Poor Britney, confused, traumatically underdressed, now more wildly erratic than erotic, we're not sure whether to envy or pity you, but really, who cares anyway? Actually, scrub that, because we all care, we're conditioned to care, even our not caring is a form of caring. Human history is an exercise in caring about celebrity; about the new aristocracy, the new monarchy. Oh, we care a lot.
We all dress it up to make it respectable and speak about pride, heritage and blood memory, but really our lovingly nurtured convictions about history are tenuous at best. Genes are unreliable indicators of birthright; all we can truly identify with is our culture’s archetypes. They resonate in our soul such that even the most devout Protestant born convert to Buddha gets a frisson when confronted by a crucifixion scene, and cultural archetypes are inescapable; they're self-referencing and self-reinforcing. You identify with them, you gravitate to them and they become stronger, so that with each subsequent interaction they resonate a little more keenly. It’s a well-founded and well-exploited principle and explains why we all feel good about Coca-Cola; until we stop and think about the vacuity implicit in such instincts; at least.
This is the mechanism by which you convince yourself that history is fundamentally romantic. Let us say that, for the sake of argument you are Scottish; thus the cross of Saint Andrew and tartan-wear and tossing the caber all become in some intangible manner more meaningful to you than they would to say, my German aunt. Maybe in your heart's eye then you see a misty glen and highlanders tearing down the heather-clad mountainside, claymores glinting in the morning sun; the mournful sound of bagpipes and all that good Mel Gibson stuff. Then Tacitus comes into play with his "desolation" speech (pure theatre, but so good):
"For in [the Romans] is an arrogance which no submission or good behaviour can escape. Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace."
And before you know it, you're positively poetic with a vision of Caledonia and some affronted sensibility of cultural meaning and identity; enraged by the indignity of being subsumed into some alien, insensitive, unsympathetic morass. It’s no prodigious leap then to denouncing the motherless English, or some variation of the same Romanised anti-Celtic assimilative impetus and your world is replete with fertile ground upon which to sow your discontent at the perpetrators of this vile culturicide.
And then, piece by carefully chosen piece, a framework of historical fact is constructed to support the patriotic conclusion; a philosophy of betrayal, the theft of the Stone of Destiny, the Clearances, improbably even, the North Sea oil fiasco of 1975 and before you are even aware of it, history is all about English repression, English greed, Scottish honour, Scottish dignity.
Imagine being English, (it's easy if you try, no hell below us...). The cross of Saint George, Dunkirk spirit and the white cliffs of Dover, or maybe The Few, the Jewel in the Crown and Disraeli's now unfashionable empire upon which the sun never set? The archetypes are there but subdued, because they're not so much shining cultural beacons that we can put on the mantle in pride of place, but rather cultural pornography that gives a guilty thrill, though we pretend that we don't even own such smut. We end up drawing our archetypes from a wider Judaeo-Christian pool instead and hear the distant call of Jerusalem; we can feel good about our dark, satanic mills at least.
And as for being American? Don't even go there, it’s a snuff movie.
All of it is resolutely human, this tendency to subscribe to a selective history. We emotionalise the entirety of our culture, because it lends us a sense of meaning about who we are.
The reality is by contrast, awesomely prosaic. Whilst it’s entirely fair to say that the English have perpetrated terrible injustices on less robust cultures, the Englishness of the issue is a mere hand-servant to the real master of cultural destinies. So with all derisory artifices like nations, religions and ethnicities, because the fact is, nationhood, doctrine and coloration are bought and sold just as cheaply as any other commodity.
Terribly unromantic maybe, but it would be difficult to disprove in even the most trivial of circumstances. History is a tragedy of rich and poor and how the former have exploited the latter for the purpose of maintaining and increasing their wealth. There is really no other history of much relevance. I suppose you could argue that even more broadly there is a history of exploitation, but you'd be hard pressed to find a scenario devoid of the clink of coin. The Holocaust? Why liquidate the bankers, moneylenders and factory-owners? Pol-pot? Why dispossess the intelligentsia, the affluent, educated middle class at all? The Roman invasion of Britain? Empires pay – yes; in the blood of the subjugate - but it all translates to currency in the final reckoning. And why build that intriguingly long wall in Northumbria? Is it because the mightiest war machine on the face of the Earth is terrified of a few hairy ginger blokes in skirts? Or might it be that the infertile, rocky terrain offers no genuine fiscal enticement so “we might just as well wall it off and forget about it; at least that way we can tax the chattels that cross over the border.” It’s an old story and the Scottish are still complaining about unjust taxes being imposed from the South to this day.
Everywhere, here and now, there and then, the machine thunders on, grinding to grist romantic notions and myth-struck ballads. Celebrity gossip columns detail the outrages of the day; we mock Britney's bizarre behaviour and Paris' courtroom outbursts and indignantly wonder at Her Majesty's refusal to publicly grieve for Diana; all the while lovingly oiling the cogs and gears of the machinery of our exploitation, architects of our own decline. Where once we stood in the glen at sunrise knock-kneed with dread at the approaching fray, or under the ponderous shadow of Carnedd Llewellyn diligently working to pay the high and mighty Welsh Princes (and future son-in-laws of the English monarchy) their tithes or even as I pay the latest in a long-line of robber-barons his extortionate monthly rents, we are all firmly under the heel of an exploiter, sometimes willingly, sometimes unwittingly, but mostly offering our jugular to the sanguinary epicure with a smile. To pretend that I suffer because of some perceived cultural insensitivity from a neighbouring province is simply a convenient delusion that, properly harnessed by the ruling classes, guarantees more income for their ongoing enrichment campaigns and more cannon-fodder for their wars, which, before you ask, are almost certainly the continuation of profit by other means.
It is precisely this wayward, but pleasingly fanciful world-view that keeps us poor and yet somehow sustained on the meagre crumb of belief in a purer undercurrent to the rhythm of our lives. The emaciated masses, unable to perceive the causal relationship between their poverty and their credulousness for the pantomimes of celebrity blindly underwrite the next generation of life’s privileged plunderers. The irony is not that we fail to notice that we are being daily waylaid, but that we crave it, demand it even, with every copy of Hello magazine purchased and every Britney sound-bite regurgitated.
