How To Be An Alien

--- The Oklahoma Sun ---

simply cable this:

“Yanks Conquer Pacific Ocean”

If Naturalised

The verb to naturalise clearly proves what the british think of you. Before you are admitted to British citizenship you are not even considered a natural human being. I looked up the word natural (na'tural) in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (p.521); it says: Of or according to or provided by nature, physically existing, innate, instinctive, normal, not miraculous or spiritual or artificial or conventional ... Note that before you obtain British citizenship, they simply doubt you are provided by nature.

According to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary the word “na'tural” has a second meaning, too: Half- witted person. This second meaning, however, is irrelevant from the point of view of our present argument.

If you are tired of not being provided by nature, not being physically existing and being miraculous and conventional at the same time, apply for British citizenship. Roughly speaking, there are two possibilities: it will be granted to you, or not.

In the first case you must reorganise and revise your attitude to life. You must pretend that you are everything you are not and you must look down upon everything you are.

Copy the attitude of an English acquaintance of mine — let us call him Gregory Baker. He, an English solicitor, feels particularly deep contempt for the following classes of people: foreigners, Americans, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen, Jews, workers, clerks, poor people, non-professional men, businessmen, actors, journalists and literary men, women, solicitors who do not practise in his immediate neighbourhood, solicitors who are hard up and solicitors who are too rich, Socialists, Liberals, Tory-reformers (Communists are not even worthy of his contempt); he looks down upon his mother, because she has a business mind, his wife, because she comes from a non-professional family, his brother, because although he is a professional officer he does not serve with the Guards, Hussars, or at least a county regiment. He adores and admires his seven-years old son, because the shape of his nose resembles his own.

If naturalised, remember these rules:

1. You must start eating porridge for breakfast and allege that you like it.

2. Speak English with your former compatriots. Deny that you know any foreign language (including your mother tongue). The knowledge of foreign languages is very un-English. A little French is permissible, but only with an atrocious accent.

3. Revise your library. Get rid of all foreign writers whether in the original or translated into English. The works of Dostoevsky should be replaced with a volume on English birds; the collected works of Proust by a book called “Interior Decoration in the Regency Period”; and Pascal's “Pensees” by the “Life and Thoughts of a Scottish Salmon.”

4. Speaking of your new compatriots, always use the first person plural.

In this aspect, though, certain caution is advisable. I know a naturalised Britisher who, talking to a young man, repeatedly used the phrase “We Englishmen.” The young man looked at him, took his pipe out of his mouth and remarked softly: “Sorry, Sir, I'm a Welshman,” turned his back on him and walked away.

The same gentleman was listening to a conversation. It was mentioned that the Japanese had claimed to have shot down 22 planes.

“What — ours?” he asked indignantly.

His English hostess answered icily:

“No — ours.”

,

1. When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles — but never England.

2. Please note my extensive knowledge of the American language.

3. While this book was at the printers a correspondence in The Times showed that the English have almost sixty synonyms for “street.” If you add these to the street names which stand alone (Piccadilly, Strand, etc.) and the accepted and frequently used double names (“Garden Terrace,” “Church Street,” “Park Road,” etc.) the number of street names reaches or exceeds a hundred. It has been suggested by one correspondent that this clearly proves what wonderful imagination the English have. I believe it proves the contrary. A West End street in London is not called “Haymarket” because the playful fancy of Londoners populates the district with romantically clad mediaeval food dealers but simply because they have not noticed as yet that the hay trade has considerably declined between Piccadilly and Pall Mall in the last three hundred years.