by Roger W. Gardner. Cross posted from Radarsite
http://radarsite.blogspot.com/2008/02/latest-news-from-across-pond-were-all.html
Most Americans, I think, feel a certain closeness to their British cousins 'across the pond'. We follow your travails with interest and compassion. What we see happening there has a special significance for us here. In short, we care.
We express this concern in our articles and in our blogs. Many of us are, to a large degree, products of your inimitable culture, and we admire you and your accomplishments. And, in perhaps the greatest compliment of all, we seek to emulate you in our hallowed halls of Academia and in our commercials on our television programs. You represent to us the highest examples of our Western civilization. However, that glorious culture of yours is under siege. The reports come in daily of new losses in this battle of cultures, of new and even more shameful capitulations to these barbarous islamic intruders. And we worry for you.
However, there is a certain breed of Brit -- and unfortunately this certain breed seems to be running things there now -- and this particularly nasty and ungrateful Brit, it seems, is quick to take umbrage with our concern, and interprets our sympathy as interference in their private affairs. These are the people who express their resentment of us with a snooty Old World condescension. They don't like the idea of being judged or criticized by us crude Yanks. These are the ones who write into our comment threads to assure us Nervous Nellies that everything in Great Britain is under control, that we needn't worry about them.
One of these nasty types wrote into an Australian website recently to remind them that the Conservatives in Britain were watching the Libs and "had them in check". Really? Somehow I don't think that's quite the message that we're getting over here. Another annoyed transplanted Englishman wrote in to assuage our worries by providing us with statistical evidence of just what a small minority these Muslims actually represent in Britain. Of course, I can't help recalling that the Nazis were also just a small statistical minority once upon a time.
This issue became somewhat more personal to me when I responded to one of these affronted Britishers, who was essentially telling us to mind our own business, by reminding him that their business often has a habit of becoming our business -- like that little business of WWII. To this he responded, that they (the Brits) had been fighting the Nazis since the Fall of France, and that we Yanks hadn't come into the fray until "late in the game". Now, considering the number of Yanks who never came home from that fray, I could get pretty pissed off about that remark. I could even stoop so low as to remind him that, yes, they were fighting the Nazis "before we got into the fray" -- but they were losing. Sorry, but remember Dunkirk? I could even sink so low as to point out to this snotty ungrateful Brit that if us lowborn Yanks hadn't made it their business to help their British cousins in that cataclysmic struggle, he'd be writing in his nasty little comments in German.
Americans are used to getting a lot of criticism these days. A lot of criticism from people in countries that wouldn't even exist right now if it wasn't for the sacrifice of our American fathers and sons, and for the historically unparalleled generosity of the American people. But to get this criticism from these quarters, from these liberal idiots who are perfectly content with the idea of selling their own country down the drain for the sake of advancing some Socialistic EU agenda, these petty ingrates who eagerly seek to discredit their loyal allies and friends is particularly galling to this particular Yank.
We can, however, seek solace in the knowledge that these skewered views do not indeed represent the views of those traditionally courageous and brave Brits, who we think of as our honorable cousins from across the pond.
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