I'll try to be nice about this

Over the past few days , I've been following the reactions of Americans to the riots in the UK. Some are genuinely astonished, because all they've ever been fed are royal weddings and Brit-coms to give them a flavour of life in the UK. Others (choose any comment thread) blame Britons for their own narrow-minded, stereotypical image of the UK and its inhabitants.

It's wake-up time, mates. Social unrest has lurked just under the surface of British life for centuries. This is an island about the same area as Wyoming, which started out in 1066 as home to six, count them, six different national groups: Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Welsh, Cornish, Lowland Scots, and Highland Scots. At least. Then the Normans came along and either subjugated the lot or gave some added muscle to the Anglo-Saxons: choose your interpretation. The people who won (the English) got there by being able to persuade the rest of an offer they couldn't refuse. If they did refuse, then the winning side had no compunction about shooting down the losers. This doesn't even take Ireland into account.

If Americans didn't have such short attention spans, they could remember just what happened in Northern Ireland when both local sides had no truck with the English. That happened in the media age. Why is so much of Scotland empty? Because the House of Hanover depopulated it after the uprisings of 1745. Why is there a Welsh province in Patagonia? Because tens of thousands of Welsh moved as far away from the English as they possibly could, rather than surrender their language and culture.* If lower-class life in the UK is so splendid, why in hell am I in this country at all?

Now and then, one will see the original English flag, the St George's Cross, fluttering about in this area. This is a fabulous example of a conquering minority pretending to be a downtrodden minority. It's no accident that this emblem of conquest has also become the emblem of English fascism. The English are great at flying the Union flag when they want something--usually blood--from the people they either conquered on the island or dragged there on the tails of empire. Now, when they want something for themselves, we're back to St George's. And everyone is supposed to like it.

So, when English police shoot somebody, this seems incredibly unusual to Americans. However, for a lot of residents of Great Britain, it's more of the same old shit that goes with 1500 years of conquest and repression. It's helpful for American history lessons, too: just in case anyone wondered why the War of Independence created so much ill will.

Now the water cannons are coming out. The next cannons may not shoot water.

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*I was fascinated that American media found a spokesperson for the rioters who seems, from his name, to be Welsh. Given the right push, Great Britain could make Yugoslavia look like Disney World.

Where are you, Grampa?

Americans in general, and American media in particular, are shocked to their foundations by the UK's riots against 300 percent tuition hikes. I'm afraid my undiluted, aboriginal British y-chromosome is delighted. I've been racking my brains, trying to recall the last time Britons stepped out of queue to this extent. I keep returning to the period of social unrest that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. I doubt that one American in 10,000 ever heard of this event, or could even imagine their pet English behaving in such a way.

My Welsh grandfather, an unreconstructed British radical socialist, would have understood and applauded the current unrest in all of its manifestations. At a certain point in her life, so would my grandmother. However the further way she got from actually being ruled by a royal family and permanent upper class, the more sentimental she got about the whole business. She tended to forget the permanent disadvantages that go with a system based upon inherited privilege, and go for the trappings and panoply.

The trappings are good, because they help the unruly identify their targets. And at last we discover the benefit of having a royal family. If they didn't exist, people might have to direct their anger at the government instead.

What say we let the people run the UK, and hire out the royal family and hangers-on as performers? This idea works very well at Renaissance fairs in the USA.