Going Brit: Anglovision vs. Eurovision

We, the Americas, are still British. It is why today young women linger in the halls of Congress to get a glimpse of Prince Harry. It is why we fought in World Wars I and II, and possibly the only reason. The tabloids tell all.

Eurovision is a kind of globalist, Eurocentric “American Idol,” in which (like ours) possibly the least talented among us seek and find dominance. The lament is that the Brits are not — have not been — competitive in this.

{mosads}From the Post’s piece: “No British artist has won the coveted Eurovision title since 1997, and it’s not for lack of trying. As is so often the case on these isles where the English Channel doubles as a cultural gulf, the British smell a continental plot. At a time when Prime Minister David Cameron is pledging a referendum on whether to pull his nation out of the European Union, the grumbling here spotlights a basic question for the region: Is Britain out of tune with the rest of Europe?”

As England turns away from globalism, it turns again to the U.S. But back and forth has been the trend since our shared creation myth, the celestial marriage of Henry and Anne, which gave birth to Elizabeth I and created the modern world. Possibly Elizabeth II is book end and Victoria the book. At the end (which is now), the greater union finds completion.

A brief chronological anthropology: The marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; the birth of Elizabeth; the American Revolution, which British writer and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher confidant John Browne says actually democratized England while it nominally divided America from England; World Wars I and II, which brought us back together; and most importantly, February 7, 1964, when The Beatles arrived in America.

Said by poet Allen Ginsberg at the time, Liverpool, England, became “the center of the universe.” Possibly the center of Anglovision, as opposed to Eurovision. It left in its wake an iconic photo of the Fab Four leaving an aircraft for America, like water pouring from the sky; the old earthy, ancestral world pouring again to the new world vessel. It could not have happened in history until that moment and after all those wars. And now, as viewers of “The Tudors,” “Downton Abbey” and “Game of Thrones” must understand, the elixir cannot be put back in the bottle. The Brits can no longer be kept from us.

Because they belong with us. My children work and live today in Australia or London as they would in New York and Boston 30 years ago. They are at home there; there is no real difference.

This common-sense relationship — cousins, friends, gifted hockey players — should begin to take form when England leaves that Greater Germany of the continent known as the EU. Possibly start discussion to legitimize this organic and natural kinship in that jewel of Anglovision in the Great White North above which is Ottawa.