Questions that I, an American, have about the British “WAGatha Christie” Scandal

Q. Wait, what is this? Ooh, is it a mystery solved by a clever Golden Retriever?

A. Unfortunately, it is not (wouldn’t that be great, though? Are there any dog-detective shows out there? Netflix? Hulu? Anyone?). This scandal involves two women who bang English football stars for a living, and thus are also social media, uh, “stars.” WAG stands for “Wives and Girlfriends”; you can do the math on the rest.

 

Q: And by football you –

A. Yes, I mean soccer. Don’t get cute.

 

Q. So… is this like a football hooligan thing, or…

A. Yes and no. The aggrieved party, Coleen Rooney, claims that Rebekah Vardy leaked information about her to the (gleefully vicious!) British tabloid press, a conclusion to which she came after a clever (I guess?) bit of Instagram sleuthing, a sentence I found profoundly exhausting to type. While this has yet to come to physical blows in the sense of the classic hooligan fight, the ladies are slugging it out in the press in a way that could be described as brutal if it weren’t so obviously mutually beneficial.

 

Q. Coleen?

A. Yeah, I know, that’s totally not how you spell that name.

 

Q. And their husbands are –

A. Soccer guys. Not David Beckham. Doesn’t matter.

 

Q. Would it be accurate to describe this as a modern-day War of the Roses?

A. I see you trying to show off your cursory familiarity with British history, but no.

 

Q. What about the Hundred Years’ War? Or something-something Boudicca –

A. Please stop. The only cultural antecedent that’s relevant here is the Real Housewives franchise, a thing about which you know more than you’d like to admit.

 

Q. Touché. But I thought the English were made of better stuff than –

A. You’re either being willfully obtuse or you’re easily swayed by accents. The British are 100% as trashy as Americans, it just comes out sounding better in pretty much any English accent (even the shitty ones, and yeah, I’m looking at you, Scouse-brows) than in our own flat American drone. Remember that Irish bartender you let treat you like absolute garbage? Translate the things he said to you out of that irresistible lilt and into the nasal blatt of someone from, say, Skokie. See? It’s like an optical illusion, but for your ears.

 

Q: But doesn’t Britain have other things to worry about right now? Brexit, Boris Whatsisname, etc?

A. The world is currently on fire, and you baked a pie for the sole purpose putting it on Instagram. Mountains of ludicrous, distracting bullshit are the only thing keeping us from losing our collective minds.

 

Q. But shouldn’t we be –

A. Shhhhhhhh, look at this picture of Trey Gowdy’s ridiculous hair and see if you can’t craft a pithy Tweet around it.

 

Q. My god, that hair is really –

A. See?

 

Q: So what’s the takeaway from all this?

A. There are a few. First, despite their aforementioned basement-level trashiness, the English have a real knack for the witty portmanteau, which doesn’t even begin to make up for their reign of terror as a colonial power, but is a minor delight. Second, no matter how many waves of feminism the Western world experiences, there will always be a collective bloodlust for hot-girl catfights, and third, *shrug emoji.*

 

Q: Late-stage capitalism, am I right?

A. You are right.