18 April 2008

You know what I like most about youtube? You get to meet, curse, demean, and be both offended by and offensive to people from all over the first world, and most of World 1.5 (formerly the second world, which nowadays just means the axis of evil... Oh yes, they're still around! No, they're not on youtube... you and I both know they couldn't handle that kind of freedom). Not to mention the nine dozen third world kids with those new old $100 laptops.

Why, just yesterday I looked around at some replies to video comments I'd made, and found myself knee-deep in the muck, slugging it out online with a whole army of South London Chav kids, who actually spell in their dialect.

(Bored by highbrow bullshit? Skip this paragraph. It's a note strictly to the conscientious, and as yet unutterly bored: I use the term "Chav" aware and in spite of its use as part of a sickening bourgeois fantasy about the childishness, triviality, and perpetual unsophistication of the working class. But that awful fantasy, like all bourgeois fantasies and linguistic magic tricks, has a way of reifying itself, and a totally disorganized proletariat is always sure to witlessly play along, each of them, one by one, as long as it provides them with an identity other than "working class" or "poor" ...a whole vast, owned western culture has beaten into their heads the idea that "working class" or "poor" is the last fucking thing on earth you want to be. And so there are so very many saved-up miserably small paychecks going to outrageous conspicuous consumption, which doesn't have anybody fooled except the poor, who remain very, very fooled, and therefore remain poor.)

And so I've got these South London kids bellowing at me, telling me to sod off and a few other much-used communal (don't tell them that!) colloquial expressions. And spelling out their own fucking accents! That kind of shit--phonetically transcribing your god-awful Peckham, England accent--is precisely why I made my first disparaging comment or two. I couldn't resist taking the bait, which they left out by accident. The dazzling kaleidoscope of British social class (and speakers of the myriad corresponding British accents) --they all dance through their daily lives in a lavish orchestration called "Let's Pretend We're British (Even Though We Really Are)" It involves overuse and overpronunciation of British slang, caring way too much (i.e., at all) about "football," and generally acting like a parody of yourself, like a caricature of the British. Or at least this is true of most of the English, if not the rest. Or at least most of the English I've encountered, in real life, in England, most of all lately on youtube, in comments or in actual videos. It makes me wonder, for real, whether these are actually spies from Russia or Albania or some such country where politics and universal pasty skin would respectively motivate and account for their spot-on performance.

I really suspect, sometimes, that at least the most prolific British makers of shitty ...pardon me, shit*... music are faking it, and routinely checking back at the politburo or Board of Fluorinization, or whatever stinking People's Commission they answer to.** Well, at least they're faking it, for whatever reason. Come off it, then, England! Just be yourself! We won't like you either way!

Wales: you're cool.

Scotland: it's your job to tell Sean Connery that it strikes the entire world as utterly preposterous that he has "opinions" at all. All I'm saying is do your job, Scotland, and we'll be cool again. (Oh, and I totally read Waverly. Where are you going? Scotland?)

Maybe the English have just got ethnicity-on-the-brain. My great grandfather died of that.

Yes, that's probably it. They can't forget they're English, and can't let us forget it, either. Just like Jews who always forever are talking about being Jewish, and actually saying "oy vey." Most English people seem to go around talking unnecessarily about Parliament or British-style court cases (wherein gratuitously many barristers, solicitors, and police constables are mentioned). Or they go around saying (just) "oy," and "oy, where's the fackin bar?" and "oy, where's the fackin baby?" They seem to be trying much too hard to sound English. It seems like they're putting on a show for the normal-talking world. How often do you actually have to say "wanker" or "tosser" or "right, mate! look here..."

Part of pulling off a role as an English person, without sending up red flags at MI5 or whatever the fuck it's called, is talking like you've got a mouth full of shit. Or shite, if you like. The point is to give the impression that you're trying to talk through and pronounce around a hideous train wreck of mangled British teeth. Or teef, if you like. Just make sure they sound light-tan. (You can do that by saying something like "My favorite British band is the Smiffs." Only don't say that, because real British people don't actually appreciate the good music that comes out of Britain. They listen instead to Lady Sovereign and various "DJ's.")

I fink some of the limey sods I've seen, particularly the Souf London kids, have actually discolored their teef wiff wood glue to look a bit more British, dinnay? So I'm not saying they're spies, but...hmm?

Souff London kids, according to the costumed people who at least claim to be South London kids, apparently have teeth all the many-varied shades of the rainbow, if you look at it through a sheet of orange mylar. See, this is where they slip up! We'll at least know for sure that these kids are faking it if we catch them trying to sniff the woodglue. Because every Souf London kid surely knows that that kind of glue don't get you high, duzzit?

My point, in short, is that British people sound like fake British people. There, that's not so offensive, is it? Oh, and they have on average 74 god-awful, staggering jaggedy teeth crammed into their jaws. What do you expect, when you live on an island for a thousand years, without letting Asians, et al., in to stir up the gene pool a little? Just be glad you've got some of the smartest, coolest fucking people in the world (Thom Yorke, David Mitchell, Terry Eagleton ...yes, I said Terry Eagleton. He's cool as all fucking hell, which is why you don't know about him, limey motherfucker.)

Well, here's an overture for peace with Souf London, and that whole limey country full of fake citizens. I'll play along with this whole gigantic show you're putting on there, on that blessed plot of yours. Just own up to it: you don't really talk like that by instinct, do you? You're trying to sound that way, and your reasons are your own. Just know that I know. Okay?

Now, that overture: A List of Things I Have in Common With South London Kids

1. "Chav" and "Chris" both start with "Ch."

2. My parents named me after various sounds that struck them as really fancy or posh-sounding: Roginald, Windrow, Dominatello, Nick, Palace, Antique. My sister is named Cliche. Her kid’s name is Secret Desire. She wants to change it to Secret Dezire, or Dez’ree, but they sez iss too late for that. [Hey! There's my accent!] She’s one and a half or some shit. We call her Dezzy anyway, because Cliche is so headstrong, she don’t care what DHHS say. The kid’s also called Dizzy, because she keeps falling off of shit: the telly, the stove, the balcony, the handlebars of Cliche’s bicycle.

3. Oh, I can't wait to try this new designer drug from England I've heard so much about: Apparently, it's called "model airplane glue" and it comes in little foil tubes ...you can buy them at hobby stores and toy shops. Must be some legal loophole, corresponding, perhaps, to an actual, molecular loophole that makes it technically non-narcotic. I bet that really gets their goat down at Scotland Yard. Anyway, you can buy it right there in front of everybody, and by all means do so, if there's a bobby standing nearby, as it's sure to piss the wanker off, but whus he gonna do about it? But otherwise, do it the South London way, and just "nick it."

I warn you, though, there ARE side effects: it makes your teeth go all "wangly" (yellow and mangled), your face go all "spotty," and turns your queen into a harpy.

It also makes you and your countrymen stupid as all hell, while your comedians remain inexplicably funny. It will make women give birth after only four months, usually to hideous skull-warped monstrosities like Lily Allen (who is rumored to be vying with incumbent Elizabeth II for the post of "Queen of the Harpies." I know what you're thinking: "What about Margaret Thatcher?" She eats harpies for breakfast, locked in a frozen torturous parody of bliss down in the very bottom center of Hell.)


Okay, England, here's the troof: ...God, this is hard to say...England, the reason I tease you so is that I'm in love with you. England, you are my precious jewel of the silver sea, and I need you, and I think you need me too. I think. I don't know... I know a wanker like me doesn't deserve a lady like you, England, but we just go together like the two decks on a double decker bus. (I'm on top.) I am Holmes and you are my Watson. Let's not be like them, and die without consummating what we both know in our hearts to be right, though it is forbidden. Shhh, baby. Let me bugger the queen. That's the same as ceremoniously buggering you, England. Shhh...


*shit (adj.): smelling or looking like shite*** to an Englishperson.

** In the end it all means one thing: everything we say gets sent right back, dutifully, to Joe Stalin himself. Whose brain (which now floats in a jar full of highly fluorinated bubbly water/sapped precious body fluids of Christian American babies) will one day be reanimated, so that he might lead the Russians to victory after all. I am a crazy fucking patriotic American and a proud Christian.**** My basic problem is that I drinks the mercury out of old thermometers. If you fuck with me, you are going to hell, my friend. Check out my angry comments on Iraq IED videos! I have some interesting opinions on cowardice.

***shite: (n) English shit. (Usage note: connotes especially voluminous, long, drawn-out, oily feces, like you get when all you eat is lampreys, thrice-boiled leeks (?), fish and chips. )

****Here, and probably in many other places I can't be bothered to check right now, I'm adopting a persona. It's just a persona. Because, were someone to write a ranting and raving message to me about "my" anti-Communist views, I would find myself in that most unhappy predicament, when you find out you've got somebody really, really dumb on your own side. Now, if you'll excuse me, I feel these footnotes-to-footnotes-etc. slipping toward an infinite regress, and it's making me nervous. I'm off, then, innt I?