You can take our accents but you'll never take our freedom

It had to happen sometime.  The constant drip-drip of evil film characters with English accents from Hollywood as a result of – and coupled with – the ludicrous American foundation myth that they gained independence from English tyranny (at a time when Great Britain was one of the most liberal states in the world) is finally ripening (I wonder also if Nora Ephron’s Heartburn got the snowball rolling in 1986).  It was there in the 2008 election, with all the criticisms of the ‘socialised medicine’ and the British National Health Service and re-emerged when the Democrats brought forward their health care proposals, with the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) was labelled a ‘death panel’ and that absurd Quisling Daniel Hannan bad-mouthed his own country’s public health provision, just so that he could a pat on the head from right-wing Americans and a ‘good boy’.  It has been there with the historically illiterate Tea Party and it is there with Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association boss, berating British gun laws and saying, in response to Barack Obama’s modest gun control plans, that “we don’t want to be like England.”  Naturally, contrary British opinion Stateside was not carried but Phil Scanlan, the performance director for British shooting (an activity that won gold for a Briton in the double trap in London 2012), dismissed as “absolute rubbish” that shooters earned the “keep their hobby a dark secret from their neighbours for fear of social disapproval.”

You don’t want to be like us, LaPierre, eh?  Get screwed and bugger off!  Like a typical right-winger in today’s USA, you can’t deploy an argument without ad hominems and attacking people you think can’t fight back, because they won’t get the same coverage or platform as you.  Well, if you like insults so much, have some back.  As described by one of your countrymen, Stephen King, you are a gun pimp and a shill for the industry (just citing your latest exhortation to Americans to buy as many guns as possible) and most likely a paranoid fundamentalist (witness your call in the same statement to “stand and fight”).

Bill Hicks, with Jay Leno in mind, said ‘good guys’ who appeared in adverts were sell-outs and could no longer be classified as ‘good guys’.  With Benedict Cumberbatch soon to offer his accent up for the latest round of English vilification in the forthcoming Star Trek, the term ‘sell-out’ can be applied to all British actors, past and present, who hammily play villains in their natural or refined voices.  Oh, the role is more interesting than that of the hero, blah, blah – basically the pay cheque is big and the exposure is bigger (which in turn will lead to even bigger pay cheques).  It has passed through parody to being that of risible.  Maybe you don’t have to sleep with the director or producer to get a juicy part but you’re sluts in every other regard, fostering in mental delinquents like LaPierre a righteous zeal to unfairly criticise this island.