Sharing With The Class (Rules & Stuff)

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Our planned new pages on Ideal Magazines has hit a snag and the proposed blogs hits on Snappy and Centaur are still in need of additional research. Right now, quite a bit of my time is being taken finishing a novel. I do hope to have composed pages for Midnight, Ballyhoo and Ads from Ideal up in a week or so.

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I found this slam on the Brits on another website. The topic was why are the French rioting in the streets about having their retirement age spiked to 62 when the Brits have not rioted and they have been asked to put up with so many more cuts. This response is about as good as it gets:

jomiku wrote:
Oct 21st 2010 6:12 GMT

I'm reading about the history of domestic service in Britain. A few statistics:

1851 - 905k women, 140k men working as servants

1901 - total number ~2 million but out of total population of only 40 million! Being a servant was the largest employer for women and the 2nd largest employer of all.

1911 - census says 1.3 million servants, more than agriculture (1.2 million) or mining (907k).

A country of servants is not likely to riot in the streets very often.

This reminds me of two stories picked up from a small printing of an American officer's WWII memoir. He was captured in N. Africa during his first engagement and imprisoned in Italy.

1. When the Italians fled, the British officers in command insisted that the men remain in the prison and set up watches to keep men in. Americans revolted and escaped, sometimes having physical confrontations with British guards. The Germans showed up and put all those remaining, mostly British, on trains to prison camps in Germany. Good show, eh wot?

2. Well behind enemy lines, he was hiding in the hills or abandoned barns, moving along ridge lines to avoid German patrols and fascists who might hand them over for a reward, living off bits scrounged from shepherds. Looking for food, he ran into a squad of British soldiers practicing drill in the middle of the day in the middle of the street of a small village. Complete with Sergeant counting out the steps and the men swinging their arm as though on parade. He warned them, but was told they needed to keep up discipline and spirit. A shepherd told him the Germans rounded up the British and shot them. Good show, eh wot? Chin up and discipline chaps!

You don't rebel because you're not a nation of shopkeepers as your mythology has it but a nation of servants. This is deeply embedded in you, not merely in the remnants of class but in the way you respond to hierarchical authority.

I'm also reminded of a tidbit from WWI, that the officers, all entitled from "public" - read private in the Us - schools, were a full 6 inches taller than the men enlisted or drafted from the cities. Even nutrition has played a role in establishing your system of hierarchical response to the word of the lord and master above you. And that goes hand in hand with the traditional British anti-thesis, the mob, which of course morphed into the hooligan. Can't fight the authority unless you're a yob.

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Next Post will be another Story. After that the promised start of Pulp History Basics.