophobe, rightfully despising the unthinking, sneering superior air that 'smart' Europeans have towards the USA.

It's a backhanded compliment. Weird inferiority complex at heart of American psyche has them thinking that only England can produce evil geniuses.

God, I'm full of it today.

The other ones are the people who join the Monarchist leauge and are nostalgic for their fathers home land.

I admit i fall into the first camp on occasion.

It's terribly twee, Dan, more for the associations of who else has the name than for actually tweeness of the name or anything.

In general, there's enough mainstream US attempts at cult-khah (or however you want to mock-pronounce it for affect) which implicitly or explicitly revolves around the UK to make it an easy option (or trap) for The Budding Young Whatsit Around Town. The UK's been around longer than the US to begin with, there's a shared language, the influence on the humanities part of the educational system is overwhelming, PBS in its heyday screened any number of import series and documentaries, and so forth. Thus you get people like me who grow up being fans of Monty Python, Douglas Adams, and so forth, to name one strain.

America itself seems to be (slowly) recognizing other influences as equally part of the brew. LA and the area makes for a good ground zero, given all the various folks with backgrounds all over the place, and that'll increase with time. But ultimately the Anglo focus is something that has had decades of impact in a variety of areas, so it's not going away any time soon.

But then again, Americans do love the accent and find it pretty sexy (or at least, I do).

Maybe it's all down to novelty value.

(The key difference it seems to me is that multiracial UK culture hardly ever travels, or it impacts years later - eg 2-tone indirectly spawning all the awful 1-tone ska bands Ned is plagued by. 'Anglophiles' of every stripe seem not to want to embrace the idea of the UK as a multiculture - I wonder sometimes if anglophilia has an element of nostalgia for the rock monoculture, though I would say right now that these are fleeting thoughts and not some attempt to paint anglophiles as racist!)

what would you prefer:

"the unthinking, sneering, superior air that 'smart' Europeans have towards the USA"

or Blair licking Bush's arse like he's being doing lately?

I know which I think is the lesser of the two evils.

I think Tom is *obviously* right that it's a one-way thing, but arguably you could say the same about the pop-cultural relationship between the US and Australia, or even Germany at a pinch. There is certainly a tendency among *a certain type of Anglophile* to think of Britain as a changeless backwater, and obviously this resistance to UK multiculture will come into it, but Anglophilia is far wider in its scope than this. There have certainly been exceptions to the tendency Tom sets out - how high did Soul II Soul's "Back To Life" get in the Billboard chart? From memory it certainly went Top 10. And of course people on these forums constantly surprise me - remember Ethan and UK hip-hop :) ?

I know which I think is the lesser of the two evils.

Robin, is this a joke? I would have thought it was perfectly obvious this isn't an either/or decision. Or perhaps you think that in order to express one's disapproval for a country's current administration one must adopt a prejudiced, snide attitude towards its population at large.

Knowing my misanthropic tendencies, do you really want me to answer that question?