AND YOU WONDER THAT IRAQIS DON'T ACT MORE GRATEFUL?:

Notes on London at the End of a War (Edmund Wilson, 1946-06-02, The New Yorker)

The influence of America on England had already gone pretty far when I was there in 1935, and a public reaction against it was expressed in the popular revues, which ridicule the United States at the same time that they were resorting to American methods and using American jokes. Today the influence is more pervasive and, though criticism on the stage and in the press is restrained by our relation as Allies, the rebellion against that influence is stronger. Everybody goes to the American films and the "lower order" now chews gum. Everybody under forty-five, of whatever social class, seems to say "O.K." and "That's right," and the American use of "fix," in the sense of "mend" or "arrange," seems to be universal. People also begin statements with "Look" instead of with "I say” (now becoming a little old-fashioned), which I believe was originally an Americanism, too; and it is queer to hear phrases like "het up" and "corked out" pronounced by English voices. There is some growling about this in print, and there has recently been a very sharp protest against the dominance of the American films, a protest with which an American may gloomily find himself in sympathy. The effect of the American movies, American journalism, and American radio on the British lower-middle class is, I fear, going to he rather awful. They will get much of the banality and cheapness with little of the excitement and snap. There is certainly a large market in England for the worst the United States has to offer. Our Hollywood stars are already their stars and our best-sellers will be their best-sellers.

The English, in fact, partially as a result of all this, have become fairly neurotic about America. They were swamped by the American Army, as wave after wave of it came in before D Day, and they now seem to look back on its sojourn as an ordeal of almost the same severity as the blitz and the bombs. It is, indeed, a dreadful nuisance to have the people of some other nation suddenly upon one, and the English have really had much to complain of in the way of soldier hillbillies and hoodlums who took advantage of the blackout in London to pester women and snatch purses. But now that the Army was mostly gone, I assumed that the resentment had subsided, and I was therefore surprised, in London, to hear a good deal of somewhat bitter criticism of practically everything connected to America. I had begun by being depreciatory about those products of United States—such as I have mentioned above—to which I object as much as they did. But I soon found this was not understood: the Englishman always stands up for his country where foreigners are concerned, and he thinks that if you criticize yours, it is an admission of inferiority. I first became aware of this attitude some years ago, when I met a visiting English physicist who said that he hesitated to tell Americans he enjoyed Sinclair Lewis's novels because he feared they might resent it. This seemed to me odd at the time, but I realized, when I came to England, that the English point of view in such matters is entirely different from ours. They do not publicly engage in self-criticism—Bernard Shaw, after all, is an Irishman—and they are always intent on keeping up face. I saw that, compared to England (or, in fact, any European country), the United States is not a nation at all—that is, an entity that maintains its breed and has to compete and defend itself among entities of other breeds—but a society in course of construction, composed of the most diverse elements, in which it is the way of life and not the national existence and essence with which people are occupied.

The extent to which Europe has reacted to America, rather than learned from it, is similar to the extent to which it finds itself in decline today.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2005 11:59 AM