Tag: england

Enthusiasts, I have been challenged. Gauntlets and whatnot! In a previous post, I dashed off a caption under a video; I so often do. Sometimes, I just wanna share a neat-o bit of teevee with you, but the post would look weird with no words: I needed to write something. In this case, the video was another example of my fatal weakness for BBC shows about the history of England presented by British comedic actors. If one of the Young Ones had bicycled around Northern Ireland for eight episodes in 2008, then I would watch that, too.

Or a documentary about the Royal Family. Oh, Jiminee horsefucking Christ, have I watched documentaries about the Royal Family. I like the ones that go into the kitchens during a state dinner, or with the troops into their barracks between shifts standing there in famous hats, but I also like the ones that are just about being fancy. English people walk up to the Royals and say, “Helloooooo,’ and the Royals say “Helloooooo,” and everything’s lovely.

This soothes my soul, as I am a loathsome beast: an Anglophile. HOWEVER, I asserted, there were worse nations to obsess over. Everyone (and, of course, I’m only talking about Americans when I say “everyone”) has a favorite country, and though England is indeed a shameful one to invest a fascination, it’s nowhere near the worst one. A valued commentator named cekman76 calls me out and demands I name these countries; I shrink not in the face of challenge.

(Again: I do not claim that it is not highly embarrassing to have England as one’s favorite nation. First of all, it’s just such a cliché. The second reason would be England’s behavior since the very instance of its inception. I speak of the worldwide dickery. For most of the previous millennium, England spent its time doing two things: discovering how far they could go; then, fucking with the natives once they got there. England also fucked with the natives closer to themselves. Ireland is right next door, and holy shit did England fuck with the natives in Ireland. Just historically a monstrosity of a society, but their novels and record albums and situation comedies are top-notch.)

Here we go. More Embarrassing Favorite Countries:

JAPAN All that manga shit is creepy. I tried to think of a way to say it all pretty and writerly, but I failed: all that manga shit is creepy. All of it–the anime and the hentai and the whatnotasaki–straight-up gives me the shkeeves. Everyone who loves Japan too much is orgasmically dysfunctional: either they can’t cum, or they can’t stop cumming, or they can only cum in an elevator that smells like dog food. There’s research about that all over the innertubes, but you can Google it yourself. I won’t do your work for you.

GERMANY I will never stop watching your ass, Germanophile. You are on my list and I will never stop watching you and all it will take is the tiniest of slips before I transfer you from one list to a different list. Y’know what, Germanophile? I’m just gonna assume. I’m going to a guilty-until-proven-innocent strategy on you.

COSTA RICA Zip-lines are for simpletons.

FRANCE 90% of Francophiles are just wine drunks who speak a second language. The other ten percent are secretly French themselves.

NORWAY If you’re obsessed with Norway, you’re clearly a Black Metal fan, and I do not get you, broham. That music is unpleasant. You should listen to mellower jams, and enough with the fjords.

PORTUGAL Who’s really into Portugal? Honestly, if I met someone and they were like, “I’m really into Portugal,” and I said, “What, the soccer team or something?” and they said, “No, everything. The whole culture. Their artistic sensibilities. Being seaworthy,” and I said, “Are you of Portuguese descent?” and you were like, “I have no connection. None whatsoever. It’s just a primal urge within me,” then I would be impressed with you for being original.

CHAD You’re just trying too hard now. If you’re, say, a white guy from Plattsburgh? Settle down with the Chad-worship.

RUSSIA Duh.

KOREA Dammit, we still make Boy Bands in this country. That’s all domestic production. That’s American jobs, man. How many Joey Fatones will starve to death because the kids were too busy listening to BTS?

PERU You just want to eat guinea pigs, you bastard.

• Mick Jagger thought that was some clever shit, making it “her” instead of “his,” didn’t he?
• “Keef. Keef. I made the devil a waaaaady.” (You know how he talks.)
• And then Keef says something unintelligible, but soulful.
• Get to work, jackass.
• Where were we?
• England.
• When?
• The past.
• You’re of little to no help.
• Then just start spouting random British bullshit to prime the pump.
• Eat fish with chips, but their chips are not chips.
• The fish is fish.
• The money is no longer as complicated as it used to be: there were farthings and pence and snookers and shillings and half-thistles and crowns and ha’pennies, or sometimes you would straight up trade a bottle of gin for a bit of rumpy-pumpy, and it wasn’t Base 10, either.
• 12 of this to four of that to 18 of the other thing.
• Until recently, no one in England had exact change.
• Now it’s just the Pound, and it divides into 100 pennies like God intended money to do, and it’s still the Pound, because England wanted, wants, and will forever want nothing to do with the Euro.
• (Again: I’m using “England” to mean “Great Britain” or “the UK.” WARNING: the residents of Scotland do not think that those terms are interchangeable in the slightest, and will inform you of this by headbutting you until you die. England is a single country that shares an island called Britain with Scotland and Wales and they make up Great Britain. (Although maybe not for much longer for Scotland.) The next island to the left is Ireland; the top bit is a country called Northern Ireland, and it joins the three nations I previously mentioned to form the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland is part of the UK because of Oliver Cromwell, who was truly a bad hombre.)
• In fact, England very rarely wants anything to do with Europe.
• Brits enjoy traveling and working on the Continent nowadays, but for the vast majority of England’s existence, the only reason to go to Europe was to shoot Europeans.
• It’s only twenty-something miles from Dover to Calais, but those miles are wet.
• If it were dry, you could walk that in a day.
• Swimming it takes a while, and people still do it: there are no sharks in the English Channel, but I wish that there were so they could have eaten everyone after Gertrude Ederle who attempted the crossing.
• A fellow did it, then a lady did it, and that should have been that.
• Mission accomplished.
• England has a North and a South, just like America, but they do not have a West, and they certainly do not have a Texas.
• Partially because the point of Texas is being the size of Texas, while the entire island could fit into the state several times over.
• Anyway, the North is gritty and rough and workaday, mines and factories and the Industrial Revolution: Birmingham and Leeds and Manchester.
• The South revolves around London, but there other cities: Cardiff, which stomps; Brighton, which rocks; and Plymouth, which also rocks.
• London used to burn down every three weeks, and residents welcomed this as a respite from the constant cholera outbreaks, but now it has a big Ferris wheel and an office building shaped like a pickle.
• It’s better now.
• The danger and feculence of London (or any city back then, but London in particular since it was the largest) cannot be overstated: urban life was a horror.
• The past was terrible, but cities in the past were the most terrible: if you were living on a farm, then your life was the same kind of awful that your father’s life had been, and his father, and so on; hell, it’s still really similar on a small farm: get up real early and shovel shit until the sun goes down.
• But the city had fire and filth: cheaply built tenements leaning against one another, wood and pitch, with a privy out back dropping into an unlined pit; if you were lucky enough to have a plumbing hookup, the waste dumped straight into the Thames.
• Next time you watch a space launch, or hear about a breakthrough in particle physics, remember how long it took humanity to figure out how to keep the clean water and dirty water separate.
• No electricity means no light after dark, at least not anything except smudgy oil lamps and smelly gas, plus there was several inches of horse shit coating the ground at all times.
• And, of course, there were Jack the Rippers everywhere.
• So, you know: Queen Victoria.
• Big woman.
• Sturdy.
• Almost certainly couldn’t knock her over: stable base on Queen Victoria.
• She was the Queen for almost all of the 19th century, 60 or 70 years or so, and while she was in charge, England came up with some of the best and worst ideas in history.
• Evolution, and scientific racism.
• The world’s first subway system, and the White Man’s Burden.
• Oscar Wilde, and what they did to Oscar Wilde.
• The 1800’s saw a massive expansion to the British Empire (the second one, if you’re keeping score at home), and they were just blatant about it: one guy named a county in Africa after himself, like it was a new dorm for his alma mater.
• Rhodesia.
• It wasn’t a little place, either: they made two countries out of it, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
• England was–for a long damned time–the fiercest military power in the world, and especially at sea: it was against the British Navy that Napoleon met his Waterloo at Trafalgar.
• Napoleon wasn’t actually that short, but he did have a dinky winky; we know this because someone cut off his dick and put it in a museum.
• Can we make a deal?
• I promise not to try to take over Europe if you won’t cut off my dick and put it in a museum for people to laugh at for hundreds of years.
• It’s cold in museums, and I would not be at my best, so to speak.
• I digress, but while I was digressing Queen Victoria died, which led to World War I.
• Not, like, directly or anything.
• The First World War One was the dumbest war, and I am including the Emu War and all three Cola Wars.
• All of Europe went to France, killed each other for four years, and then went home having accomplished nothing but set up the sequel.
• It was a lot like the last Captain America movie.
• Trench warfare.
• The British soldiers were called Tommies, and the generals were well behind them, out of the way of the shelling and the smell of No Man’s Land; the generals would order an attack, and the Tommies would go over the top.
• That means they would get out of their trenches and run at the Germans.
• Who had machine guns.
• Which means that plan was no good, but the British High Command tried it a second time, and a third, and a fourth.
• The artillery would fire, sometimes for hours, and then it would stop; the captain blows his whistle, and young men in silly-looking hats climb the ladder and run towards the other young men in silly-looking hats.
• There is barbed wire, and mines, and falls, and caltrops.
• And the Germans, who had hidden through the shelling just as you hid through theirs, had machine guns.
• In World War I, the British Army had something called the Pals brigades.
• Men would fight harder for men they already knew, that was the thinking, so battalions were formed from specific locations or backgrounds; small towns, university classes and rugby squads, even a so-called stockbroker’s battalion drawn from banks of the City of London.
• Do you see the flaw in the plan?
• The Accrington Pals were mustered out of East Lancashire, 700 of them, and in the first half-hour of the Battle of the Somme, 235 were killed and 350 were wounded.
• That’s a lot for one town to absorb.
• After the war, the Pals brigades were abandoned; grief resumed its random distribution.
• …
• Goddammit, I didn’t get to Churchill again.
• England is fucking exhausting.

• Those pasty motherfuckers took over the world, pretty much.
• I’m getting ahead of myself, and also I don’t want this to be another linear history, but it might end up being one.
• We’ll both find out at the same time, I guess.
• Kind of an adventure.
• Get on with it.
• To recap: England is a small country on the island of Great Britain where damp humans live; it has had a far more influential role in the course of world history than its size would suggest.
• The English language was invented there, in a small shed in Shroppingtonshirechester-on-Ferryknickers.
• That is not true.
• Everything else ever invented by an English person was invented in a shed, but the English language was not invented.
• Around 500 AD, after the Fall of Rome, Germanic tribesmen (and tribeswomen and tribeschildren and tribesdogs) started immigrating into England; at the time, the primary tongues were various dialects of Brythonic (Carbonic? Moronic?) and Latin.
• The German tribes were called the Angles and the Saxons.
• Mix that all up for a few hundred years and you have Anglo-Saxon, or Old English: Old German plus a little Latin plus a little Norse.
• Then come the Normans, who change the official rich person language to French (Old French), and this permeates the Anglo-Saxon; this becomes Middle English.
• Chaucer was Middle English, and still mostly understandable today, whereas Old English is completely incomprehensible: Beowolf.
• Chaucer uses tons of words that make no sense, and many quirks of syntax, but the rhythm of the language is recognizably English.
• Beowolf sounds like you walked in on an alien taking a dump, but The Canterbury Tales has a whole bunch of fart jokes: point, Chaucer.
• How about that Wife of Bath, huh?
• Anyway: England is an island (Britain, whatever) and things evolve faster and weirder on islands than on the mainland: you have a more concentrated breeding stock.
• Think of the Galapagos.
• Canterbury Tales, in its vaguely-understandable Middle English, to Hamlet, in strange but almost totally clear language, in a little over 200 years.
• That’s fast.
• (The only Shakespeare conspiracy theory I have ever given any heed to is the one put forth by Malcolm X that Shakespeare ghost-wrote the King James Bible. I enjoy that theory, and always picture William and King James having a Black Adder/King George-type relationship.)
• Then there was Great Vowel Shift, which is better than a Great Bowel Shift, which is actually a small consonant shift.
• People started talking differently.
• For reasons.
• Somewhere along the way the spelling got all fucked up: weird rules and sub-rules and exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions and one-time special dispensations: learning English can be tough, though through thorough thought, it can be done.
• When it comes to languages, TotD is an exceptional relativist: each language is unique and has its own strengths and weaknesses, no language is inherently better than another.
• It’s just what your mother talks to you when you’re a baby.
• This is to say that the English language is not now the lingua franca of the planet because it is superior to other tongues, but because its speakers spread it over the face of the globe using cannons.
• Pointing cannons at someone is an excellent way of getting them to learn your language, if for nothing other than ask you to point your cannons elsewhere.
• English became the official language of money and medicine and science, and also the skies and seas. (All planes and boats operate in English, everywhere.)
• Linguistic hegemony, motherfucker.
• (My appreciation of English’s dominance, of course, goes against Kant’s conditional imperative: I only like the fact that English is number one because I happen to have been born into the language. On the other hand, the only good Kant is Hal, so fuck the conditional imperative. USA! USA!)
• Here’s how colonialism and the British Empire worked: in places that were not England, stuff existed.
• England went and took it.
• Wait, no.
• Usually, there were people living around the stuff.
• England made the people get the stuff and then they took it.
• Cotton, opium, tea, tobacco, sugar, spices, gems, and a shitload of crops.
• Africans.
• England stopped slaving well before America did, but for a good long while only the Portuguese were better at it.
• The British Empire was almost self-satirical in its rapaciousness: they declared several wars on China to force them to accept their opium.
• Those were drug pushers.
• Remember in the after-school specials, when they would warn you about the drug pushers, who would give you the first one for free and get you hooked, but they didn’t actually exist?
• They did: the British Empire.
• The bullshit they pulled in India is also a hoot: India was forced to sell cotton to England, who would turn it into clothes sold by a monopoly in India.
• That’s so evil it’s funny.
• The guy who thought that plan up was stroking a white cat as he did it.
• Here’s something you might not know: America began as an English colony.
• Thirteen of them, as a matter of fact.
• The media, which is very unfair, doesn’t want you to know that.
• After a growing conflict with England and her Parliament, the American Colonies sued for independence; the two sides worked out a deal reasonable and calmly.
• Nah, just fucking with you: war.
• You know how that turned out, so let’s go back to Perfidious Albion which, as I mentioned, has a Parliamentary system, which means their legislative body has a recessed filter and comes in a blue box.
• Like America: bicameral legislation, person with the job title Speaker of the House.
• Unlike America: everyfuckingthing else.
• One of the houses is the House of Lords, and those people are there because their families have been rich for many generations.
• That’s it.
• They’ve been updating it, but still: slide out of the right rich lady, and boom: you get to make laws.
• It’s not even titular: they get to do stuff.
• England has a Queen, but she’s not really allowed to do anything.
• But she has to do everything.
• It’s complicated.
• Like, the Queen (or the King, whoever is alive at the time) opens Parliament by giving a speech outlining the agenda for the upcoming session: the party in power writes the speech for her, though, but she has to approve it, but she’s not really allowed not to approve it, but a million other things that are all based in Common Law and tradition rather than a constitution because England doesn’t have a constitution.
• They like to say they don’t have a “written constitution” but I say there’s nothing else but.
• An oral constitution isn’t worth the parchment it’s written on.
• Many countries have had royal families through their histories, but most have given them up, or converted them into figureheads.
• Some kings are still allowed to chop off people’s’ heads, though.
• Queen Elizabeth II, of the House of Windsor (née Gothenburg: the name was changed during World War I) is not permitted to execute anyone by any method
• She has been Regent since the death of her father, Stutterin’ Colin Firth, in 1952. (’51? ’53? Sometime soon after the war.)
• Queen Elizabeth has never blown her nose in public; nor has she pinched one nostril closed and exhaled violently through the other, spitting a bullet of mucus at the sidewalk.
• She is married to Prince Phillip, who is only a prince because if he were a king then he would outrank Elizabeth, and together they had four children, all of whom are dreadful.
• Although someone once tried to kidnap Princess Anne, and she said “Not bloody likely,” and just got out of the car and walked away, which is a baller move.
• That is behaving like royalty:
• “You’re kidnapped!”
• “Absolutely not.”
• “What?”
• “No, I’m not.”
• “Listen to me! I have a gun!”
• “I’m a princess. Fuck off.”
• “You are being kidnapped.”
• “And you are being told to fuck off. We’ve come to an impasse.”
• …
• Jesus, it’s four am.
• I didn’t even get to Churchill.
• Can’t talk about England without talking about Churchill.
• Goddammit, to be further continued…

• Second-place in the “most comprehensible foreigner” contest, except for up North or the East or God forbid you have to figure out what someone from Scotland or Wales is saying.
• Scotland and Wales are not England, but England owns them (kinda) and the whole deal is called Great Britain because the name of the island is Britain, and then there’s the United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland.
• That last part gets complicated and sad.
• In some ways, it’s like the individual states forming America.
• But in all the important ways, it’s nothing like that.
• They got a whole different system over there.
• You hear them speaking English, and think that they’ll be reasonable and normal, but no.
• Foreigners.
• Not even ashamed to not be Americans!
• Canadians apologize for not being American, and Australians pretend to be American, but the English just walk around with their umbrellas being foreign; I almost respect them for it.
• Okay, right off the bat: I am going back to the founding principles for this one, and really not looking anything up; I know that there are British Enthusiasts, and I ask you to keep in mind this fact before being mean in the Comment Section.
• Here we go: England was discovered in 1611 by Vasco de Gama; he claimed it for Spain and then Winston Churchill stabbed him in the eye with a cigar.
• Stop that.
• Fine: the British Isles (the two big ones, Britain and Ireland, and a bunch of little ones like Wight and Man) were settled by by humans a long time ago when French cavemen became bored with sunny weather and decided to live on a rock in the North Sea.
• (England’s a lot closer to the Arctic than you realize, but the Gulf Stream blips north when it hits the European mainland and warms the place, but not, you know, warm.)
• There was tribal squabbling.
• There still is, but back then it was done with war dogs and night raids.
• Now the English tribes just print newspapers at each other.
• Rome!
• The English were not the English yet–the word comes from the Angles, who migrated well after the Romans showed up–and they spoke Brythonic (Byronic? Chthonic?), which has nothing to do with even the Oldest English.
• The Romans called them Britons, and the island Britannia, but the people were Celts and Picts and Iceni and other geographically-based tribes of filthy savages.
• All the tribes had traded with Rome, and other countries, for hundreds of years, but Caesar gonna Caesar and in 50 (?) BC he invaded.
• Then he invaded again a few years later.
• And again.
• March 15th.
• Then Augustus invaded.
• Caligula tried it next, but something went wrong because he was insane.
• Who finally took control of Britannia and named her capital city Londinium?
• Him, Claudius.
• Along the way, Boadicea (who I am quite certain Emily Blunt is currently in talks to portray) led her tribe, the Iceni, in battle against the Romans.
• It did not go well for her.
• So now England was Roman, but it was still an island and therefore developed a much different form of Roman culture than the rest of the Empire.
• For example, their togas were double-breasted.
• But, being a part of the Roman Empire, there was a lot of movement back and forth and cultural exchange and all that; genes were moving back and forth, too: your average British subject today is a mutt of just about all of Northern Europe, plus Spain.
• Unless you’re a part of one of those uncontacted Amazonian tribes, you’re a mutt.
• Embrace your muttness.
• Then the Roman Empire became Christian, and then turned into the Catholic Church and England wasn’t a part of the Roman Empire any more, thus beginning the Medieval Period, which is also known as the Dark Ages, maybe.
• I’m sure historians use those terms for different eras, or perhaps one or both has been exiled to the Problem Attic, but you know what I’m talking about: the thousand years in which Western Civilization wasn’t looking too hot.
• If you’re a fan of Western Civilization, then the highpoints are the Roman Empire and right this very moment.
• (And Rome has nothing on us. We have electricity; they didn’t; discussion over.)
• But for a thousand years, Europe went back to being shit-covered savages.
• For example: vikings.
• They were Norse (Norway and Sweden and Denmark) and fucked shit up: they’re still known it for more than a millennia later.
• Vikings were to fucking shit up what dervishes were to whirling.
• It it at this point that England got very lucky, because they had access to something the vikings did not.
• Magic.
• King Arthur and his knights and also a dragon fought off the invaders, but then winter came and everyone got eaten by zombies or zombie dragons.
• Moistened bints lobbing scimitars may or may not have been involved.
• There was no King Arthur (and he most certainly did not ride elephants, no matter what Guy Ritchie will have you believe) and no Merlin, Galahad, Lancelot.
• Nor was there a Sword in the Stone or Excalibur, which were not the same thing.
• They were two separate folk tales that got blended together over generations of retelling.
• The previous sentence is based upon no evidence whatsoever, but that sounds like how stories operate, doesn’t it?
• There was an Uther, though, and Ulric, and Alfred, and–of course–Æthelred the Unready (the Jeb Bush of Medieval England); these were kings (more like local warlords) who fought the Vikings and tried to expand their territories; they did so for several hundred years because everything in the past happened for several hundred years at a time.
• There was no 24-hour news cycle in the Dark Ages.
• In 1066, William the Conqueror did so.
• Battle of Hastings, motherfucker.
• Without Research.
• He was a Norman, and not the fun kind like Crosby or Lear or Bates: the French kind.
• The Britons took this calmly, and with the equanimity they’re know for.
• Nah, just shitting you: thousand years of war, on and off.
• More on than off, honestly.
• When England and France started fighting, it was typical monarchical bullshit: cousins marrying strategically, and uncles siccing armies on nephews, that sort of thing.
• Rich people fucking up everyone else’s day.
• England and France then grew into modern nation-states; they continued having wars.
• One was called the Thirty Years War.
• It lasted a while.
• Another was called the Hundred Years War.
• It lasted quite a while.
• 130 years, actually.
• Until fairly recently, a great deal of England and France’s economies were based around killing each other.
• They’re friends today.
• Kinda.
• Anyway, lot of kings and fighting: Edward and Edward II and Richard II and the Henry IV and Jaws III-D, and others.
• Also the Black Death, also known as the Bubonic plague, also known as y. pestis.
• Nasty little fucker: fills your lymph nodes with pus; your neck and armpits and crotch swell up black, and throb until they split, spilling infectious poison all over a room inhabited by people who do not understand germ theory.
• Lot of people die, but economists think that–in a perverse way–the Black Death (along with the concurrent Little Ice Age) was good thing in the long run: it cut down on the supply of labor, which means the remaining Britons were now more valuable and could maybe stop being serfs that belonged to rich people.
• (That’s feudalism: the poor people belonged to the land, and the land belonged to the rich people. Next time someone starts in with the “good old days” bullshit, scream “FEUDALISM” at them, and then punch them in the suck. Right in the suck.)
• Then there was an English Renaissance, and an Interregnum, and the Spanish Armada, and the Glorious Revolution, and several Reformations, and Queen Elizabeth.
• Not our Queen Elizabeth, the first one.
• Our Queen Elizabeth has been around a while, but she is not a Highlander.
• She does have a place in the Highlands of Scotland, though.
• …
• Shit, maybe she is a Highlander.
• Empire!
• England used to be part of someone else’s empire, but now she was getting her own: the New World and Asia and Africa and India; pretty much the entire planet save South America (except for the Falklands.)
• Colonialism.
• That topic is a whole Without Research post by itself, so let’s skip over the British Empire.
• Wait, you can’t “skip over” the British fucking Empire.
• But I am sleepy.
• Enthusiasts, we have ourselves a first: this Without Research post is…
• …
• …to be continued.