Bill Hicks and the War of Independence

July 7th – Have you gotten over the American War of Independence yet? I have, for the most part, but there’s still a couple things that rankle. Take, for instance, the central reason it started.

Toffs in Britain, the self-styled ruling elite have never got enough of anything, y’know? It’s insufficient, you see, to have only six homes dotted about the world (you can only live in one at a time but, WTH) and pay £6,000 per gentleman’s suit (when you could pay £12,000) and £2,000 for shoes (when you could pay £5,000) have the food of your choice served and delivered to your table wherever you are and no matter how inconvenient it is for all concerned (heaven forbid you should be inconvenienced). Where it all went pear-shaped in 1775 was that familiar friend of 2008, international catastrophe brought about by greedy fuckers and has a clear resonance with recent events: I paraphrase.

In 1775 the Brits were waging wars in various places, grabbing colonies, grabbing commodities, fucking over the population with the militaristic panache that was the hallmark of our diplomacy back then, either that or buying them out with cheap whisky and beads. We wanted their gold, timber, shipping ports, precious stones, forced labour and land; we didn’t want their culture, heritage, folk stories, population or any of that Johnny Foreigner muck they call local food. By waging these wars it was a win-win situation as we manufactured the arms used to wipe out these foreigners and their infrastructure then charged them to rebuild it with our people (because the majority of their labour force had been shipped abroad as slaves…or shot). But this waging wars thing was an expensive exercise to get involved in and, although the government paid the money to the arms manufacturers (their friends and, in many cases, themselves) still it wasn’t enough (is it ever) and so they hit on the idea of taxing the colony…(this is the same colony they – with the help of the Dutch, French and Germans –  pillaged,  systematically destroying the country, it’s indigenous peoples and wild animal species reducing it to just another London borough)…taxing the colony demanding that the cost of the hostilities be paid for…but not by them of course. The colonists basically said;

“You go fuck yourself. We pay enough to what are, ostensibly, absentee landlords”

(shades of Scotland and Ireland here, methinks) and, in their arrogance, the Brits said;

“Righto, you scallywags, we’ll just have to some over their and give you a sound thrashing”

It’s what we’d done so well up to that point. Like the school bully we’d picked a fight with the wimp in the playground in order to look big, all the time trying to play the injured partner role…go on YouTube and type in Bill Hicks – Pick Up The Gun he says it so much more eloquently than I ever could – we lost a man of rare talent and insight when he died…far too early… And that’s it, in honesty. But for the greedy, senseless, chinless, idle, in-bred, self-righteous, arrogant, elitist wastrels and their insatiable appetite for more (no matter what it is or whether they need it, just MORE) but for them, Bill Hicks could have been one of us, like Ali McBeal…

Didn’t see that one coming did you?

I know, I know, how can you possibly put that TV sitcom alongside arguably the finest male comic (grouped with George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen) that has come from our former colony?

Well, you see, I thought that, as a piece of slick U.S. TV work it’s up there with the very best and, yes, genuinely funny at times, a difficult trick for a US sit-com to pull off. What they managed to do was soften the zaniness of Marty Feldman and Monty Python, Americanise it and sell it back. Slammed by the US feminist movement when it was aired what it really did do was provide a clear lead for the production values that have been built on in countless other classic sit-coms both from the States and in the UK. The cutting, the characterisation, the set pieces and use of popular music to emphasise a point or emotion, like using Vonda Shepard, who was born on this day in 1963, for the dénouement at the close of many episodes. All clever stuff done in a country that should still have belonged to the Motherland but for our full set of greedy, senseless, chinless, idle, in-bred, self-righteous, arrogant, elitist wastrels…