Thereabouts
Norman Ball
The United Kingdom is an accommodation born
of geography and the desire to reconcile centuries of nastiness under
one brolly. Echoing George Orwell’s ambivalence, Christopher
Hitchens touches upon the inevitable fiction of all things British in
Why Orwell Matters. For U.N. enthusiasts, the formal name is The
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain
is thus a subset of the United Kingdom, denoting England, Wales,
Scotland and various islands (though not the Isle of Man or the
Channel Islands). Like Hugh Grant on an L.A. bender, the adjective
‘British’ affixes quite loosely. So have at it -- from
Bosworth to James Bond to bangers ‘n mash. But may I suggest you
obtain permission before coupling it with Gerry Adams? The British
Isles designates the entire six-thousand island archipelago. But
because no political power accrues to this purely geographic amalgam,
no one really cares.
The kingdoms of Scotland and England decided
they could harness some real synergies by combining all pomp and
circumstance under one crown. This occurred with the death of
Elizabeth I and the ascension in 1603 of James I or, as the Scots
like to insist, James VI. Alas, even the Roman numerals are a point
of contention. The real savings from the merger didn’t kick in
until the Scottish parliament was dissolved in 1707. This created a
political union, The United Kingdom of Great Britain. Wales had been
appended to England in the sixteenth century. The Welsh have
struggled with their national identity ever since, Tom Jones notwithstanding.
In stark contrast to the stubborn
irreducibility of many Eastern European ethnicities, the British have
proven to be a remarkably agreeable mix of Normans, Saxons, Angles,
Celtics, Picts, Welsh and increasingly, Arabs, Pakistanis, Indians,
and West Indians, to name just a few late-arriving tribes. Yes, the
forces of devolution have been active in recent years. So Scotland
can now boast Scottish, British and EC parliamentary representation.
Sounds like representative overkill to me. But if it makes Sir Sean
Connery happy, then I’m a happy emigrant too.
Northern Ireland was appended in 1921. But must we recount that
tragic tale? A branch of my family hails from this least reconciled
member of the UK family. Historians have elevated the Irish plight in
recent years to Zionist proportions. It’s not uncommon to read
nowadays about the Great Irish Diaspora. However I resist placing all
blame at the feet of my ethnicity. No, there’s just something
about my family that gets under the skin of indigenous populations.
Traditionally, this process of alienation has taken a generation or
two. But I’ve had girlfriends vanish within hours. Maybe
we’re getting better at whatever it is we do.
Ball is a frightfully common English name.
Then someone had to spoil all that and emigrate to the misty Pale of
Ireland sometime around the Year Dot. An even more fearsome family
aptitude was displayed with the subsequent relocation from Dublin to
that oasis of sectarian equanimity, Belfast. Then, it was a veritable
puddle-jump to Glasgow to ride the ship-building fever of the late
nineteenth century. My great-great grandfather, an Ulsterman, landed
in Glasgow in the 1840’s. What possessed him to depart the
country of his birth with five children at the age of 42? After
painstaking research and numerous seances, I have determined that
hunger, or its looming probability, figured prominently. Yes, potato
famines can do strange things to a man.
Inheriting the one-foot-in-one-foot-out
gene, my father struck out for America in the mid-sixties. No, we
were not unwashed and destitute, an almost universal American
assumption. My father was an engineer recruited during the Great
Brain Drain. We came over on TWA so the passage was hardly fraught
with peril unless you consider stale peanuts a material hardship. So
far, the natives have accommodated us nicely. However this may be due
to a chronic shortage of the latter. Finding a native-born American
in Washington DC is akin to locating the Mohican liaison officer in
the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The region is a rogue’s gallery of
carpetbaggers, foreign and domestic.
Speaking for my own sliver of time, I am an American in more ways
than one, though a Glaswegian by birth. This makes me a tad more
savvy than my native-born American brethren on junkets back to the
old country. You see, Americans, particularly Scottish-Americans, are
easy to pick out, especially on Prince’s Street in Edinburgh.
They’re the ones lugging bags full of tartan travesties. Few
native Scots would be caught dead in tartan. I know I’m bursting
bubbles here, but clan tartans are a nineteenth century invention
aimed at capitalizing on the poignant rootlessness of wealthy
Americans. As a young lad fresh from the old country, I can remember
being asked by well-meaning Americans if I missed wearing kilts. I
had never worn one.
Now I am a full-blooded hyphenated American.
To prove this, I joined a clan on my last UK visit. This was done
primarily to instill within my son, a half-Scot, half-Portuguese,
all-American something other than a sort of Naipaul-esque
citizen-of-the-world alienation. Everyone comes from the world, so
where’s the thrill in that? Given my choices – Menzies or
MacNab – you could have knocked me over with a spruce of
heather. But my God, have you ever seen the MacNab tartan? When I
learned the Menzies had a castle near Perth, the choice was an easy one.
My middle name is Dewar. The Dewars were a
sept of the Menzies. But should you ever drop by, please don’t
expect copious supplies of free Scotch. One, I’m not related to
that illustrious line. And two, I’m a Scot. I’ll never
forget my eight-year-old’s wide-eyed wonderment, ‘Dad, I
didn’t know we had a castle’. Feigning an easy familiarity,
I reached nonchalantly for a thick velvet rope to summon the court
jester. Hey, I wanted this to be the most authentically-derived
artificial experience my son had ever had. We all need to think we
have roots. That, and I’m an adopted American. Show business is
practically in my blood.
My father often joked that when something of
note was contributed to the Empire by a Scot, it was dispatched to
the pantheon of British achievements. Whereas English achievements
remained immutably English. At least, that was how the BBC’s
oh-so-painfully-English newsreaders allocated the Kingdom’s many
accomplishments. The same double-vision attends football hooliganism.
When Scots run wild at a European soccer match, the London Times
invariably refers to them as ‘Scottish hooligans’. But when
Manchester fans act up, the problem becomes all too British.
After all, the operative fawning term is
Anglo-phile, not Brit-ophile. Americans chronically short-hand
‘The United Kingdom’ for ‘England’ to which my
parents often note how the Marshall Plan was a momentous Canadian
achievement, or near enough. Americans, famous for their geographic
befuddlement, invariably nod, sort of getting the joke. While
perhaps a source of great merriment, geographic myopia can have a
perilous side too. The darker side of this ‘vague nexus’ is
presently on the ascendant. During those times when America is fully
engaged in its role as Leader of the Free World, we Americans have a
redoubled obligation to be able to find it. The world, that is. Too
many Americans don’t know their place, literally, and I have a
hunch this geographic myopia cascades into a myriad of confusions, if
not outright catastrophic adventures.
We may be in the midst of one such
‘adventure’. I’ve always been troubled by the
amorphous and geographically imprecise nature of the War on Terror.
Terror is not a defined territory locatable on a map. A
‘state’ only insofar as it is a state of mind, terror and
its practitioners will never surrender aboard some aircraft carrier
with ceremonial pens. This means that at least half the battle will
always rage within our darkest imaginings. I don’t want to fall
into the Badrillard post-modernist trap and question the very
‘existence’ of this war. Like Hitchens, I’m too much
the Anglo-Saxon for such existentialism run amok. Al Qaeda is no more
a fiction than Britain is. Whatever nation-states may harbor them,
it’s clear someone found the World Trade Centers alright.
But a war on terror, with its boundless
potential, possesses eerie Orwellian perma-war implications. After
all, certain elements in the world will always seek to elicit terror.
How then does a war on terror, once commenced, ever end? This is a
very strange and different war. It deserves all the wariness we can muster.
Our own President had never traveled outside the US prior to assuming
office. He is unapologetically non-cosmopolitan, not necessarily a
bad thing as, for better or worse, he displays an uncanny sense of
what’s being thought down on the ranch. At any rate, such
‘wise innocence’ redounds to a stubbornly isolationist
chord within the American makeup. And really, who can blame Americans
for wanting to sidestep the historical mess that is Europe? The
unraveling of the EC Constitution is only the most recent example of
the shortcomings of ancient national identities and enmities.
But given the surreal, cocooned nature of a
Presidential trip, it’s fair to say President Bush has yet to
get lost in a foreign capitol which, as de Tocqueville noted, was the
only real way to discover a country. Using this litmus test, Bush has
never left America. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville was French. There
are few things worse in America than being labeled a Francophile.
Believe me, I’m as far removed from French-worship as the next
Anglo-Saxon. They could torture me for days in the Bastille, but
I’ll never concede Jerry Lewis is a genius.
As the effete class wrung its hands over the
larger population’s seeming indifference to the sovereign
distinctions between Afghanistan and Iraq, one can imagine many
Americans simply concluding that, since both countries were
indefatigable worlds away from Ohio, each had earned some vague equal
merit to the enmity of the American military machine. This lack of
conscious place feeds a dangerously bifurcated planet: them and us;
over here, over thereabouts. A nation with precision-guided missiles
must oblige itself to cultivate a precision-guided sense of the
world. Otherwise we could be bombing our friends and not even know it.