Torn on The 4th of July
How should an Englishman celebrate Independence Day?
Celebrating the moment where the country you live in kicked out the one where you’re from is not without its irony.
I have now been in America for two Independence Days , and I’m still no clearer about how to behave as an outsider. I spent the entire weekend last year in New Orleans observing American men and women clothed in various ironic and non-ironic versions of the Stars and Stripes, bikinis and sheer rayon shirts and thongs and more.
Americans have a number of very clear traditions for celebrating it — drinking till they pass out in the heat, tailgates, getting sunburnt, shouting “Murica”, shooting guns, barbequing things, and setting off fireworks as a merciful alternative to live fire-arms.
Of course, as an Englishman, the principle preoccupation is etiquette: how should I behave, what is the least awkward way to act when everyone around you is celebrating what an arse your country was in the past — what, in short, is the ‘done thing’?
Below, a few viable approaches for the non-native:
Potential Options for The Englishman in America on The 4th of July:
i) Be apologetic and ashamed for the Sins of The Great-Great-Great-Grandfathers (also useful when having discussions about the British Empire with people from Argentina, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Kenya, China, Malaysia, Myanmar…….)
ii) Be magnanimous: pretend the whole of the British Imperial Project was just a deliberate exercise in giving America a common enemy everyone hated enough to forge itself into a nation and evict us from their shores.
iii) Assume the part that Hollywood has typecast most Brits into and play The Villain. Shout “Make America Great Britain Again”. Refer to the USA as “The Colonies”. Try not to get beaten up, tarred and feathered, or shot. (Please note: previous experience with making jokes about American national iconography suggests that this might be tricky).
iv) Play a British soldier in full-costume re-enactments of famous battles from The War of Independence so that your American friends can cathartically murder you to exact a terrible vengeance for past ills.
v) Engage with the spirit of Independence Day but totally ignore the historical context of the occasion, like most Atheists do with Christmas and Easter so they can still receive presents and eat Easter eggs.
vi) Pretend that, in the same way that Coke invented Father Christmas as we know it and Taco Bell are gradually trying to claim Cinco De Mayo, you thought Independence Day was invented as a marketing launch for a film about America leading the fightback against an alien invasion. Express surprise that the constitution hasn’t been rewritten to allow Bill Pullman to remain President beyond his allotted two terms.
vii) Pretend to be American.
Whilst it’s easy for outsiders to laugh at the sheer distilled American-ness of America even before you arrive at the eye of the hurricane that is Independence Day Weekend, it’s also hard, as an Englishman, not to be slightly jealous.
This inability to understand how to behave on national occasions is largely due to the fact that, as a collective entity, we British don’t have any.
The only ones we do have are about The Royal Family — cue moaning about a waste of taxpayers’ money from Republicans and tight-fists all over Britain — or mourning our war dead, which isn’t something anyone wants to celebrate.
We just aren’t very good at waving flags in the UK — try to imagine anyone shouting “Britain” randomly whilst drinking in London, or a brand of beer changing their name to Britain during The General Election — and the last time that anyone managed a version of the UK that everyone liked was the opening ceremony of London 2012, where for a few glorious hours Danny Boyle somehow managed to put his finger on something that had eluded the entire country since Britpop.
(Conservative voters still complained about him including the NHS).
It has even got to the point where the mere act of trying to define what Britishness means — humour, politeness, alcoholism, bad teeth, being miserable — is somehow deemed as un-British, a patriotic paradox which it’s best not to try and unravel.
America gets a day where everyone can celebrate the birth of their nation, whilst the best that Britain has is the lingering sense that our role on the global stage ended somewhere between 1914 and 1945 - along with the knowledge that what we did with our power and prominence is not something any of us should be proud of in the first place.
(Americans also haven’t yet, I don’t think, had their enthusiasm for their country tempered by the knowledge of some of the things that have been done in its name, which a hundred years of hindsight can grant a fallen power).
My conclusion from all of this?
Britain should have a British version of The Fourth of July.
I can’t imagine what that day looks like — drunken-ness, tea parties, perhaps Morrissey singing a version of ‘The Queen Is Dead’ as an alternative national anthem? — or what the date should be, but we need one.
If we don’t invent one soon, more Brexit-style things are going to happen, or or someone is going to try and officially make the day that half the country voted for Brexit our equivalent of The Fourth of July, and the other sane half of the country will be forced to commit suicide in shame.
So, until the day when Britain decides to create a national occasion every British person can enjoy without caveats, I will be celebrating every Fourth Of July in as American a way as I can, and without a shred of irony.
I will be looking past the firearms, Donald Trump, the wars in the Middle East, and everything else you can care to mention, to celebrate the shimmering promise of The Shining City on The Hill, with precisely zero un-American irony or cynicism, and with a great deal of optimism and hope that the country I have admired for so long will re-emerge.
So, happy belated birthday America — we British can’t take any credit for it, but can we please join the celebrations anyway?
