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Dear Mr. Cleese,
Your recent message has been received here “across
the pond,” and we Americans are giving it due consideration. You
make some very good points, and I will acknowledge them here, and
then get on to a few little matters on which we differ.
It can’t be denied that we are currently a country
severely in need of some guidance. Since the fall of the Soviet
Union we seem to have been flailing about, “the world’s only
superpower,” unable to decide what to do with all that military
might. Sadly, we’ve decided to use it on the
flimsiest of excuses, blundering about and tipping things over and
generally making a bloody nuisance of ourselves. However, I wonder
if you in Blighty are actually the ones best suited to straighten us
out. You, after all, have been governed by the appeasing Neville
Chamberlain, the near-fascist Margaret Thatcher, and Tony “Bush’s
Butt Boy” Blair. (Let’s just forget all about that Mad King George
III business. Water under the bridge.) Mr. Blair was single-handedly
responsible for giving a veneer of legitimacy to the term
“coalition.” Without your support in Iraq the invasion would have
consisted of the USA and assorted rabble.
I have no excuse or reasonable explanation for our
pronunciation of “aluminium.” I’ll see if we can fix that. However,
it should be noted that only idiots mispronounce “nuclear.” You have
your idiots, too.
Yes, we have too many guns, lawyers, and therapists.
They are all as hard to eradicate as a bad case of the
penicillin-resistant clap, and I despair of curing any of them. And
a vegetable peeler may in fact be too lethal for many of us to
handle.
We’re slowly getting used to UK prices for gasoline,
believe me. I expect we’ll be caught up to you by next summer,
unless the decline in value of the US dollar brings that about
sooner.
Metrification … I can’t explain that, either. But you
might bear in mind that you are the chaps that foisted your system
of weights and measures on us. We still call it the “English
system,” in fond memory of the odd people who invented it, and
though you have had the good sense to abandon it, I suspect that
some Englishmen still call for a pint of bitter down at the local.
I think that pretty much covers our points of
agreement. Now, I’d like to make some points of my own.
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1. |
Tea out of cups and saucers is for pussies.
Serious cultures drink coffee out of mugs. Tea was one of
the reasons we went to war with you. (That was the first
time. We whipped you twice, if you recall.) Tea was what got
you into that whole Black Hole of Calcutta unpleasantness in
India, and all sorts of contretemps in your Empire. And if
you hadn’t noticed, the sun now sets on the British Empire
regularly, once a day. |
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2. |
While I agree with you about American beer,
it is fatuous for you to hold up the brown swill you drink
as a potable beverage. There are only two cultures in the
world who know how to brew beer, and that is the Germans and
the Australians, as they drink more of it than all other
countries combined. |
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3. |
You presume
to lecture us about food? You,
whose entire contribution to world cuisine is the good old
“fry-up” of fish and chips? That is, unless you want to
count steak and kidney pie, bully beef, the meat pastie, and
Marmite? (I’d advise you not to count them; it only hurts
your case. Especially the Marmite.) |
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4. |
Soccer is for pussies. |
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5. |
A lot of your words sound rather …
effeminate, which may be why we don’t use them. What is this
“lorry” business, anyway? You can’t even say it without
holding your pinkie in the air. A large vehicle for moving
goods from place to place is a truck, and
always will be. Those who operate them are truckers, not
lorry drivers. |
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6. |
I believe we Americans understand the British
sense of humour quite well, thank you. We completely
understood the brilliant humour of “Monty Python’s Flying
Circus.” If we hadn’t, you might be delivering a stand-up
routine on the sidewalk in front of a chip shop in Brighton
instead of relaxing poolside at your estate in Santa
Barbara, which is where I last saw you. |
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7. |
Again, I agree with you about American actors
playing British people, and you didn’t even mention two
worse examples: Julia Roberts and Kevin Costner. However,
that goes both ways. Anthony Hopkins has recently played a
Louisiana judge, a psychotic American psychiatrist, and John
Quincy Adams. Kate Winslet and Jude Law also tried to speak
Louisianan, and Law pretended he was from North Carolina in
Cold Mountain. Cate Blanchett hardly plays
anything but Americans anymore, except
when she takes a holiday as one of your Elizabeths. She even
played Bob Dylan, for crying out loud. Yes, I know she’s an
Aussie, but what is an Aussie but a Brit who says “G’day” a
lot? |
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8. |
And now,
language. First, I should point out that, like the “English
system,” you are the ones who invented this most illogical,
difficult, and inconsistent of languages and fobbed it off
on an unfortunate world. And now you presume to lecture us
about cleaving to the stupidities inherent in its very
structure? Take that “u” in “colour,” etc., that u are so
insistent we use. You don’t pronounce it. We don’t pronounce
it. It’s useless, it’s superfluous; we abandoned it. Why not
coulour, while you’re at it? Our “neighbours,” the
Canadians, kept it, and what has it gotten them? Just extra
keystrokes, a bit of time wasted. (If keeping the u in
honour helped keep them out of the Coalition of the Willing,
I take it back, and will endeavour to use honour in future.)
English has
around 300 irregular verbs. Each one must be memorized, as
there are no rules governing this. Every rule
in the English language has at least one exception. Take one
of the most notorious ones: i before e, except when we don’t
fucking feel like it. Or something like that. Who was the
English genius who thought up this –ough business? What the
hell is that? Ooh? Uf? Ow? Ug? O? Up?
(Hiccough.) Answer: All of the above.
And how did
you manage to stretch “knight” into a six-letter word? –ght?
Where did that come from? I think it was
George Bernard Shaw who pointed out that “fish” can be
spelled “ghoti” in English. (Gh as in enough, ti as in
nation … and you figure out the o.) What was wrong with a
nite in shining armour? Maybe you’d confuse it
with night … no, that isn’t rite …
The very
alphabet sucks in English. You want us to
use “ise.” Why? It sounds just like “ize.” The letter Z
(Zed, if you insist) is entirely superfluous, as is Q. But
the worst is the 23rd letter. All the other 25 are one
syllable. So why is W pronounced “double-u?” Three syllables
for one lousy letter? Why not “wah,” or “wee?”
And it doesn’t even look like a double-u, it’s
a double-v! |
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9. |
Everything nancified about England can be
summed up in one word: Cricket. I’ll grant you that we
shouldn’t call the American Baseball Championship “The World
Series” until we start inviting Japanese, Chinese, Cubans,
and other South Americans who are good at it. But cricket
should be stamped out entirely, it is an abomination. I
think that, even more than high tea, cricket was one of the
main reasons people around the world through (that is,
threw) off the yoke (or is it yolk?) of British Colonialism.
No one understands it. I’m not sure if even the players
understand it. American football may stop to rest every 30
seconds, but at least the games end. I
understand a cricket game started in Wapping in 1932 is
still in progress. “Bowling” is a game where a large ball is
rolled along a lane to strike 10 wooden pins. It has nothing
to do with hurling a small brown spheroid. That’s
pitching. And what are those croquet sticks in the
middle of the playing field? Somebody could fall down and
get hurt on those. Pitchers throw curve balls, knuckle
balls, sliders, change-ups. No self-respecting American
could bring himself to throw a flipper, a yorker, an
indipper, or … god help us all … a “googly.” (In Australia,
a googly is a “wrong ‘un.” And the fact that Aussies play
cricket proves my point, above, that they are just Brits who
favour sheep and pronounce a as oy.) |
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10. |
Finally, we would gladly pay our back
revenues, but we’re a bit tapped out at the moment. Our
president has been spending money we haven’t got, as
Republicans are wont to do. The treasury is full of IOUs.
Could you come back sometime next year, say on Guy Fawkes
Day? |
Up the Revolution!
March 13, 2008
Hollywood,
California |
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