h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Recent events have left me with few reasons to be proud of Americans, and no reasons (that I can currently think of) to be proud of the British.

I'm proud to be a Cabinian.

Well, Kyaa, I suppose I can appreciate Dickens' exposes too a little.

But I suspect he was no more influential than Samuel Clemens. Both were enormously popular in their own age and still are but Dickens' didn't get rid of poor houses and Clemens didn't get rid of slavery. Clemens in fact spoke very disparagingly of the people of the Great Basin tending to reenforce the prejudices that were already current among the immigrants. To some extent, whether intended or not, Dickens might have reenforced the prejudices of his society as well.

Both writers shared a certain Victorian view of things that Burton did not and that's why I like him especially. He broke out of the mold and recognized that God wasn't necessarily an Englishman and civilization didn't necessarily culminate in Victorian splendor.

I think there's a direct relationship between the Victorian perspective and such things as Manifest Destiny that I find sort of abhorrant. Unfortunately, I don't think the Victorian perspective is entirely dead or obsolete in our own time either. It's just been retreaded a little, which makes it all the more difficult to identify by those who practice it.

Regarding writers of ethnicity other than Anglo-Saxon or whatever, I think I can speak from some small personal experience. You can use English and think in it a lot but still retain some of the stuff you got from your ancestors. You might not even remember your native tongue very well but the way you express yourself can betray who you are even in English.

I guess the question might be is English literature English literature? Or is it eclectic literatures articulated in English? Does that articulation form some sort of superliterature or is it still a mixture of independent voices?

Well, Lil, I had to look that one up since I haven't read it.

Apparently the author had the English version of her story translated into Lakota and then back again. I think that would show maybe a little.

Expressing Lakota equivalents of English thoughts in English is probably not the same thing as trying to express Lakota thoughts in English. What do you think?

I'll see if I can do an example of a Shoshone story translated literally and then freely into English. Maybe that'll make the issue a little more clear. Stay tuned. This gets tricky sometimes.

Clemens wrote disparagingly of anyone and everyone, with only two exceptions... his daughter, and his wife. He disparaged himself more than anyone else.

Since so much of his work has been banned from so many schools, perhaps the ban should be extended... nobody is allowed to read his work who has not exhibited a sense of humor.

There are situations where everyone loses. And those are the situations where everyone commits atrocities and everyone is wrong. To err is human, to be human is to err.

There are many groups in Ireland, it is summed up very well by Sellars and Yeatman in "1066", but my copy has gone awol - I hate it when that happens to books. It is the bit about the picts, now scots and living in bogs, if anyone else has a copy to hand.

The long and the short is that the the Picts, the Irish, the Scots, the Celts, the Danes, the Vikings, the Angles, the Saxons, the Normans, the Welsh, and every other strand of the mongrel race of Brits have been criss-crossing the Irish sea for over 1500 years, and taking each other's lives, land and livelihoods in the process.

There never was a time when some of them were not justified in hating the rest, if hate is the answer, and if justification is what you seek.

Northern Ireland / the North of Ireland currently has a majority of Protestants who are in the minority within Ireland as a whole. So which majority should prevail? The majority within the British Isles, the majority in the Island of Ireland, the majority in the Six Counties, or the majority in a particular town or a specific street?

The Protestants have been shot to pieces by the Catholics, and the Catholics have been shot to pieces by the Protestants, but these are the descendants of other, older, racial groups. And then there are, or rather there were, the Anglo-Irish in the South, the Ascendency. And each of these groups represents yet another strand, yet another set of opressors, yet another set of burning houses, yet annother wave of violence.

The long and the short is that Cromwell was wrong in the seventeeth century, and Elizabeth I was wrong in the sixteenth, (though Essex treated with Tyrone and was exectuted for it), but so were the Picts and the Scots living in bogs in the tenth and the ninth and the sixth. "The sins of the fathers are visted upon the children, even unto the fifth generation" is an observation, not a curse.

My personal opinion on Ireland is that what makes it different from the rest of the Islands of Great Britain is that it was not conquered by the Romans. "What have the Romans ever done for us?" - "They gave us the IRA". Thre is always a back-story, always a prior cause, always something you need to understand in order to understand.

I am not saying that any of this makes anything all right. What I am saying in fact is that it makes most of it all wrong. No-one is innocent, but all are - if this is the language you choose - victims.

You (anyone, whoever) are not responsible for my actions, but neither am I responsible for those of other people. And none of us are responsible for the actions of our ancestors. It is up to us to deal the cards we are dealt. And each of us does so according to our lights.

This is what I mean when I say that Ireland is too complex, there are too many strands. It is impossible to say 'this is where it started' to say 'this group of people were innocent' to say 'if this person had acted differently' because everything in Ireland is a mesh of context wrapped in interconnection linked to a network of historical cause. It is a Greek Tragedy of a place, with no deus and no machina to hand around pardons and at the end of the play, and no prizes for the playwrites.

Ben

Well said. *applauds*

yeah!

Interesting take on the situation, Ben.

I'd never thought of associating it with some sort of Panathenaic Festival metaphor. Makes it all the more intractable doesn't it? A little more trivial too I think.

Quite frankly it doesn't matter to me what you accept responsibility for. That's between you and your conscience and I leave you to it. I don't think your historical sources are very reliable however, but that's another issue.

Glad we could have this chat. Maybe we'll find common ground some other time.

I don't think it is trivial at all, but there are too many wrongs and too many wronged in Ireland for any one group to be singled out as the offended, or the offender.

k - with one side of the family that are Irish Catholics living deep in bandit country. Visit them in a car with GB plates at your peril.

Asteroid Lil:

I have a copy, which I've read and enjoyed several times. Since the last time I read it, I came across a commentary which compared Hill with Ayn Rand , and said that her book was so heavily biased that it was misleading. I was disappointed to read this, but have no idea if the criticism is valid. You wouldn't have any light to shed on this would you, Lil?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

We British are a cocktail of many races and cultures, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, French and Viking, to name but a few. I think I'm most proud of our language, which offers so many synonyms for most things that you can choose the one whose nuances best fit your intended meaning. And this strength comes from our language being not so much ours as a composite of everyone else's. Hmmm....

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

*back after chores and eating and looking for her copy of the book*

I would never have compared it to anything else, this book, and I am unable to answer as to how it could be misleading because I have no knowledge outside of this book, of what Lakotah life was like before the Europeans came. Misleading??

And as it happens, I've never read anything by Ayn Rand. Don't know why.

As regards its language, Hanta Yo, the English shimmers. The tense tends to shift in a way that tells you time is treated differently in the original language. This way of speaking struck me quite hard when I first read the book thirty years ago; picking it up again and reading the first few pages, I find that I take it more in stride.

The book is one of my lifetime favorites and I paid a bunch to get this hardback copy, cos it's out of print. There is a picture of her Sioux collaborator on the inside jacket, a man named Chunksa Yuha. 'Collaborator' is the word used. Not quite co-author, but more than translator. Hill could never have written like this herself.

A translator can make or break a book. Look how many translations there are of Homer, and how different they are!

Ben, might I say that, having read through this thread, I admire greatly your mental accuity. You have the gift of honing an argument down to a pointy reckoning.

Might I add my reasons for my pride in being British ?

(i) Britain is the nurturer of the best comedy in the World: The Great God of Irony suckles at Britain's teat;

(ii) We value human life - despite our President's drive to unite us with Neo-Conservatism, the people of Britain will always question, and make their feelings known;

(iii) What other Nation could have invented Tiffin ?

(iv) Even when our sportmen and sportswomen lose (as they invariably do) we have the good grace to blame everything else but them.

(v) Our cars may be junk, but we pioneered the use of exciting names for them;

(vi) Our Soccer Hooligans are renowned across the Globe for their fervour;

(vii) Jeremy Paxman and Lauren Taylor.

Ben, do call by if you happen to be passing Gedditon. I still seek an heir y'know.

P.

So long as there are no moles involved, Perry!

Gadzooks ! Don't forget, Young Lady, a mole in the hand is worth two in the bush !

Reasons I am proud to be British:

(1) The BBC
(2) It's the best place to go out for a drink in the world
(3) The NHS
(4) The *incredibly* civilised way we gave up our empire (cf. the French in Algeria)
(5) George Orwell
(6) Oliver Cromwell
(6) What other country would hold the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures?

World history in a nutshell, Ben. Far from being trivial, in my opinion it adds a human dimension to the conventional victim-perpetrator systems of thought.
It is an outlook that can be quite galling for personal vanities and interests though.
But i foresee that it will be this outlook, that will be increasingly substantiated the more broken bones and arrowtips get dug out of the ground on all continents.

Here's the story I promised, Lil. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/F108445?thread=270013 While Shoshone is a good deal different from Lakota, maybe like Arabic is different from English, it might illustrate a little why you assertion about a translator making or breaking something is very true. But it also should illustrate why what Hill and her collaborator supposedly accomplished might be a little more difficult than most people might realize. Imagine getting the English into the Lakota and then back again. What would you have? Would it be Lakota or English in spirit? And just how could it represent in any respect what the Lakota were like before contact with English speakers, or even French for that matter? Whether or not Hill had an agenda is another matter. There seems to be some considerable friction right now among the Lakota about traditional, unsullied by whites things. It's almost racist in tone sometimes, which probably is what Delicia is referring to in a way. Of course the Lakota are among the very few nations on earth who can legitimately claim to have defeated the United States in war and forced them to make a treaty. So they are maybe a little more sensitive about issues of victim/oppressor or whatever. When you can use the oppressor's own laws to indict him, it's kind of hard for him to dodge with general reflections on the mobility of human populations. I think arrowheads and such have already been found all over the world and many indigenous people are still very much alive, if not thriving, on the more or less invisible fringes of the dominant civilization. I guess you just have to look around a little bit more to see them.

If anyone is interested, here's a couple of links more or less illustrating one of the current disputes going on among the Lakota right now respecting traditional ceremonies and who gets to participate.

http://indiancountry.com/article/1051280913

And the rebuttal,

http://indiancountry.com/article/1051281656

One of the things going on here is a struggle between those who would speak for the Lakota Nation and those who advocate the right of the tiyospaye or extended family or clan to decide who speaks for who and who is recognized as a relative.

Some people here might have encountered a similar debate before in maybe a different context. For example, who are the Irish and just as importantly if not more importantly, who speaks for the Irish?

I've noticed that traditionally some British have assumed they can speak for people who aren't British. This ordering of the universe to suit an agenda that maybe the universe isn't inclined to exhibit otherwise is one of the reasons I think that these issues get extremely complicated almost to the point of being reduced to logical absurdities or trivial pursuits.

I wish some people would mind their own business.

I'm told by my Canadian acquaintenances here that the British were very much better about honoring treaties than the Americans. I'm not sure that's true but if keeping your word is something British people admire in general and practice diligently, that would be an admirable trait I think.

I've got a list of my own now.

1. the NHS
2. The national gallery
3. the BBC, esp radio four
4 The fact that it is still possible to go through higher education if you don't have rich parents, (anyone who wants to disagree, can meet me outside with my bank statements)