The United States of America has always traded with Britain, though sometimes it was less of a formal trade, and more of a swap.
We stole our whole country from the British, and they invaded us in 1812. But, we sent Americans to help Britain in two world wars. Call it even.
They sent us The Beatles. We sent them The Doors. Even.
They sent us the Spice Girls. We sent them Justin Timberlake. That was an even trade, too, but nobody was happy with what they got, except teenage girls. Of course, the happiness of teenage girls counts for a lot in the world, as does the happiness of teenage boys.
Lately, we’ve taken on some British slang. The Brits have a great gift for what I call “itsy-bitsying,” which is the art of saying things cutely.
“Walkies,” for “walking the dog,” is an import from Britain, as is “brekky” for “breakfast.” Even hard-bitten American reporters have taken to calling themselves “journos,” the Brits being one of the European people who use that as shorthand for “journalist.”
We love royal weddings. The Brits loved the wedding of Pres. John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy.
The most trusted American presidents have always had a little bit of the British aristocracy in their demeanor, if it was only their tailoring. Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an American aristocrat at a time when the American rich acted very much like British lords and ladies. The first Pres. Bush had that prep school WASP-y buzz perfected by the English upper class.
Right now, the Brits are up to their crumpets in old, white, isolationist, Muslim-hating creep jobs, and so are we. Their country also contains a bunch of radical Muslim creep jobs who want to bury Western Christian civilization. So does our country.
If all goes according to form, neither group will triumph in either country. Their institutions, and ours, tend to flatten out the extremists, to roll over the far-left and the far-right wings, and create a sort of boring, peaceful, slightly dorky, middle-class middle that sometimes gets mad and goes to war.
If there is a great blessing of any kind of one person, one vote system, it’s that it favors dorkiness and not extremism. It’s for the man who just wants to get off his job as a bus driver and go home to watch the game and the woman who wants to get off her job as a mail carrier and go home to watch the game. Such people can be terrible in their vengeance, but if you give them time, they’ll get tired of extremism and want things to be orderly and slightly drowsy again.
And in this long history of trade and swap, the United States of America most recently sent Pres. Donald J. Trump to England. The British, whose still-very-much-unhidden class system has existed for generations, smelled him as a cheap little casino developer who is in over his head, the way one of their kings is occasionally stupid or so inbred as to be useless.
The British let such a king rule, and try to keep him from breaking anything, and they hope that their institutions are strong enough to hold. So do we.
We ought to send them something nice after this, though, just to even up the cultural balance of trade.
Maybe Beyonce. Not forever. I’d miss Beyonce. But send her on a tour of Britain. Maybe Lady Gaga, too, and a couple of rappers and, what the hell, Justin Timberlake. Is Britney Spears busy?
Give the Brits free tickets. Call the tour “Geez, We’re Sorry-2019.”
Marc Dion, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a reporter and columnist for The Herald News, the daily newspaper of his hometown, Fall River, Massachusetts. For more on Dion, go to go to www.creators.com.
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