Anglo-Americani

I spent a lot of my time in Rome getting lost, and it wasn't always the good kind of lost, where you wander around picturesque streets and then stumble across something wonderful. My hotel -- about a mile away from the Tiber River -- was in an area slightly reminiscent of Jackson Road in Ann Arbor. Since moving to New York, I walk everywhere, which, in Rome, meant getting lost a lot. Hence, at the end of my second day in the city, I found myself walking along the shoulder of a highly unPhish-like freeway called Anastasio II.

After that, I started taking cabs. One phrase was repeated constantly over the cabs' dispatch radios: "Anglo-Americani." It was repeated about 90 times each minute. There were a lot of Anglo-Americani in need of car rides.

The Anglo-Americani I saw in Italy were indistinguishable. Most of them were in late middle-age or in early retirement. They approached everything with a combination of enthusiasm, clunkiness and self-consciousness, equally likely to wear goofy caps with an Italia logo, sit in piazzas drinking half-pints of beer, and react in giddy and nervous ways when confronted with a menu in Italian. Eager, happy, content, sufficiently clueless to be annoying and endearing at the same time.

This reinforced a conclusion that I reached in London and in Scotland. The difference between Britons and Americans is so slight that it's only an accident of history that we're no longer part of the same country. The American Revolution was a brain fart.

When I was in London and Scotland, I was thinking about how traveling from the Northeast to Britain was less jarring than visiting the South or the Upper Midwest. I mentioned this to someone in Scotland, who wasn't surprised. He talked about the misfortune of visiting Texas, and the continental Europeans' poor grasp of America.

A couple weeks later I read an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune by a Briton named Rob Blackhurst, who had just returned home to London after a month in Vienna. Somewhat dismayed, he observed that "the British will never be comfortable Europeans," and that "Britain has slowly but inexorably rejected European-style social democracy and embraced American-style individualism." Blackhurst later noted that while British politicians pay lip-service to being good Europeans, they rapidly adopt American-style economic and social policies. He concludes that the British have willingly traded community and security for individuality and wealth.

Sadly, I didn't have time to meet with any British sociologists or treasury officials, but watching TV before naps and bedtime, I saw programs so garish that they made Fox and Spike look like Masterpiece Theater. This included a reality program about sweaty, sexually promiscuous teenagers learning how to be more romantic with their dates, and another program where lower-class teenagers competed for jobs as construction workers. Evelyn Waugh would not be amused.

Is this a byproduct of globalization? Neither the Netherlands nor Italy had such recongizable fashions or attitudes. Italian Survivor was comparatively classy, albeit lengthy. The inevitable result of America's status as a former colony? I spent a summer of college working in the Canadian Parliament, where the politics and civic culture more closely resemble continental Europe than either America or the U.K. My guess is that the policies of Reagan/Thatcher, Bush I/Major, and Clinton-Bush II/Blair have been so similar that the economic and political cultures have basically elided. Both countries have been electing identical heads of state for 25 years.

As far as the two countries' pop cultures, I blame Rupert Murdoch.

Disband NAFTA and let Canada join the E.U., where it belongs. Canada is too pleasant and gentle to be stuck with us. Britain needs to call off its engagement with the E.U., which will only end in heartbreak -- it's been 230 years, so let's stop playing hard-to-get with each other. Just a little free trade and a little immigration relaxation. I'm not saying we go all the way, but I'll volunteer that Andrew Jackson was one sick son of a bitch and that Churchill could like nice on the twenty. (U.S. conservatives are batshit about him anyway.) We could also dump Grant for a picture of a squirrel.

This way, it will be much easier for both nations to wreck Middle Eastern countries, produce shitty reality shows and throw away their civil liberties.

Pint of the Fuller's? Yes, please.