-Caveat Lector-
>From TheIndepedent (UK)
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COLUMN ONE: THE YOUNG AMERICANS TAKING BILL'S PATH TO BRITAIN
THEY WERE smart and alert, their eyes clear and their handshakes firm as they
gathered last week in the rotunda of the British Embassy in Washington. It was
hard not to feel that there was little anyone could tell them. They were the
Rhodes and Marshall scholars, the cream of young American students on their way
to Oxford and other universities across Britain, and they were at the embassy
to find out more about where they were heading.
Lest one wonder about the importance of these young people, they were given 15
minutes with the US President himself.
He told them what an important and wonderful thing they were going to do, and
said he wished he could change places with them. One student, Alon Unger, told
the President that he was ready to change places, and they all laughed.
In 20 or 30 years, the chances are strong that one of them will be there in the
White House. Mr Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, and so were many of the top tier
of this and many other administrations, taken to Oxford on the strength of a
bequest by Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist. Or, in the case of the Marshall
scholars, on a British government scholarship founded to commemorate the
Marshall Plan. This is a concrete part of the desperately serious effort to
perpetuate something which Britain calls the Special Relationship, and America
doesn't.
Most of the scholars appear unmoved by their time with the President, perhaps
because they are not fans, but more likely because they are not readily
impressed by anything. Their CVs record staggering young lives of unimaginable
energy and aspiration.
William Reilly Polkinghorn has won the American Chemical Society Polymerization
Award, written a thesis on the Christology of the Italian writer Ignazio
Silone, helps kids with cancer in the summer, plays baseball for his
university, skis and reads Somerset Maugham and E M Forster. Karen Yoshiko
Matsuoka founded the Diabetic Buddies Program, works as a graphic designer for
the Earth science division at Nasa and has had her photographs exhibited in Los
Angeles.
As for Mr Unger, he has already received a Truman scholarship, an Arizona
Regents Scholarship, Flinn Scholarship and the Sun Angel Research Award for a
project on "Mythmaking about Women and AIDS." Presumably, he only
wanted the Rhodes to make up a full house. He volunteered at the Cancer
Division of the University Medical Center in Tucson and with underprivilegedand
disabled children. Godknows what he will make of Oxford students.
And what will they think of Britain? Last week, they were lectured on what to
expect: on British identity by a man from the BBC, on Tony Blair by the Foreign
Office, and on pubs by The Independent. It was an attempt to show them that the
country promoted by Mr Blair may not be what they expect.
But what they expected was clear from their questions. Are women welcome in
pubs? What about racial discrimination? What do the British think about their
imperial past? About social class? Is there rap music in Britain? These were
not questions about Mr Blair's Britain, but about an older, nastier, more
hidebound nation, one which - for all the efforts of the Government - has a
stronger resonance than Cool Britannia.
Ted Leinbaugh, a Marshall scholar at Oxford in the 1970s, remembers his time
there with warmth. He was given a storage cupboard as his room at Linacre
College, but found the Iffley mansion for himself later. He was surprised by
Oxford's cosmopolitanism, but also by the country's insularity. It will
probably be a shock for many of the students, he said. "Some will have come
from a Mid-Western state and never travelled out of it." The President himself
learned rugby, ate curry and even smoked a little dope, and returned with a
friendly feeling for Britain. But others will be horrified by the weather, the
food, the plumbing and the snobbery. Some will find that the spirit of self-
improvement and aspiration is regarded as positively hilarious. George
Stephanopolous, formerly Mr Clinton's press secretary, has said he found Oxford
a desperately unfriendly and unhappy place at times, and he devotes more space
to Sudan than Balliol in his memoirs.
There were leaflets left for them, setting out the Rock and Roll Map of
Britain. Each was also given a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to speaking
British, detailing the mysteries of such words as Bap, Lager and Pudding. It
has sections explaining how to swear in Welsh, or to pull in Gaelic, which
should come in handy in Oxford. And there, on the front, is a phrase which,
hopefully, will come in handy occasionally: "Oroit, innit"?
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A<>E<>R
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