Status Anxiety

15 March 2008

Disaster strikes as the scales finally fall from American eyes: not all Brits are gentlemen

For the past 200 years or so, Englishmen who aren’t faring too well in the home country have had the option of moving to the States. Thanks to their inferiority complex, our American cousins labour under the illusion that we are more intelligent and better educated than them. You only have to deign to notice them and they are pathetically grateful, something particularly true when it comes to the fairer sex. Men who would not attract a second glance in the nightclubs of Mayfair are treated like movie stars across the Atlantic simply by virtue of having a British accent.

Unfortunately, it looks as if the well has run dry. In the current issue of Reason, an influential American monthly, there is a ‘rant’ by journalist Michael C. Moynihan about ‘the feral packs of lager louts’ arriving on American soil by the jumbo jet-load, thanks to the falling dollar. ‘Take a look around New York, Boston or Los Angeles and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach,’ he writes. It won’t be long, he concludes, before these ‘pale-skinned men in Manchester United shirts... correct America’s long-held misperception that the English are a nation of Inspector Morse bit-players — sophisticated, fastidious, snobby — especially when compared to us rubes’.

If this is true, it is a catastrophe. As an Englishman who has lived in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, I can attest that life in those cities would have been intolerable if I had not been able to exploit this ‘misperception’. Without the myth of the English gentleman to fall back on, I would have been just another newly arrived immigrant, forced to take my chances alongside the Pakistani cabdrivers and Mexican busboys. I don’t suppose I would have persuaded a single woman to go to bed with me.

What makes this turn of events tragic is that it was avoidable. Those expats who have been benefitting from this snobbery have always made a point of warning new arrivals that it depends upon maintaining an air of refinement when dealing with the natives. Among other things, that means never taking a service job. ‘It’s a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it,’ says one of the British characters in The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh’s Hollywood novel. ‘We can’t all be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the underdogs — except in England, of course. There are jobs an Englishman just doesn’t take.’

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