Poor Mojo's Almanac(k) Classics (2000-2011)
| HOME | FICTION | POETRY | SQUID | RANTS | archive | masthead |
Rant #5
(published Mid-year, 2000)
The Invention of the English
by David Erik Nelson

Oliver Cromwell never existed, William Shakespeare was a Maine ferrier who lived from 1857 to 1892 and never left the county in which he was born. Churchill was a concatenation of manipulated photos of WC Fields— news reels were montages of WC Fields out-takes, a French-Canadian voice actor & a Burbank janitor in chin-putty. Benjamin Disraeli was an alcoholic Hollywood soaps actor named James Levinson. Margaret Thatcher? A puppet constructed of terry cloth, angora and a cantaloupe.

There were no 13 original colonies, darjeerling tea was first genetically engineered from spinach and cloves in 1944 and the reason that the Sun never sets on the British Crown is that there is no British Crown for it to set upon.

"England" was invented in 1951 by Walt Disney himself, just a tiny element of the baroque, far-flung marketing strategy for Mary Poppins.

Think of that film. Imagine, then, that the protagonette was, let's say, a simple babysitter instead of the ever-so-quaint Edwardian nanny? Imagine, now, her male counterpart to be not a pip-pip-cheerio chimney sweep, but a roughnecked American garbage man. Imagine the charming, pinafored-and-knickered children to be whirlwind American hellions. It doesn't work, does it? No one loves the babysitter (unless I use "love" as a euphemism)— for she is too distant. No one loves the garbage man, for despite his utility, he is as course as burlap diapers. And our children— our children are not lovable little scamps; they are murders, beggars, monsters all, nothing more than an armed, vicious marketing demographic.

So Disney invented a new land, a civil land, and sculpted into our memories a great colonialist power, a power like an old and forgiving father, whose guidance we would crave— a provincial ole da' to frown on premarital sex and wink an eye at the beatings of wives, dogs and children.

"England" doesn't exist. It doesn't exist— DOES NOT EXIST!— I have been there, have motored back and forth across coordinates which any globe will indicate are the very heart of Piccadilly Circus and there is NOTHING THERE but listless, polluted waves and bloated marlin studded with oozing carbuncles. It is a place of imagination, nothing more.

"But oh," you say, "But oh, I have been there and it was every so pleasant." But, oh, you have been NOWHERE, you've been loaded onto an airplane and rendered senseless with designer psychotropics which catalyzed dreams of crossing the Atlantic (crossing the Atlantic, in an airplane, without refueling? The idea is laughable in the extreme, the fanciful product of deranged and drug-bedazzled minds) when really you were loaded into the back of Ryder vans, stacked like cord wood, a Buchenwald of limbs, hauled to the rolling greenery of West Virginia, and paraded around sound stages and giant diorama in your psychedelic stupor and told that you were traipsing through jolly old fuckall.

Absurd. All absurd.

Why do we believe in the myth of England? Because, like children, we believe what we are told. Water is transparent, and yet we believe that fog— quite clearly a blurring of the visual field— is caused by water. We are told that the Earth races about the Sun, although I can quite clearly feel the rock steadiness of the ground beneath my feet and observe the progress of the sun across the brave o'erhanging firmament. I am told that there are no Martians and so know it is true, despite the incessant chattering I hear buzzing along the inner wall of my skull when I eat crunchy foods, like pistachios and cereals.

And, for that matter, that venerable old Klansman (didn't know that, did you? That Walt Disney was, in fact, a Grand Basilisk SuperFund Exter 8 in the Klu Klux Klan, in addition to being a 23 level Swayback Freemason and a chair-holding member in the Zionist Occupational Government's Council of Tzedek— the only man EVER to simultaneously belong to all three groups, and at such a rank!) is not alive. He is not in cryosleep in rural Florida, or suburban Cali, or lying recumbent upon the dark side of our swollen Moon— he is dead, as dead as Elvis, as Hitler, as Kennedy, as James Taylor.

I know because I was there, I was a pallbearer at that timeless event, when the Klan and ZOG and the Mason's put aside their petty ideologies and joined together to mourn the loss of a man who, like a God, strode upon a cushion of air and rode the monetary deluge of children to victorious eternity. And, in the moment before we cast his corpse into the caldera of the grandest of crematory ovens, before we forcefully cast The Man Behind the Mouse into legend, when all clutched their hands to their eyes with holy dread so as not to witness the blinding fission of His master's TRANSFORMATION, at that moment, a moment in which, though surrounded by a panting throng of 80,000, I was utterly alone, I pulled off my four-fingered white gloves, reached up under the snout of my mask, and pulled down my blindfold. I looked upon the withered corpse, I touched him with my bare hands, and he was as cold in death as he was in life.

He was dead, and in the next moment, was cast into the magma, and became as much of an ethereal whiff as his beloved "England."

Share on Facebook
Tweet about this Piece

see other pieces by this author

Poor Mojo's Tip Jar:

The Next Rant piece (from Issue #6):

Brittany, We're Coming to Get You
by James P. Miller


The Last few Rant pieces (from Issues #4 thru #0):

Don't Let Them Kid You, It'll Be Back Next Year.
by Jim Oliver

Quite Rich
by Gordon Smith and Erik Garner Warren

Wit Inspirations Of The "Two-Year-Olds"
by Mark Twain

What I Really Want to See On Television
by Jim Therkalsen


Rant Archives

Contact Us

Copyright (c) 2000, 2004, David Erik Nelson, Fritz Swanson, Morgan Johnson

More Copyright Info