Take them back to dear old blighty: the ugliest byproduct of the sagging dollar.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.

LAST DECEMBER, Ricky Hatton, a stout-chugging, ruddy-faced British boxer, was laid out on a Las Vegas canvas by the American welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather. The crowd of Union Jack-bedecked fans--"drunken dullards" and "boors," according to The Daily Telegraph's horrified sports correspondent--became so unruly that for the first time in its history, the MGM Grand casino shut down its archipelago of bars. Hatton's troglodyte supporters achieved what was long considered impossible: They managed to class-down Vegas.

Drawn by a plummeting dollar, the British are arriving en masse on American shores. In the streets of Manhattan, pale-skinned men in Manchester United shirts marvel loudly at what all these iPods, "trainers," and Nike track suits would cost them back home. While generously pumping much-needed money into the U.S. economy, the feral packs of lager louts are, one hopes, helping correct America's long-held misperception that the English are a nation of Inspector Morse bit players--sophisticated, fastidious, snobby--especially when compared to us rubes.

We're not quite free of our inferiority complex just yet. After a 2005 stint playing on London's West End, former Top Gun actor Val Kilmer enthused that English audiences were "smarter" than their American counterparts because "they read books." (This is true, though if the current British bestseller list is any indication, our bibliophilic cousins are feeding their heads with diet guides and biographies of topless models.) The American blogger Matt Janovic, enraged by his intellectual isolation in the Midwest, summed up the prevailing confusion nicely: "Face it: an English schoolgirl sounds more authoritative than the voice of most American politicians ... we sound like the cavemen that many around the world (rightly) think we are."

And the filmmaker Michael Moore, always eager to play suck-up abroad, told one English audience in 2003 that the "dumbest Brit here is smarter than the smartest American" In other words, theirs is a nation of abeyant Evelyn Waughs.

Waugh himself bristled at such stereotypes--insisting, for instance, that in etiquette "Americans are immensely the superiors of the English. "When Esquire asked the...