>
>Quaint is right. Athough I recall telling my highly cultivated college
>mentor, Harvard '37, about Donna Summers; Love to Love ya Baby, a hit at the
>time (dates me!), with its heavy breathing and on-air orgasm. He refused to
>believe me. I found it on the radio, and after a few minutes, Szathmary said
>to me, "This is the end of Western civilization."
>
>--jks
>
A propos, this (romping, rocketing, ball-busting) little piece is worth a read:
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Suffering under Uncle Sam
*The US has done, is doing and will do more damage to this planet than Nazi Germany, fascist Japan and Davi Baddiel put together*
Julie Burchill
THE GUARDIAN Saturday September 16, 2000
Poor Sacha Distel. Not only did people hate him enough already for being one of the few men alive to have had full penetrative sex with the young Brigitte Bardot, but now he's in the merde with his fellow Frenchies for claiming last week that English is a far better language to sing in than French. Then the fantastically brilliant American-born writer Bonnie Greer revealed in last Saturday's Guardian that, when travelling back to her adopted homeland from the US, she habitually begs airlines to let her sit near the front of the plane, so that she may be all the quicker on to her beloved British soil.
Meanwhile, the very sexy model and singer Caprice, who was born and bred in California, sighed to OK! magazine from her LA condo that she considers England to be her real home: "Living there has made me a much better person, a lot more cultured and sophisticated... the education system is better, so you get a different kind of character." Gee whiz, Caprice!
Knowing that I'm approved of by Sacha, Bonnie and the beauteous Miss Bourret makes me feel even better about the recent nasty comments from Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson about how they're planning to leg it to America because this country is going to the dogs - ie, not buying their rotten books in anything like the quantities they used to. Go on, be honest: which trio would you rather go down the pub with? I thought so.
And, of course, once more it is naked self-interest attempting to cloak its dank and shameful crevices in the watered silk of artistic stimulation. As sumptuous banquets of hypocrisy go, it's the 80s Bad Boy actors thing all over again - you remember, when every week there would be an interview with Tim Roth or Gary Oldman ranting on about how they couldn't breathe any more in Thatcher's rotten, repressive, rightwing Britain. So, for the good of their health and their art, they were moving to... Cuba? Sweden? No, actually: they were moving to kind, enlightened, liberal Reagan's America!
You couldn't help but sn-word when the turkeys started trotting. Like Michael Caine before them, who made such gems as Alfie, The Ipcress File and Get Carter in boring old Britain before abandoning us for Hollywood where, apparently, the real work was - in his case Blame It On Rio, Jaws: The Revenge and The Swarm IV.
No, when Brits move to America - be they actors, writers or stupid sportsmen-turned- movie-tough-guys with mouths like little cats' anuses who are managing to pass off silence as wisdom rather than cretinism - they move there for one of two reasons, both of which have nothing to do with art. They move there because they are rich and greedy for more, or because, unconsciously, they worship evil.
Yes, I said evil. You need only read or own dear George Monbiot's excellent new book to understand that the US has done, is doing and will do more damage to this planet and its people than Nazi Germany, fascist Japan and David Baddiel put together. In the face of this, the rest of the world seems somehow to have reverted to the state of impressionable native - and instead of waving shiny beads in our faces, the Americans now wave shiny Starbucks, Seinfeld and Britney Spears instead.
And this voodoo works. All around you, you can hear people choosing to ignore the fact that America is greatly responsible for turning the earth into an open sewer - culturally, morally and physically - and harping on instead about American "energy" and "can-do". Of course, nine times out of 10, that energy is the energy of the vandal, psychotic or manic depressive, fuelling acts of barbarism and destruction from My Lai to Eminem; and it's a shame that that legendary can-do usually translates as can-do crime, can-do imperialism and can-do poisoning the seas. But Frasier's dead funny, so never mind!
If you want to worship evil and cosy up in the belly of the beast, you're perfectly free to do so, but please don't dress it up as love of art. The fact is that Britain has always attracted sexy, brilliant Americans such as Ava Gardner, Stanley Kubrick and numerous blacks who cannot believe the lack of racial segregation that exists here.
You could see this in the true-life scene from John Schlesinger's film, Yanks, when the English girls, horrified by the white GIs' contempt for their black colleagues, grab the black men and drag them on to the dancefloor, leaving the white Americans as wallflowers. When I was in the music business, I was always being told by black musicians how amazed they were by the sexual and social freedom extended to them here. Most touchingly, I'll never forget a black teenager from a Boston boy band whispering to me, "You can go anywhere you like in England! Where I come from, there's always someone telling you you can't come in."
And every so often, you meet black Americans called Devon - never white ones: "It's because my grandpa was there during the war," an American black lady told me recently. "The people were so nice to him, he always dreamed of going back. But it never happened. So my dad was Devon, and I'm Devon, too." Preferring Britain to the US, despite all our faults, means that you respect tolerance, kindness and a refusal to judge people merely on how far they have made it up the dung heap we call capitalism. Preferring the US to Britain, on the other hand, reveals a person to be a blind worshipper of power, money and those crazy go-to-hell golf slacks. It makes you dirty, but not in a sexy way.
Any Briton who goes to live in America has the clammy mentality of that creepy kid in every class who, while never actually caught bullying vulnerable kids himself, is always there on lookout, always enjoying the show, yet not possessing the guts to get embroiled himself. In short, any Briton who emigrates to America is a pathetic, traitorous little sneak, a disgrace to the human race that is currently suffering under the studded cowboy boot of Uncle Sam, and as such deserves to be stripped of their British citizenship - which could then be given to some nice, appreciative refugee - and never allowed back on this sceptred isle again.
Go on, Mart, Salman, Jeanette: enjoy all the nylons and chewing gum you can get, while there is still time. For soon there will be a mighty day of reckoning, when the free world will break loose of the American yoke, and all the Great Satan's whores and quislings will dangle from the nearest lamp-posts. On that day, don't come looking for me to bail you out - because I'll be down the pub with Caprice.