An odd symptom of imperialism

I am about ready to attack my TV if I hear one more talking-head imbecile around here try to sound like a Briton during the run-up to Sunday's Patriots game in London.

Once again: remember the part in journalism school that talked about informing the public? Oh, right, oh course you don't. Informing the public in this case would include running clips from various Tony Blair or Gordon Brown sound bites, or even something from Frost-Nixon. The object would be to show what a reasonably educated inhabitant of the British Isles actually sounds like in the 21st century. Or how about 20 live interviews from Londoners-on-the-street, who approach the language from 20 different directions?

It would be so much more useful than newscasters putting on a bogus Colonel Blimp accent that wasn't representative even its heyday. Newsrooms might even point out that most people interested in American football represent the 90 percent of the population who never, ever, spoke like that.

This is a case of the shoe being on the other foot. Nothing in British popular literature between, say, 1890 and 1940 matches the pathetic comedy of an English writer trying to capture Americanisms in print. That was the era when--at its start--the sun really didn't set on the British Empire. At its end, the sun was setting on it rather fast.

Now we are the imperialists. Although Americans don't dress for dinner (or any other occasion) anymore, we inherit the privilege of stereotyping everyone else. The chief distinction between stereotypes aimed at Britain or Ireland, and those aimed at Iraq and Afghanistan, is that the former are socially acceptable, and can play out on the evening news, even when it isn't Fox.