Great Britain is our best friend on the planet. It is sad to recall that we fought two wars against our Cousins Whose Hotel Rooms Are Tiny and Who Eat Beans With Breakfast.
My Anglo-philia runs deep and wide. My favorite writers? British. My favorite television? British. The best theater on Earth? British. My favorite city? London. The most beautiful spot on earth? The Isle of Skye.
There is Oxford, the Inklings, Trollope, Shakespeare, Dickens, and the splendor of Elizabeth II, the good Queen over the Water.
This Fourth of July it is important to remember why we are glad not to be part of the Empire. So as you barbecue a hot dog and down a cold one (the scarcely combustible and the indigestible made palatable by the potable), let us recall why we must be glad for the Revolution of 1776.
Five Reasons It Is Good We Left the Mother Country:
5. We would have Canadian history if we had stayed. So powerful is the gravitational pull of London that Canada had all the events sucked out of her. Any nation whose two best products are William Shatner and Anne of Green Gables has an excitement problem. Mark Twain would have become a Toronto journalist, “Quite a garden show, eh?.” American football would be Canadian football. Our troops would dress like Mounties.
4. Dental care. Charity forbids I go on.
3. We are not in the European Union.
This misbegotten child of the bureaucratic mind is intent on making Britain simply European. Nobody is quite sure what it means to be European since the only thing that European nations have in common (about which Brussels’ Europeans will speak) is a periodic tendency to want to destroy Western civilization by following a lunatic ideology such as fascism or socialism over the cliff . . . since the EU has banned Christianity from consideration.
2. We don’t have to pretend to care about the yammering of Scottish and Welsh “nationalists.” The whining of two people groups that have almost entirely benefited by their association with the English is unbearable. That tales of their oppression (that filthy Edward I!) are taken seriously is a good sign of the Europeanization of Britain.
This lack of manliness of course began by calling soccer “football.” In British football their overpaid and pampered players run about in shorts doing nothing but running about in shorts for long periods of time while the fans go to prison. In American football our overpaid players growl and claw in the Frozen Tundra or near the Dog Pound on their way to prison.
Our defense can score . . . their offense rarely does. (”It is one nil, the excitement builds!”)
Only a nation who thinks Manchester United could last two seconds with Lombardi’s boys (even at their age today) . . . would contemplate giving nationhood to Wales.
An independent Wales? Whatever. It can join Liechtenstein in every kid’s favorite “cool countries we cannot believe exist.”
1. Disneyland, ice in drinks, Diet Coke, and lots of stuff. Yes, yes. I know commercialism is bad. It is very bad. It is also pleasant and we are better at it than the British. Look around London and you realize that our stuff is better than their stuff and we have more of it to cover our girth. Shoot . . . there is more of us to love . . . and after the hotdogs and beer there will be more still. The Founders of 1776 may have had bigger ambitions, but a good mocha latte and Pixar movies are fine by me.
As a result of all this conspicuous consumerism our Red Necks are from Texas, best remembered for the vets from the Alamo while theirs are from Yorkshire best remembered for vets in “All Creatures.”
Thank God for 1776.