Campaign for British Reparations: A Public Service Announcement
Not Saussure
04/04/2007
You know how Americans notoriously don't do irony? After all, their most reasonable conservative is on record as thinking
Young people (and many adults) often don't have the capacity to determine the difference between funny and unfunny so I think that we need to start teaching our youth about comedy in the schools. They need to learn that the number one rule of comedy is that a "joke" should be funny. They need to be taught the difference between laughing at and laughing with someone. And they should be taught to avoid satire, which only confuses people and saps the national will. I don't think, however, that we should teach young people how to be funny, because I don't think they are ready for that, so I propose that we fund Abstinence-Only comedy classes.
Well, some British bloggers, to whom I won't link because I like most of them most of the time, have become rather upset about an American campaign, www.britishreparations.org, which purports to be
a global network of citizens who have suffered injuries at the hands of the British Empire over the last five hundred years. We've banded together to ask the United Kingdom to compensate the world for all the damage they've done.
To further this end, this global network of citizens is circulating a petition containing the following modest proposal:
We, the undersigned citizens of the world, demand reparations payments of £31,960,000,000,000 from the British Monarchy and government of the United Kingdom. This money will compensate us for the profound injuries we have suffered over the last 500 years from British brutality, negligence, malevolence, crimes against humanity, and other heinous and atrocious forms of misrule. It is far from enough to make us whole, but a necessary first step in the long process of British coming to terms with its historical guilty and reconciling itself with global opinion and international law.
Should anyone require further and better particulars in support of this claim (amounting to about £4,600 for every living person on the planet), they are referred to a book, The Evil Empire — 101 Ways That England Ruined The World, of which number 99 is that we made Elton John a knight.
Should anyone require still further and still better particulars of the claim, they're advised to read an interview with the book's author, a Mr Steven A Grasse, that appears on the same site before taking it all too literally. Mr Grasse, by the way, is an advertising executive in his day job, and seems to know a thing or two about viral marketing, though being an American he's obviously not very good at irony;
Like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
