God Save the Queen (and Us from Ourselves, While You're In a Saving Mood)

Oh, fiddle-dee-dee. Do you mean that British youth didn't spring spontaneously as fully-formed drunken destructive nihilistic assholes from their mothers' wombs, like one of God's more capricious racial punishments in the Old Testament? That perhaps they had adult role models in terms of becoming drunken destructive nihilistic assholes? That perhaps their main fault is being drunken destructive nihilistic assholes in their own cities instead of travelling abroad and subjecting browner people to their charms, like their parents and grandparents?

Dear me. I was all set to buy a Mosquito for our stoop in case any English youths accidentally stumbled on to the Eurostar and blundered their drunken destructive nihilistic assoholic way to my neighborhood, but now it looks as though I'll have to get a gun.

I know I rib on Americans a lot, and the French, and Belgians when it's not Lent (four more days until Easter and I can start again! Wheeeeee!), but the British, that paler, richer half of my genetic and cultural heritage, never fail to fascinate me, nor most other Europeans. While Italians and French content themselves with typical linguistic uncreativity to calling them 'Roast Beefs', Germans have thought up the much more descriptive name 'Inselaffen', or 'Island Monkeys'. Although it only indirectly touches on notions of the British caste system that oppresses its own natives in a way other European countries only oppress browner people that they considered furriners, I feel it sums up to a tee the British notion that there is something subhuman and deeply unaccountable about themselves, as nicely written up in this rant by Philip Hensher.

I'm enjoying the Independent at the moment, by the way, and regretting I didn't switch from the Guardian long, long ago. And the round of being fascinated with the British that I'm currently in sprang from reading another rant in the Independent about how having CCTV cameras everywhere is actually okay. I feel there's something wrong with people being filmed, their movements being recorded, even if it is in public spaces, without certain guarantees about how that footage will be used and kept - deeply wrong. And yet Johann Hari makes a good point. Could he make a good point if he was writing in other countries? I don't know. And hence, the fascination with the British.