Friday 18 September 2020

Red, White, Blue and Green

I tried to tell you. In America, Ireland always comes first. And by Ireland, they mean the 32 County Republic, meaning in turn those who insist that they speak for the 32 County Republic.

Expect nothing different under Donald Trump, who had close ties to the SNP in the Salmond years. Anglophile? There is nothing Anglo about him. His mother's first language was Gaelic. The whole of his father's family was of course German, making him part of America's largest ethnic group, and it is not the WASPs. 

The WASPs now own little and run almost nothing. Look out over a major historic stronghold such as Manhattan and tell me what is still theirs. Episcopal churches, and that is about it. But in any case, they are the only white group, at least, to define itself against its ancestral homeland. What matters is to have had ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence, and that kind of thing. Even the most advanced cultural Anglophilia has never necessarily translated into pro-British politics, and often quite the reverse. 

This is not odd at that level. The Royal Family spoke German at home until the First World War, and English with heavy German accents, but there was still a First World War. One of George V's first cousins who fought on the other side had been born in Britain, where his sister lived happily to her dying day as a firm favourite of the British public.

Almost none of the Duke of Edinburgh's immediate family attended his wedding in 1947, and it was not because they were Greek. He, however, had served with distinction in the Royal Navy. His descendants still open their presents on Christmas Eve, in the German manner.

So it was with isolationist and Lend-Leasing American politicians whose Ivy League accents were sometimes mistaken for English, who had in some cases even taken second degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, whose dowried kinswomen had married into cash-strapped but prestigious branches of the British aristocracy, and so on. 

As scions of what had already been the leading families of New England or Virginia in 1776, they were descended from younger sons of the English landed gentry, thus from daughters of the English nobility, and thus from daughters and younger sons of Kings of England. But that made no difference in 1776, it has made no difference thereafter, and in any case, while of course those lines still exist, their political clout is a thing of the past.

People go on about the hilarious fact that, like a jilted lover, John Major stopped taking calls from Bill Clinton after he had granted a visa to Gerry Adams. As if Clinton would have cared, or even noticed. And as for Jim Baker's reference to the tiff at the Republican National Convention, he was booed from the floor. Clinton, like many Southerners, was of Ulster Protestant stock. But so what?

What are the three biggest days in the United States? One of them celebrates enemies of the English Crown who had fled to the New World for the sake of religious liberty, however little that might have to do with anything approaching real history. The second celebrates independence from Britain, obtained by force of arms. And the third is Saint Patrick's Day. Well, there you are, then. I tried to tell you.

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