Red Squirrel Gray squirrel

There’s an article in the October 7, 2007, Sunday New York Times Magazine about the small, shy British red squirrel being overtaken by the big, brutish American gray squirrel. The gray American squirrels were brought to England as a novelty, but once the aristocracy got tired of them, they let the big bruisers lose into the countryside and the buggers have been causing havoc ever since. How American.

The metaphor of the delicate red squirrel representing traditional English values and culture that is getting overrun by the American behemoth (the gray is a better breeder and more adventurous that its British cousin) has been used before. There was an article, I think it was in Harpers, 15 years ago that used the red squirrel as a metaphor for English cinema. In a nut shell (ha!), films like Brideshead, Enchanted April, Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, and Sense and Sensibility show the Britannia that exists in our imaginations. The stories these films tell are from other centuries with no shadow of the post-colonial, multicultural, you-are-being-videotaped Big Brother England of the 21th Century. The English movies of the red squirrel kind are your basic Merchant/Ivory fare.

Though I can appreciate a Die Hard and an Independence Day, there's nothing like spending quality time with a classic “red squirrel.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07squirrels-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
Squirrel Wars, by D.T. Max, 10/7/07