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Posted on 11/02/2001 6:23:39 PM PST by Pokey78

In crises, some things clarify. I grew up for 20 years in Britain, and I'm now closing in on 20 years of adulthood in the United States. It's funny how feelings of identity arc in such a life. I remember the first time I got a lump in my throat singing ''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' on July 4 about 10 years ago. It took me completely by surprise. My attachment to my new country had taken shape and form without my even knowing it, until I found myself tearing up in a routine ritual of patriotism. It wasn't that I had left my love of homeland behind. But it was now refracted through the prism of my new love -- a love that is foolish to inspect because it belongs somewhere in the heart where reason doesn't follow.

And then, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, another surprise. As friends and family from the U.K. finally penetrated the tangled phone system, I found out that they, too, were almost as grief stricken as I was. ''What can we do for you?'' was one question I heard over and over again, as if ordinary Brits could do anything for me or anyone else in such a case. But the feeling was intensely serious. It was almost as if it had happened to them, as if a vicarious American patriotism had crossed the Atlantic. Days later, all of Britain stood still to mark a moment of silence for a tragedy thousands of miles away.

My own first moment of silence blurred nationalisms as well. It was at a memorial service for an acquaintance of mine from Provincetown, where I spend my summers. Graham Berkeley was a Brit, a violinist, a business professional, a big, tattooed bodybuilder, who'd been on the flight from Boston that crashed into the World Trade Center's south tower. Like me, he was a transplant for many years in America and loved the place with a passion. A bunch of us gathered around some candles and memorabilia on the farthest part of Herring Cove beach, the sun setting over Cape Cod Bay, told stories and wiped away tears. And by the side of us were two large flags impaled in the sand, Old Glory and the Union Jack. In the dusk, they intertwined until the reds, whites and blues seemed almost indistinguishable.

Sentimental? Surely. Irrelevant? Surely not. When the queen ordered the band to play ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace for the first time in history, I doubt I was the only one watching through tears. When Tony Blair stood in Congress as President Bush gave his memorable tribute to America's truest friend, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. And as the news came through that British special forces were among the first soldiers to foray into Afghanistan, alongside Americans, it seemed simply fitting.

Tony Blair's role in all this has, of course, been central. Blair has not only been the key rhetorician of the war against terrorism; he has also become almost a second secretary of state of the United States. He has shuttled from Pakistan to Oman and Egypt, defending American policy, patching the leaky coalition ship. He was the figure who announced to the world the proof of bin Laden's complicity in the attack in the House of Commons. He has rallied the European Union and committed British troops as by far the biggest non-American contingent in the war in Afghanistan. And all this from a prime minister who is, primarily, a Europhile. A cynic would respond that Blair has, like many previous British leaders, merely seized an opportunity as America's diplomatic and military fig leaf to enhance British influence in the world.

But there is surely more to it than that. What Blair was responding to was what I had felt from afar: the instinctual association of ordinary Brits with Americans under fire. Some of this was understandable. There were, after all, dozens of British victims in the World Trade Center attack. Their presence alone is a sign of how deeply interwoven the lives of Britons and Americans had become in the new global economic order, and a sign too of how Britain, an open country, deeply reliant on trade and international finance, would suffer if terrorism shut the global system down.

But beneath this, there is also something primal. What struck me here among my American friends at the time was how instinctive their response was to British support. It wasn't so much gratitude, I sensed, as relief. At moments like these, the Brits somehow make America seem less alone in the world. They act as a sanity check when America feels beleaguered, a reassurance that not all foreigners harbor reflexive hostility to the United States. And at profoundly vulnerable moments, maternity matters. Somewhere in the American psyche, the support of the mother country buoys even those Americans who have no ethnic or cultural connection to Britain whatsoever. When faced with a real threat, we remember the fundamentals. Orwell foresaw this linkage in his vision of a new bloc of trans-Atlantic powers called Oceania in his novel ''1984.'' Churchill, partly American himself, articulated it more cheerfully in his notion of a union of the English-speaking peoples. But now, perhaps because of deeper and deeper cultural penetration, because of growing financial and economic interdependence, the merger once dreamed of is finally coming to pass. What Orwell and Churchill foresaw, and the 1990's deepened, bin Laden catalyzed still further. And it's appropriate, perhaps, that this came about not because of some political effort from the top but simply because of an emotional groundswell from below. Those feelings soldered something new and deep between these two countries: if not a reunification, then something close to it.

Andrew Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine.

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