Americans Pretending to Be British

I’m gonna file this entry under the category, “You Know What Really G’s and G?” as in, “grinds my gears,” “gets my goat,” and “gripes my Grandma.” And I’ll tell you what G’s my G – Americans pretending to be British. Let’s begin.

So it seems like everyone has at least one person in their life who makes a sad attempt at being something other than American when we all know damn well they were born and raised in McBurgerland and putting on a fake accent ain’t gonna do nothin’ to change it. I know at NYU there was an infamous character by the name of “Fake British Rob” who I personally never encountered, and everyone’s got at least one (if not several) person(s) from their high school who wanted desperately to move to Japan so they could work in a Hello Kitty Factory, watch anime, be accepted by their peers (good luck!) and compete on Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (that is what they do over there, right?) But aside from those incredibly obvious (and somewhat desperate and sad) attempts to pull off another national identity, I’ve noticed an ever-increasing, yet subtle, trend amongst the speech and behavior of young Americans that I can only assume is meant as an effort to appear more worldly and learned, ipso facto*, British.

Happy America Day

It’s the 4th of July, and this is the first time I’ll be in New York to celebrate our nation’s independence from high prices and finance charges. Normally, if I were back in Maryland, I would spend the night at my grandmother’s house, wake up at about 8am to eat Costco danishes, watch the parade, and have my hearing permanently damaged by sirens, loud engines, and screaming crowds. Then we would spend the day by the pool eating hot dogs and hamburgers. Ah, America. Who else has the freedom to do that once a year?

But this year, I know nothing of any parade in Manhattan, and I certainly won’t get to be grilling my own sparkler dogs. And how am I supposed to exercise my freedoms without dangerous illegal fireworks? I didn’t think far enough in advance to get a gun, so what am I to do? Well, blog, it seems like. And now, a brief and abridged history of our great nation.

America! The United States of America was founded in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He vanquished all native peoples with his Italian charm and rampant case of super-crabs. Once he had all those damn people out of the way, his fellow guidos hopped on their motor boats and arrived in the New World. In 1500, they opened the first pizzeria, Famous Original Ray’s Pizza on Lexington Avenue in Italyville, which later become known as “New York” and more specifically, the borough of “Manahatta”. That had too many syllables and was easily mistaken for “Man Hat?” by the Italians, so it was changed to “Manhattan.” 

Then it was discovered that Columbus didn’t vanquish all the native peoples of this new land. In 1980 it was discovered that Texas was chock full of real Americans, with old school values like the necessity of firearms and Weber grills. These people, much larger than Columbus’s band of scrawny Italians, waged a war against the Manhattanites and won. They installed their leader, George H.W. Bush, as king of the land. The Bush dynasty spread across the land and is still prevalent today. The end.