Lewis Jones

American enterprise

The title of A.A. Gill’s latest book comes from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor… I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ And its subtitle is a tribute to Alistair Cooke, who was a friend and colleague of Gill’s father, and ‘the most urbane, witty and readable journalist of his century’. Urbanity is hardly Gill’s forte, but he is often witty and always readable.

‘This book,’ he explains, ‘is the view of the New World from the Old.’ He might more modestly and accurately have called it ‘a view’, as it is intended to challenge the view of many European intellectuals that Americans are stupid, ignorant, arrogant and so on. He rightly argues that such sneering abuse is itself stupid, ignorant and arrogant, and that ‘America is Europe’s greatest invention’.

But, as readers of his columns in the Sunday Times will know, Gill himself has a remarkable flair for sneering abuse. Here he is wildly insulting not only to people who are unlikely to read his book (‘What is the point of shooting a Swiss? There’d just be another one there in the morning’) but also to those who might, such as readers of hardback books: ‘The number of hardbacks on your bedside table is in inverse proportion to the number of arched backs in your bed.’ Paperbacks are obviously more flexible, but still…

And while he praises Americans for their optimism, courage, enterprise, ingenuity, philanthropy and sense of irony, he simply cannot resist mocking them for such traits as gun mania and religious fundamentalism. This tends to sabotage his thesis, but is good news for the reader.

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