Hitchens, Christopher. Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. 398 pages.
Oxford-educated Christopher Hitchens still has his British accent, but
he lives in Washington DC, and doesn't get a chance to use it while writing
columns for The Nation and Vanity Fair. It's just as well; he seems a bit
uncomfortable with it. In this book he shows how, ever since U.S. imperialism
began in 1898, it has been the British tail wagging the American dogs of war.
In their scholarship, language, manners, ethnicity, and taste, privileged
Americans frequently aspire to be British. This identity problem has placed
American economic and military power in the service of British efforts to
maintain some semblance of empire.
Half of this book belongs back at Oxford, as Hitchens' literary
allusions are poor grist for the NameBase mill. It gets better starting
with chapter ten: there's one on the special relationship between British
and U.S. intelligence, another on U.S. foreign policy and the British
connection since World War II, and then a chapter that briefly traces the
Rhodes-Chatham House-Ditchley Park-Council on Foreign Relations tradition
of elitist salon think-tanking with its dense Anglo-American cross-connects.
What's missing is a discussion of Anglophobic conspiracy theory in America
that would help us decide whether right-wing American patriots are just
crazy, or could they be trying to tell us something?
ISBN 0-374-11443-9
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