The Duke and Duchess of Windsor Happily Meeting One of Their Favorite People
The Prussian-Blooded King George VI Proudly Wearing His Freemason Garb
The Royal Fops of Merry Ole England and Their Hold on US White Folk
I don't get it. Anybody whose read The Daily Growler for even a bare length of time knows my particular contrarian stance on what seems to be a love affair between White Americans and England and all that is "British." I find it so hypocritical and so racist even. Of course, I'm extremely anti-British first of all in terms of American roots music and the fact that a bunch half-talented copycat Brits took advantage of this music being a unifying music in that it was bringing American White kids and Black kids together, so, hell yes, Brit boys grabbed hold of the contracts offered them by US record companies and record promoters--and then these lawyer geeks and promotional boobs brought the Fab Four to this country in 1964, which, to me, brought about not an abrupt end but a gradual end to the rising popularity of Black-influenced rhythm and blues, swinging rock and roll, and most of all the end to a golden era in jazz improvisation.
Black and White music of the 1950s was integrating television for one thing--it was integrating our popular music and culture--it was integrating our dances. Watch the early Patty Duke Shows--1964-65--and you'll see Blacks going to high school with Patty and going to the shake shop with her and at all the parties and dances.
White kids in my day were tired of the old-fashioned Protestant Ethic bullshit our White parents forced on us. We looked for an escape from their world, the world of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Pat Boone--even early Tony Bennett--God awful boring sweet-ass romantic music. We were tired also of movies stressing American-Dream bullshit. We were fucking tired of war movies and Westerns and John Wayne and Clark Gable. We agreed with Reverend Ike, we didn't want our pie in the sky, hell no, we wanted it right here and now and on the table and still hot and maybe with a dollop of ice cream on it. So I'm very chauvinistic about my being naturally born into the basic forms of American roots music, from the Afro-American contributions of rags and quadrilles and blues and jazz to the truly original American classical music of Charles Edward Ives, the inventor of polytonal and atonal music--writing polytonal music at the same time as Debussy and writing atonal music years before Schoenberg got famous as its inventor.
This USA love of all British is especially noticeable in the entertainment industry. Last week I asked the question on my "Grammies" post as to why Mick Jagger was chosen to pay tribute to Solomon Burke on the American Academy of Music "Grammy" (for the British term "gramophone"--the American term was "phonograph") Awards show on February 13th?
Then this week I fell into watching one of these Hollywood 30-minute infomercials that pose as actual documentaries on the making and the thinking behind certain films they're promoting for the upcoming Academy Awards. In this case, the film was The King's Speech, a film that is being heavily lauded as a sacred masterpiece of a film. This is THE film this year if I am to believe this puffy piece of supercilious advertising. This reality ad went on to trumpet that this movie is actually favored to be a big winner at the coming Academy Awards show this year. And I got to watching this bunch of Brit fops going into detail about this totally Brit propaganda story about how this stuttering-stammering morganatic bastard fop of a Windsor-Prussian-Nazi bloodline royal highass bravely made this speech that, as this movie is claiming, perked up the almost beaten-down Brits who were being bombed back to the Stone Age by those German-Nazi rocket bombs, what the Nazi scientists called their latest devil of a human-being killing and city destroying device, the V-12 rocket bomb, or buzz bomb, as the Brits came to call them. And, yes, these scientists were the same Nazi rocket scientists who would after the German surrender be bundled up and stolen out of defeated Germany in the dead of night only to show up here in the good old USA, the vilest one of the bunch, Werner Von Braun, made head of our rocket and space program in Huntsville, Alabama, a murdering rat who got to end his corrupted life as a highly respected, highly paid, great American. Why he has the whole complex in Huntsville named after him. Ironically, it was an American scientist, Robert Goddard, who was the brains behind rocket science.
Guess who actually heard this "King's Speech" live?--as it was being broadcast on the radio back in the middle of our 20-Century's most righteous war. If you said, "You did, Wolf Man, you heard it live," you would have been correct sir or ma'am. Yes, I heard it, and remember it--how the speech was preceded by the ringing of Big Ben and an announcer saying, "London calling...London calling." And, yes, I remember at the time even my own parents talking about King George VI and his precious wife, Mother Mary--why, that's the same name as Jesus's mother! I say! What a pip of an analogy, old boy. I heard that speech--and I heard Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speeches, too--and even I as a little sniveling kid recognized FDR's speeches as more relevant to me than old King George the VI's most famous speech. I heard live Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech...the "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" speech--and I listened to Roosevelt's famous "Fireside Chats"--I remember them, too. I also remember how we took the longest to get fully behind the Brits--Churchill using his American mother to try and get we spoiled-brat mixed-bag Colonial weasels to support the Brit fight against the super-Christian and Vegetarian, Adolph Schikelgruber. I remember all those summit meetings--Roosevelt the cripple going to Potsdam or sailing out into the North Atlantic and meeting with Churchill, a big pompous-ass aristocrat--a parasite on the British common man, and Uncle Joe Stalin, a paranoid schizophrenic Georgian peasant whose only solution to a problem in the goat herd from either temper or weakness is a final solution--whack the son of a bitch. But I do remember that night the King of England, George the Sixth, made this speech that they have now made into an American Academy Award-potential-winning movie--a movie that wasn't made in the US...so why not put it in the foreign-film category?
Trust me, folks, and here's a superchauvinistic statement on my part, the Brits would be goose-stepping and Siegheil-ing all around the island today if it had not been for the Yanks...the Americans...who showed up by the thousands in England to bolster the combat troops and the air force squadrons of the British Armed Forces. Fuck whether Georgie Sixth gave that speech or not--what mattered was the stammering King knew the Yanks were coming into the mess full-fledged with money and manpower--this fop of an morganatic bastard never really wanted to be King--though he wasn't fop enough to reject the throne like his brother, the Duke of Windsor, a perverted playboy who loved dressing up in women's clothes and sitting watching some young London society gay boy fuck his American wife.
I don't hate the British people with as much passion as I do the British Royal Family--or, in fact, any god-damn royal family wherever they are. I do hate this White American adoration of British people though. Perhaps it's an adoration forced on us by our corporate-controlled media. And aren't corporations now setting themselves up as our Royal Betters?--our Power Elite crowning themselves our Kings, our Dukes, our Earls, our noblemen--divinely instructed, divinely ordained, divinely privileged?...God-damn I hate such an attitude--BETTER ANARCHY than living under a King, a Master, a Sheik, a Libyan Colonel, or an Egyptian President.
But Brits are thick in our American lives. British chefs rule in the restaurant kitchens of NYC nowadays. Brit chefs are basically simply European-style chefs, i.e., Wolfgang Puck and that European ilk who got their fame hustling overpriced miniportioned dishes in celebrity-frequented restaurants and hangouts, foods better known for their presentation than their taste. I mean we are just now getting the raspberry sauce bullshit out of our cuisine--only now the Brit chefs have come up with other kinds of saucy swooshes--swooshed on a huge platter of a plate in whose center is a dainty, say, 5-oz filet mignon on a bed of fennel, with a persimmon-cilantro sauce--just a swoosh now--over it, a sprig of rosemary on it--"Ahhh, I say, Chef, what a brilliant presentation...why it is so pretty I hate to eat it." And all for only $65.00 a la carte. And, hey, for desert you can order the ice-cream sundae with that pure 24-karat gold topping--for only $2,000--"Oh, we'll take 5 of those." Fool's gold, we'll bet you.
Forget how we White Americans are so swept off our feet by Brit salesmen, especially those selling us cheap-ass, Chinese-made, Ron Popeil-reject crap--like the currently hot-selling automatic stirrer a Brit fop is hustling on us on one of those 24/7 infomercials. This little piece-of-shit tin-and-plastic battery-operated crap you are told you can put in your pan of gravy or in your small pot of soup (it wouldn't fit in a huge soup pot) and simply press down on the top of it, switch it on, and it stirs your food for you while you're doing other things like chopping up onions and celery.
My generation of White kids also became infatuated not only with Black music, but also Black cooking. When I was a playboy type in New York City in the 1970s, nearly all of the best chefs were Black guys. Phoebe's on The Bowery's hamburgers were known all over NYC as the best and biggest and juiciest hamburgers in the city--cooked in a very small narrow kitchen back by the restrooms by a tall gaunt Black man (the Chinese guy who was his assistant in those days is currently the head chef at my fav Irish pub just down the street from where I live). And there was Jack's Nest, a Southern-style soul food restaurant, still going strong down on Second Avenue--with the kitchen open and you could see the Black chefs ruled over by a large stately Black woman--turning out the chitterlings, the ham hocks, the beef tips and rice Carolina style, the barbecued spare ribs--GO ON, folks--there's not one damn soul-food restaurant left--well, there's still Sylvia's up in Harlem--but it's not the same food. Like nothing was better than finishing a gig at 3 in the morning, packing up and then taking your equipment back and dumping it off at your pad and then making it over to the Pink Tea Cup on Bleeker in time for a monster breakfast of sausages, grits, and scrambled eggs--served with big steaming mugs of strong-ass coffee.
OK, I'm an Anglophobe. But also, OK, I'll admit to owning 2 Jaguars and an MG 1600A in my lifetime--and one Jag was my dream car, a white 4-door sedan, a Mark V, revised for the American market by moving the steering wheel as is from the right side over to the left side. This left your gearshift where normally your turning signal lever was--it meant that anytime you left the Jag at the filling station or the mechanics they inevitably broke the turning signal lever trying to shift the car into gear.
I'll admit there are some British writers I've always admired--Wyndham Lewis for one; Frank Harris for another; D.H. Lawrence; Evelyn Waugh; Joyce Carey; Siegfried Sassoon; and you gotta like Will Shakespeare; you gotta like Basil Bunting; you gotta like William Blake; you gotta like Gerard Manly Hopkins; you gotta like Sir William Walton's Facade; you gotta like Ralph Vaughn-Williams's Antarctica Symphony. But for the most part, I cry, spare me these British salesmen, chefs, rock stars, entertainers (like comedians and one late-night teevee talk show host), and actors and actresses--and you may as well throw the Aussies in the heap, too, even though if anybody should hate the Brits more than the Irish Republicans, it should be the Aussies.
Whewwwwww...that was fun...venting my rage against Britain...and this little fool fop of a Prissy Prince who's marrying the golddigging commoner in a while--what a bunch of foppish bullshit. I guarantee this couple just like this little parasitical worthless fop's parents will soon be in the divorce courts and all over our news headlines once again. A fop prince who while his mother was banging the gang down at the royal stables, his father was banging a horse-faced noble woman out in the muddy fields of one of the royal palaces--at what a cost to the British common men and women!! It wasn't that long ago that old King George VI's daughter, Lizzie, the keeper of the royal Scotch bottle, was bitching about the royal asshole household being in arrears and needing a little more than the several million pounds a year the royal fops now make.
And while I'm on the subject, thanks to Walt Disney and the Disney Kiddie Corruption folks, the ideal is still that of princes and princesses and kings whether in symbolic African animal situations or even in an undersea adventure--the KING is always the respected LORD of all while the vassals are ignorant but fun loving loyal dutiers fulfilling the King's orders to respect your elders, brush your teeth every morning, and watch out for the anthropomorphic donkey's back kick--he can't help it, it's the animal in him.
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What I Hate Even Worse Than the Brits
Here's one that is griping my ass big time. This budget-trimming bullshit that is currently going on in our rabble-rousing House of NONrepresentatives, a house divided in favor of total nincompoop Yahoos with no ability to reason beyond their stubborn jealous racist heads. These people in the House who are determined to bring down our government--to take their stupid spending sprees and blame them on our Black (he's actually half White, too) president, the bleeding-heart Liberal Democrats (I really don't know who these people are, do you?), and of all people, those who work for our governments, including school teachers, firemen, and cops. This is politics of ruin being forced on us by politicians from low-populated backwards states like Kansas, Idaho, Indiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Southern California, South Dakota--check it out, these Yahoo dumbasses are changing our lives for the worse not the better. They defiantly refuse to tax the rich or the corporations. Exxon-Mobil continues making the highest profits in Capitalist history; yet they paid only 1% of those profits back to the American people in taxes last year. Meanwhile, the average dumbass American is paying upwards of 30% of his EARNINGS (taken out of his or her pay before he or she has a chance to count it) in taxes--taxes which are collected and then distributed out to every man, dog, and jack off in the world EXCEPT the American people. I'm just reading where General Dynamics had gleaned a big military weapons deal with the Great Libyan Dictator now pro-Western (remember when Reagan killed his daughter with a rocket?) Colonel Kha-hah-hah-daffy to the tune of 265 million good ole USA bucks--weapons now being used to massacre the Libyan people who like the Egyptians finally got up off their asses and packed the streets in defiance of a 30-year dictatorial regime in the case of Mubarak; 40 years in terms of Kha-hah-hah-daffy.
And in Madison, Wisconsin, hot damn, and in Columbus, Ohio, today, hot damn, the American people, our teachers and firefighters and civil servants are off their asses and packing the streets. Hey the hippies did it and got the Vietnam War ended and Big Balls Lyndon Johnson down in defeat, even though they petered out after the Democrats once again fucked up and ran a namby-pamby candidate against the vicious and drunken ego-maniac Richard M. Nixon who took over--though trust me, Nixon was a leftwing liberal compared to the Libertarian-Reaganlovers the numbskull Yahoo voters in these low-populated backwards states put into power--like they love shooting themselves in the foot they've just had in their mouths.
So look for some hard times heading our way. Once again President Obama is refusing to be the world leader of change he promised us when we unanimously elected him president in 2008. And now look at the rightwing nutjobs coming out of the wormholed woodwork throwing their hats in the ring for the coming 2012 presidential race--primaries and caucuses beginning in a few months, folks. Yep, another year-long presidential campaign is beginning soon--all the nutjobs will be out there blabbing forth their wrong economics their wrong statistics their prejudices in our Yahoo faces. I just read where California is now officially a White minority state. No wonder there are some vicious White politicians from California who are determined to bring down Obama one way or another. It's a sorry state of affairs for We the People in terms of our future incomes, our future chances at education, our future retirements, our future as either slaves or vassals--as once again the British form of Capitalism and its greed for profits and more profits is corrupting us and ruining us--when Samuel Gompers, the great American unionist, was asked what labor unions wanted, he said, the same thing the corporate robber barons want, "MORE."
New Jersey's big fat overweight pig-jowled governor is riding roughshod across the Hudson from me over the dumbass Jersey voters--truly dumbass, though let's face it, they had a choice of an ex-Goldman-Sachs pirate, Johnny Boy Corsine, who could only promise more taxes and higher tolls and state taxes as the solution for Jersey's state budget being a few billion bucks in the hole or Fat Boy Christy (he'll probably die in office, wanna bet?) who said he was going to do away with taxes and tolls and tunnel projects in favor of going after government workers including teachers, firemen, cops, townships, blah, blah, blah. The voters in New Jersey got what they asked for--now they are ruing that day.
And in New York City, our little-man billionaire fop mayor is Power Eliting his privileged fucking way against the citizens of New York City, the majority of whom he hates, shutting down schools and firing thousands of teachers; shutting down fire houses and laying off fireman by the hundreds. In response to a huge fire in Brooklyn a day ago that got out of control and totally burned down a 5-story apartment building, the fire department union spokesman said they had failed in putting out this fire--1 person died in it--because of the extraordinary high winds and cold temperatures but also due to a shortage of firefighters--hundreds of whom had just been laid off and their fire houses closed by Billionaire Mike Bloomberg--who paid 200 million dollars of his own money (think of that, folks) to get himself elected to an illegal third term as mayor of the greatest city in the US. Bloomberg's response: "Hey, I expect these low-life firemen bastards to bitch and blame me for their inability to put out that fire. Hey, they've got to learn to work a little harder during these hard times." Mayor Bloomberg just shot the New York City firefighters the bird and told them Dickless Cheney style to go Fuck themselves--and to obediently bend over and let him fuck 'em some more up the ass. The firefighters's response to the mayor, "This little billionaire prick had rather save dollars than human lives." This privileged lucky asshole bullhorned us that he was the successful businessman who could get this city in shape--instead, we are deeper in the hole than we were when he took office. Plus, this bastard is firing schoolteachers by the thousands, closing down schools, privatizing NYC public schools through this charter school bullshit, another way for bigshot, Mayor-buddy hedge funders to make our public schools profitable, so profitable that pirate banks and financial fraud pits like Goldman-Sachs are investing in these schools. [According to a late night comedian, Mayor Billionaire Bloomberg gave as a reason for needing immigration reform as, "So more foreign models can come here to work." This is the Power Elite attitude towards the commonest of us that We the People of the USA will be facing over the next few years.]
I give up. I'm tired of this anti-British ramble. I'm listening to the music of Ellsworth Milburn as I type this. I don't expect anybody to know who he is, though I highly recommend his Menil Antiphons for 8 Players, if you are culturally transcended that is--Transcendentalism is very American, you know.
From the Mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Reference: www.goodreads.com/
thegrowlingtranscendentalwolf
for The Daily Growler
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