Dissing British heritage to appease a viewpoint

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 18, 1997 | by Woody West

In Pax Britannica, a superb three-volume history of the British Empire, Jan Morris wrote that her theme was one "of muddled grandeur." At Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897. the empire was the world's largest, encompassing nearly a quarter of the world's land mass as well as a quarter of its population.

It has been all downhill for our cousins since their valiant defiance of the Nazis during World War II. Though Maggie Thatcher got the sinking old island half bailed out (its economy was second only to that of the United States among the G-8 summiteers in Denver a few weeks ago), the United Kingdom in traditional terms of global power and influence may be pretty much ready for the knacker.

It is conventional wisdom, of course, that colonization was nasty and imperialism evil -- no room for nuance in that pious point of view. But there was a grandeur to the dominion "over pine and palm" and the grand cultural and political legacy that has enriched the world and is America's special inheritance.

The surrender of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China was for practical purposes the coda in the long-running play of empire (Scotland is exuberantly "devolving," Wales has ideas in that direction and Ulster probably will be an asterisk eventually). Hong Kong typifies Great Britain's post-World War II withdrawal from east of Suez, and impressive ritual has not obscured the scuttle back to the home island since 1945.

The end of British dignity is howlingly illustrated by a recent national "marketing" study commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corp. To call the proposals embarrassing is on the order of describing an aroused cobra as touchy

To peddle the nation for "the new millennium," the London marketing firm recommends "Great" be dropped from the name of the kingdom. "Great Britain" implies, after all, an aura that might offend someone somewhere.

The Union Jack should be junked, too, the study asserts. The flag is "no longer representative of modern Britain ... hijacked by right-wing politics, it stands for imperialism in many parts of the world." (The jab at conservatives demonstrates how leftists will abase their country to score petty political points). The marketeers believe that a flag more resembling a corporate logo would be dandy. Red and blue vertical stripes, with "Britain" imprinted in white, catches their fancy. "The brand is postpolitical" -- whatever that means.

Oh, and the lyrics of the national anthem have got to go. "God save our glorious Queen" evidently is embarrassing. The marketing firm likes "Green fields and spires, lakes and sea shores." That gets the blood stirring, doesn't it!

One point of this dull drill, though, is presicely to keep the blood from being stirred. Nationalism as a dirty word is a premise of this nonsense. A more corporate approach, it is believed, "respects our heritage but is not nostalgic." Respects the national heritage by genuflecting to the hollow sentimentalities of global self-esteem! Strange notion.

Doubtless the London marketing gurus' final report also will recommend excision of John of Gaunt's glorious speech in Richard II ("This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,/This other Eden, demi-paradise,/This fortress built by Nature for herself"). Indeed a special subcommittee will be needed to sanitize Shakespeare's histories.

Edward Elgar's resounding "Land of Hope and Glory" -- the lyrics of which include such presumably offensive lines as "mother of the free" and "God who made thee mighty,/Make thee mightier yet" -- will have to be summarily purged.

In the final volume of Pax Britannica, Morris wrote elegiacally of empire: "Its beauty had lain in its certainly and momentum, its arrogance perhaps. In its declining years it lost the dignity of command and became rather an exhibition of ineffectual good intentions. Its memory was terrific, it had done much good in its time, it had behaved with courtesy with brutality, rapaciously and generously, rightly and in error; good and bad had been allied in this, one of the most truly astonishing of human enterprises."

Contrast those words with the lame prose of the marketing study Dreary Sad.

To subscribe to such studies is to admit the utter loss of confidence and an eagerness to rely on a pseudodiscipline -- to have decisions made by focus groups and similar mumbo-jumbo. Marketing may have modest utility for selling beer or burgers or Band-Aids. But when leaders of that once-bold "green and pleasant land" embrace it, there is little soul left.

Poor "Great" Britain.

Couldn't happen here.