save your mad parade

When I was an undergrad, I took a course titled “Sociology of the Eighties.” At the beginning of the semester, the professor asked the class to tear out a sheet of notebook paper and anonymously write down our answers to the following question:

What would you call a family, led by a jobless woman with multiple children, which derives its livelihood and upkeep from the government?

The idea was to draw attention to popular attitudes and biases regarding entitlement programs for the poor. It was expected that everyone would answer “welfare family,” thus leading to an in-class discussion about the intricacies of class and poverty in America. I don’t know if I was the only person in the class who saw the forest for the trees, but I was the only one who tried to toss a curveball into program by answering “the British royal family” instead. The professor loved it, my having dropped a sly counter-example right into his lap to highlight his salient points.

I might not have any particular fondness (file under: dry understatement) for the Queen, or the concept of hereditary privilege in general, but I’ll hold back from tossing stones on this occasion because she and her brood of noble parasites aren’t as much an instrument of government policy as an overfunded tourist attraction and retrograde embodiment of British national pride. I, on the other hand, happen to live in a country where the non-figurehead chief executive is an over-privileged frat boy with a cornpone accent and a long history of failure. So who’s laughing at whom?

What I don’t get is the amount of local media attention Elizabeth Regina has been netting on her visit to this side of the Atlantic. Is it because of that blockbuster movie she was featured in a while back? (For those of you who missed it, it was like Spider-Man 3, but with better action sequences. The licensed Happy Meals for it weren’t as good, though; they tasted like the blood, sweat, and bitter tears of the working class.) I know it has been two-hundred-and-thirty years and we’ve since gotten back on friendly terms with the Brits, but wasn’t the point of the Revolution to wash our hands of all things royal?

Maybe it’s an amputee’s itch, given the nauseating rise of celebrity (used in the loosest possible manner) culture in recent years. Compared to the spectacle of crowds of demonstrators showing up to vicariously support both fairly unsympathetic sides of a celebrity child custody battle, lauding the state visit of the current scion of one of the more successful dynasties of extortionist warlords to rise of out the power vacuum caused by the fall of the western Roman Empire seems rather reasonable.

It was an interesting juxtaposition on this morning’s newscast, with the anchors chattering like Entertainment Tonight hosts over House Speaker Pelosi attending tonight’s white tie dinner in the Queen’s honor; the current impasse over the Iraq War being treated as a tiff between high powered personalities. On the scroll beneath the in-studio inanity ran this:

12 GIs, 1 British soldier, 118 Iraqis killed in Iraq on Sunday.

Priorities, priorities…. If only those poor souls had lived in a castle.

Sex Pistols – God Save the Queen (Demo Version) (from D.I.Y: Anarchy in the UK, 1993) – This earlier, rawer version of the song comes from the Dave Goodman sessions, released in the fall of 1977 as the Spunk bootleg LP. Note the difference in lyrics compared to the version included on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

The punkier installments of Rhino’s D.I.Y. series of compilations would provide the basis for the label’s later No Thanks box set. The D.I.Y. discs suffered from Rhino’s inability to license material from Sony/CBS, leading to the omission of such acts as The Pretenders, The Clash, and Elvis Costello, all of which would later make it on to the box set a decade later.

The Sex Pistols, represented on D.I.Y. by two tracks from the Goodman bootleg (back before the legal status of the Pistols’ back catalogue was sorted out, when unofficial releases were thick on the ground), refused to license material for No Thanks, for whatever arcane reasons. The more things change….

The Exploited – Royalty (from Punks Not Dead, 1981) – Dead? No. Devolved into a clichéd self-parody? Yes, indeed. You can feel the desperate grab for some of the ol’ Jubilee controversy magic, but by this stage punk rock offensiveness had become an expected part of the package…kind of like camera functionality in cellphones.