BLOOD, CLASS, AND NOSTALGIA
by Christopher Hitchens
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
398 pages; $22.95
Take up the White Man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need.
So begins one of Rudyard Kipling's most famous poems, which reads as if it were written for the British raj. In fact, this hortatory verse was addressed to Teddy Roosevelt with a clear message: having won the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. should claim the Philippines as a colony. Thus Kipling, as author Christopher Hitchens dryly observes, was "John the Baptist to the age of American empire."
The origin of Kipling's ode is only one of many quaint facts in this rambling, opinionated history of the "special relationship" between Britain and the U.S. An English journalist of hip leftist views, Hitchens was inspired by the question he asked himself one night outside a Los Angeles hotel, where Prince Philip was to bestow the Winston Churchill Award upon Ronald Reagan. Why is it, Hitchens wondered, that Englishness looms so large in the American imagination, particularly among the rich?
His answer, basically, is that as Britain's power waned, its ruling elite increasingly saw its country's link with the U.S. as akin to that between ancient Greece and Rome. This teacher-student thesis, with its implication that Washington should take on London's global role, found attentive ears within an Anglophiliac American establishment. Hitchens contends that Britain guilefully dominated the relationship by appealing to ties of blood, class, nostalgia and a common tongue.
Hitchens has a wonderful eye for zany manifestations of Brit kitsch. In 1890, for example, some idealistic Shakespeareans decided to release in New York City's Central Park every bird mentioned by the bard -- more than 50 species in all -- that was not already native to the region. Instead of filling the city's air with the song of larks and nightingales, the experiment introduced to America the common European starling, a dirty, prolific pest that soon ousted New York's native bluebirds from their nesting places. If there is a moral here, Hitchens refrains from drawing it.