Changing Stages

Excerpt from chapter 6: America Dreaming "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is." -- Gertrude Stein 1. There's a Picture Post photograph taken in 1945: two sailors and two girls are standing in the fountains of Trafalgar Square, trousers rolled up to their thighs, water above their knees. One girl has her arms wrapped round the two men, a half-knotted tie lying between her breasts on her Lana Turner jumper, and a sailor's hat cocked at a rakish angle on her dark hair; she looks straight at the camera, mocking the photographer. The other, blonde and demure, floats her hands away from her body like a dancer, neither encouraging nor rejecting the sailor's hand spread over the side of her stomach. They are tired, drunk, young, and guileless. It is dawn, V-E day, after a night when plump women in aprons made of Union Hacks danced with pinstriped civil servants, strangers kissed, the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret mingled with the crown outside Buckingham Palace, searchlights danced on the night sky, bonfires blazed in the streets, and for a moment the nation held its breath before putting its weary back into rebuilding a nearly bankrupt country, crippled by war. Britain at the time was profoundly insular, undemocratic and riven by class division. The country was divided between those who were content to let it continue, and those who were keen for change. A poll of all voters was asked if people wanted Labor to govern along existing lines, only more efficiently, or to introduce sweeping new changes. 56 per cent made the second assumption. A Labor government was voted in with the hope of a New Jerusalem. The wonder is that it changed so little for so long. In the six years of war, millions of British men left home for the first time in their lives, and had their eyes opened by experience and education, millions of women went to work, millions of both sexes occupued the magic heartland of the movies, and were seduced by the vision of the Promised Land. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers grafted their world onto Britain -- their own newspapers, magazines, films, music, even their radio station: 'They so often seemed t treat Britain as an occupied country rather than as an ally," said a contemporary U.S. journalist. They were better paid than the British, better dressed, and however vainly the old guard may have hoped to export cricket and soccer to the U.S., the traffic was all one-way -- the waltz gave way to the foxtrot, Pinewood to Hollywood, and the received pronunciation of the BBC graduated to the Mid-Atlantic. The American presence -- and the 'special relationship' -- started to saturate British life politically, economically, and culturally, invoking unease about our lack of democracym unsatistifed desire for consumer goods, and restlessness and insecurity about our own culture. We became willingly, enthusiastically, and comprehensively colonized. 'The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof,' said the novelist Mary McCarthy., Generation after generation has lost its soul to American films, novels,comics, rock and roll, or TV, from I Love Lucy and Bilko, to Friends and ER. Now when you walk down a street, you pass a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Nachos, a Baskin-Robbins, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Planet Hollywood, Tower Records, Warner Cinemas, jeans, t-shirts, baseball caps, loafers, hightop sneakers that proclaim Gap, Nike, Coke, Levi's, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Tommy Hilfiger. You choose between a Bud and a Beck's in a pub called the Sunset Strip where you watch a Superbowl game on the TV, agree to a ballpark figure for your deal, take a rain check on a movie, slap high-fives, and find yourself in the centre of any large city in Britain --Eyre, Richard is the author of 'Changing Stages' with ISBN 9780375412035 and ISBN 0375412034.