An Englishman (too many) in New York
Anglophobia, contd. Why are the British so disliked? Yesterday, we promised you some hard facts, so let's get to work, and we'll start on the other side of the Atlantic. Now, our "cousins", who donated so much blood and treasure to prevent European génocidaires from torching civilization twice in the last century, are patient but they can only take so much. They expect that the French and Germans will wallow in hatred of America, but it's harder to take when the Brits get in on the act, because any time former colonists begin hectoring and lecturing former possessions, it's bound to cause trouble. And the camel's back really breaks when hordes of Guardian (and Sun) readers descend upon the New World and forget to leave their superiority complexes at Heathrow. Vanity Fair's A. A. Gill isn't going to take it any more:
Brits are rarely seen in New York without their magic cloaks of invisible irony — they think that, on a fundamental level, their calling here is as irony missionaries. They bless everything and everyone with the little flick quotation marks, that rabbit-ear genuflection of cool, ironic sterility. How often their mocking conversations about the natives return to the amusing truth that New Yorkers have an unbelievable, ridiculous irony deficiency, which ignores the fact that a city that produced Dorothy Parker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Abstract Expressionism, Woody Allen, and Woody Allen's love life has quite enough irony to build the Brooklyn Bridge.
Storm in teacup? Do a blog search for "aa gill brits new york" and you'll see that this is whipping up waves, which is understandable, of course, when Gill lashes out like this: "Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric." Cor! Wot a scorcher!
It's one thing to pour scorn on the Brits in the acidic way A. A. Gill has gone about it, but there are others out there who prefer blunter weapons. Tomorrow, here, someone who wants more than apologies from London. We're talking reparations! And not just for the descendents of slaves.
