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In the US, in common speech, the word “Asian” has tended to mean East or Southeast Asian. In the UK, the same word more often refers to the Indian subcontinent. Look, I don’t decide these things. It has to do with historic patterns of migration: who went where. It is also liable to change. But it shows that America’s exposure to the world’s largest continent is nothing like Britain’s.
在美国的日常用语中，“亚洲”一词往往指东亚或东南亚。在英国，这个词更常指印度次大陆。听着，这些事情不是我能决定的。这与历史上的移民模式有关：谁去了哪里。它也可能发生变化。但这表明，美国与世界上最大大陆的接触与英国截然不同。
That is the least of the differences. The forebears of a Black Briton probably arrived in the country after 1945, willingly. Those of a Black American might have come centuries ago, forcibly. In America, the settlers’ treatment of people who were already there is recent enough to be a raw topic. As harsh as the Emperor Claudius no doubt was, the displacement of “native” Britons has lost some of its salience over the intervening millennia.
这只是最小的差异。英国黑人的祖先可能是在1945年后自愿来到这个国家的，而美国黑人的祖先可能是几个世纪前被迫来到这里的。在美国，定居者对待原住民的方式是一个仍然敏感的话题。尽管克劳狄乌斯皇帝(Emperor Claudius)无疑很严厉，但“本土”不列颠人的流离失所问题在几千年间已经失去了一些显著性。
“Woke”, if that means a focus on group identities, has turned out to be a bad fit in the US. But at least it was dreamt up with the US in mind. What possessed people in Britain to think it made sense in their different (which isn’t to say better) context? Or in Europe’s? I’d toast the apparent demise of this dogma but even the crusade against it in Britain has a US flavour — faintly religious, very online — which will unnerve the public in no time.
如果“觉醒”意味着关注群体身份，那么它在美国并不合适。但至少，它是以美国为背景构想出来的。是什么让英国人认为它在他们不同的环境中有意义？或者在欧洲呢？我为这一教条的明显消亡而干杯，但即使是在英国对它的讨伐也带有美国的味道——略带宗教色彩，非常网络化——这很快就会让公众感到不安。
There is but one consolation in what Donald Trump has done of late. Strategically, the transatlantic rift is a disaster. Culturally, it might not be the worst thing if America and Europe have a bit less to do with each other. Their educated elites in particular should start seeing other people.
唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)最近的所作所为只有一个安慰。从战略上讲，跨大西洋的裂痕是一场灾难。从文化上讲，如果美国和欧洲之间的联系减少一些，可能并不是最糟糕的事情。尤其是他们受过教育的精英应该开始与其他人交往。
Looking back, the relationship was at its healthiest in the cold war, when the political enmeshment was almost airtight but there was much less pretence of sameness
回顾过去，冷战时期的关系是最健康的，那时政治上的纠缠几乎密不透风，但假装一致的情况要少得多。
The undue obsession isn’t all one way. How did JD Vance become so exercised about free speech in Britain that he raised it in a televised Oval Office setting? If we fall short of First Amendment standards, that is because we don’t have a First Amendment, because we are a different country. As with Elon Musk’s dabblings in Germany, the conceit here — born of the internet, I think — is that the north Atlantic is a common cultural space.
过度的痴迷并非都是单向的。JD•万斯(JD Vance)是如何对英国的言论自由如此关注，以至于在椭圆形办公室的电视直播中提出这个问题的？如果我们没有达到第一修正案的标准，那是因为我们没有第一修正案，因为我们是一个不同的国家。正如埃隆•马斯克(Elon Musk)在德国的尝试一样，这种自负——我认为是互联网的产物——认为北大西洋是一个共同的文化空间。
Still, the fault lies mostly with Europe. The US is not “culturally imperialist”. It has CNN but no public mission to shape world news, at least not one to match the BBC, France 24, Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera. It has no Melville Institute to go against those named after Goethe and Cervantes. Its grip on film, academia and postwar painting was never a conscious, top-down project, even if the CIA was more of a cultural actor in the cold war than was known at the time.
不过，问题主要在于欧洲。美国并非“文化帝国主义”。它有CNN，但没有塑造世界新闻的公共使命，至少无法与BBC、法国24频道、德国之声(Deutsche Welle)和半岛电视台(Al Jazeera)相提并论。它没有梅尔维尔学院(Melville Institute)来对抗那些以歌德和塞万提斯命名的学院。它对电影、学术界和战后绘画的影响从来都不是一个有意识的、自上而下的项目，即使中情局(CIA)在冷战中的文化角色比当时人们所知道的还要多。
No, it is a European choice to live vicariously through America. (Not just a British one, unless I am misremembering those George Floyd protests in France.) I myself am always setting the continent’s feeble economic growth rate against America’s, as though it were the natural comparator. Given their respective ages and histories, is it? Even if Europe is the Norma Desmond of continents, drunk on the past, how could it not be?
不，这是欧洲人的选择，他们希望通过美国来获得生活的代入感。我自己总是把欧洲大陆微弱的经济增长率与美国的相提并论，仿佛这是自然的比较。考虑到它们各自的年龄和历史，真的是这样吗？即使欧洲是各大洲中的诺玛•德斯蒙德(Norma Desmond)，沉醉于过去，又怎能不是呢？（译者注：诺玛•德斯蒙德是1950年经典电影《日落大道》(Sunset Boulevard)中的虚构角色。她曾是默片时代的巨星，但在有声电影兴起后逐渐被时代抛弃。无法接受自己过气的现实，她沉溺于昔日的辉煌幻想之中，最终走向悲剧。作者在此以“欧洲是各大洲的诺玛•德斯蒙德”作比，暗指欧洲沉迷于过去的辉煌，而忽视当下的现实状况。）
Looking back, the relationship was at its healthiest in the cold war, when the political enmeshment was almost airtight but there was much less pretence of cultural sameness. A staple of 20th-century Toryism was mild distaste for the US, which often informed a corresponding fancy for the European project. (Jeremy Clarkson, a subtler conservative than his schtick implies, is an echo of that world.) This sentiment crossed over at times into witless anti-Americanism. But it helped to inoculate the continent against laughably out-of-context ideas and practices. As a child in the height of the Atlantic bond, I never heard “upspeak”, that tic by which grown men and women in modern Britain adopt the vocal cadence of 13-year-olds in Pasadena. What we have lived through is the inverse of the cold war: political estrangement alongside deepening cultural mimicry.
回顾过去，冷战时期的两国关系是最健康的，当时政治关系几乎密不透风，但文化上的相似性却少得多。20世纪保守主义的一个主要特征是对美国的轻微反感，这通常会引发对欧洲项目的相应兴趣。这种情绪有时会演变成愚蠢的反美主义。但它帮助欧洲大陆抵御了可笑的断章取义的想法和做法。作为大西洋纽带鼎盛时期的孩子，我从未听过“upspeak”，即现代英国的成年男女采用帕萨迪纳13岁孩子的腔调说话。我们所经历的是冷战的反面：政治上的隔阂与文化上不断加深的模仿。
Perhaps the Trump shock will bring a cooling off on all fronts. Last weekend, in a startling speech as Canada’s Liberal leader, Mark Carney cast the US as Other, in its approach to language and the absorption of immigrants and other cultural fundamentals. Whether to regret his belligerence, or wish our prime minister would say the same, it is hard in these times to know.
也许特朗普的冲击会让各方面都冷静下来。上周末，加拿大自由党(Canada’s Liberal)领袖马克•卡尼(Mark Carney)在一场令人震惊的演讲中，将美国在语言、移民吸收和其他文化基本方面的做法视为‘他者’。在这个时代，很难判断是对他的好斗感到遗憾，还是希望我们的总理也能这样说。