Spectator's Notebook
A 111:1:1: or two ago the BBC ran a symposium
A
on anti-American attitudes. Some well- balanced diagnosticians like Denis Brogan, Kingsley Amis, Marcus Cunliffe, and Anthony Crosland dealt with the various causes of the disease which still disfigures the fringes of Eng- lish society. Nothing could have been more reasonable, more sober, less provocative. This did not prevent a quantity of letters to the Listener complaining indignantly and self-righteously of bias! How dare the BBC put all those 'pro- Americans' on the air without contributions from 'a Communist, a pacifist, a socialist (not another pink Labour-ite please), an anarchist, a CND speaker (preferably one who worked at Holy Loch) and perhaps someone who has taken an active part. in the fight against racial seg- regation in the USA.' What on earth could be more indomitably bigoted than the attitude be- hind such a complaint? And then there is the solemn student of American critics of American society who say, 'speaking as a British socialist,' that he always turns `to American sources when I wish to indict American capitalism.' The con- text betrays precisely the same certitude as that which finds full confirmation in Holy Writ of any imaginable prejudice or delusion, and then, like Jehovah's Witnesses, damns to the hot hob of hell those who find the process unsophisticated, The people who took part in the BBC programme all knew America; they were concerned not to put across 'pro-American attitudes' but merely to explain the more grotesque misconceptions about life in the republic. But it is clear that there remain many whose anti-Americanism has now the full force of a faith, and who react to any challenge much as Wilberforce reacted to Hux- ley.
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