Oh, Britain and America, get a room already! We know you crazy kids are madly in love, even if you're currently spitting like two minks trapped in a pillowcase. "You stole that football match," seethes Britain, and America's all "Whatever. Thanks for the filthy pelicans, dude."
Wait, what's that sound? It's Richard Curtis on the phone - he wants to make a romantic comedy about a musclebound knucklehead with more money than brains and a waspish dame whose tart exterior hides her insecurities (and her giant Marks & Spencer underpants).
Obama's a natural for the male lead: Look at the smackdown he delivered this week to BP's benighted British CEO, Tony Hayward. It was like the Revolutionary War's muskets never got put away. And for the plucky English girl, how about Dame Helen Mirren, who this week on Late Show with David Letterman abjectly apologized for all of her country's failings, from the oil spill to England's ham-fisted World Cup goalie, and if left alone probably would have included Branston pickle and the films of Sienna Miller as well. She's already played the Queen; it's only a short step to playing prickly Albion.
There might even be a tiny role in this film for London's mayor, Boris Johnson, who's started stomping around like Rumpelstiltskin because that giant new Harry Potter theme park sprouted its wands and spires in Orlando, Fla., and not in Skegness or Grimsby or some other jewel of the British Riviera. "It is utterly mad to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention," Boris scratched with his quill, I mean wrote in his newspaper column. Meanwhile, in poor oil-drenched Louisiana, the tourism board is putting up ads that say, "This isn't the first time that New Orleans has survived the British."
Careful, kids: People will say you're in love.
America can't be all that angry if it's willing to take Piers Morgan, a man the Sunday Times once identified as suffering from "a life-threatening lack of shame." Morgan, talent-show judge and (disgraced) former editor of The Mirror tabloid, has sucked all the goodwill from Britain so he's heading across the pond, where he's reportedly in negotiations to take over Larry King's job. (I'd argue that a wax effigy of Teddy Roosevelt could take over from King and nobody would notice, but I don't run CNN.)
It is well known that Americans have an abiding love for a cheeky chappie with a London accent, even if, like Morgan, he has a tiny, indelible brown stain on his nose. Despite his reputation for sucking-up, Morgan does have a couple of achievements which will forever endear him to his new countrymen, should he be lucky enough to trade his Mayfair townhouse for a ranch-style with pool: For one thing, he made Simon Cowell cry during an interview for his chat show, Life Stories (the Britain's Got Talent ringmaster, who is also Morgan's boss, was remembering the death of his father). More important, Morgan called his most recent collection of diaries - a journey of spiritual awakening that takes him from the swag-suite at the Emmys to admiring Beyoncé's bottom - God Bless America.
This did not endear Morgan to fellow Brits, who would bless America only at the point of a sword and prefer not to bring up God in polite company. They're more likely found at the pub complaining about the American cultural menace before sneaking home to watch The Wire.
But really, that's just the posturing of lovesick fourth-graders, isn't it? Britain and America, why not just take a cue from some of your high-profile, culture-spanning lovebirds: Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Paul and Linda McCartney, and the greatest hiss-and-make-up duo of all time, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Yes, Liz was born in England, but she's as American as a milkshake (George Stevens, who directed her so effectively in A Place in the Sun, wisely identified her place in the American consciousness when he called her "the girl on the candy box"). Burton, as we know from Furious Love, Sam Kashner's and Nancy Schoenberger's new book about their affair, liked to style himself "your little Welsh stallion" in letters to her.
They could not have been more representative of their respective countries' postwar dreams. Taylor - spoiled, privileged, ripe to bursting; Burton - brilliant, spotty, desperate to escape a grim industrial past. She was a movie star and he loved Shakespeare. And for a while it was very good, until it drowned in vats of vodka and Chasen's chili.
"We are such doomed fools," Burton wrote to his wife when the rocky shoals were in sight. On July 4, 1973, Taylor released a statement about their future, and perhaps she chose Independence Day deliberately. In any case, I'm sure she was thinking only about her own heartache, and not a future feud between her home country and her adopted one, when she said: "I believe with all my heart that the separation will ultimately bring us back to where we belong - and that's together."
They did get back together, mismatched and mutually suspicious though they were. That's what special relationships are all about.