Just a 'snippet' of a mate's exhaustive and scholarly work on us.
As a “Scouser” I am biased. In all likelihood so are you one way or another. I have no intention of being “objective.” I do not believe there is any such condition. Take it or leave it on that basis. Doubtless I have missed some nuances and other important points. But I have yet to read anything anywhere that didn’t.
Those who wish to take a more academic line can start at this website:
http://www.liv.ac.ukSo there is good news and bad news.
The good news is that the so-called external offensive “adverse image” of us “Scousers” is de facto deliberately manufactured balderdash. The bad news is that the internal view, frequently made as defence, can too often be as misleading. All sensible people everywhere know this. Time to strike a sensible balance.
I came to this subject after years of working and travelling abroad when I finally came to settle in the city I love and in which I was born. No big deal, and a route followed by many others before and since. During preceding years I watched with some dismay as most of my worst cultural suspicions were realised one by one. But until I returned permanently I did not understand the full depth of the local or national condition. I still find it scarcely credible even though the worst anti- and pro- elements seem to be fading, perhaps through straightforward boredom or cultural weariness of the status quo. Plainly, returning every two or three months on business or pleasure did not provide the fullest understanding. It has been a sort of culture shock in reverse. Moreover the further I loosely researched the subject the more intriguing it became.
As always, facts and reality have proved infinitely more interesting than myths.
2. Relevant Quotations.
“……… Greek myth survived intact, in a better state than almost any other ancient world-system. The reasons for this are neither religious nor political, but cultural………The characters and incidents of myth were so multifarious that they were not so much lateral to life as the continuum of life itself………This richness affected not only popular culture, spawning a crop of old wives’ tales and customs to rival those of anywhere in the world; it dominated ‘high’ artistic endeavour of every kind………By the time Aeschylus, Exekias, Homer, Phidias, Plato, Praxiteles, Sappho, Theocritus and a hundred others had had their various ways with Greek myth, its survival needed no further reliance on belief in the Olympian gods or on civic ceremonial – and it was also invasion-proof………”
KENNETH McLEISH – Editor’s Introduction, “The Greek Myths,” (Penguin Books) 1955.
“In short, our minds seem to be measured by countries when we are men, as they are by places, when we are children, and until something happens to disentangle us from prejudice, we serve under it without perceiving it.”
TOM PAINE – “The Crisis, Number VIII” February 26, 1780.
“Liverpool is the pool of life.”
CARL GUSTAV JUNG.
“I have always loved the great city of Liverpool.”
JOHN MASEFIELD, Poet Laureate.
“In the evening, especially when the sailors are gathered in great numbers, these streets present a most singular spectacle, the entire population of the vicinity being seemingly turned into them. Hand-organs, fiddles and cymbals, plied by strolling musicians, mix with the songs of seamen, the babble of women and children and the whining of beggars. From the various boarding houses………..proceeds the noise of revelry and dancing.”
HERMAN MELVILLE (visiting Liverpool, 1839).
“And this is England?……….But where are the old Abbeys, and the York Minsters, and the Lord Mayors, and coronations, and the may-poles, and fox hunters, and Derby races, and the dukes and duchesses, and the Count d’Orsays, which, from all of my reading, I had been in the habit of associating with England. Not the most distant glimpse of them was to be seen………….”
HERMAN MELVILLE, “Redburn” (Richard Bentley, 1849).
“My own view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”
BERTRAND RUSSELL, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” Chapter 2. (Unwin Books, 1957).
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and heartstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, First inaugural address, 4th March 1861.
3. Genesis.
Myths can have a powerful cultural rôle and affect. No culture is immune. The central question is what and whom you choose to believe.
It also depends how seriously you take all this English regional nonsense. Which is not the same thing as different national cultures, languages, and therefore clearer self-identity, of the Scotch, Welsh and Irish. Most European countries still have a strong outline of former city-states but few of them except the worst of Italy and Catalonia endure the kind of chauvinist regional civic claptrap and metropolis centred lunacy that puffs up contemporary English culture.
If you are one of those self-deceptive loons let’s get this straight: I’m here to set YOU straight. Which requires a short history account to get things in perspective, otherwise you will end up in one of two camps of the absurd. In the first camp you become a sickly-sweet self-deluded sentimentalist about all things “Scouse.” In the other you end up hating anything to do with the city while hurling all the asinine generalities you can lay your tongue to, courtesy of propaganda sheets like the Daily Telegraph or the Sun or the equal tabloid horrors of Sky TV, or the kind of paranoia you find prevalent in lower middle class mortgaged-to-the-hilt suburbia, or expatriates who miscalculate self-improvement as denigration of ones own roots.
I will avoid too the kind of gushing narcissistic nonsense you get from assorted Tykes, Cockneys, “Home” Counties deadbeats, Geordies, Brummies, Mancs, East Anglians, various Yokels and Wools, Manxmen, Lancastrians and who-knows-who-all-else intent on letting you know that where they live is better than anywhere else, but especially where YOU live. For instance who can forget the mortifyingly comic behaviour of supposedly adult Yorkshiremen of yore who made serious efforts to drag heavily pregnant wives across the county border to ensure their new-born qualified to play cricket for Yorkshire? Fortunately such prescriptive and essentially racist actions are now illegal, but only comparatively recently.
England is part of a small island off the coast of Europe, and up to its overpopulated neck in national, metropolitan and regional absurdity. Enough is enough.
To illustrate: Some years ago at Manchester Airport I waited to deplane from a New World exploit. At the head of the queue were two blowhard Mancunians making their origins obvious. Both smelled woefully of alcohol even at a distance. Disgusting double chins wobbled as horribly as unsteady legs. They wore disgusting baggy floral shirts. Disgusting obese stomachs rolled in layers over the top of disgusting baggy Bermuda shorts. Disgusting black socks and scuffed white training “shoes” completed the kind of now-standard Brit Slob ensemble stolen from the worst of Americana. They were sunburned to hell and back, wizened prunes with all the signs of future skin cancer, and referred to this as their “tan.” They looked and sounded as though somehow they got back to England from Benidorm via North America.
While we awaited the opening of the airplane door one of them said loudly with humourless vehemence, “Ahv always sed Manchistir is an independernt sovrin stirt an shud be reckugnahzed as such.” Immediately, an unidentified public school type voice said, “And you, I suppose,” – there was a clear pause as presumably the proclaimer was looked slowly up and down – ”are the minister for finance?”
Tired transatlantic passengers debarked with broad, satisfied smiles as they ducked quickly through the obscene reek of alcohol and body odour left hanging in the air by the two drunks. Yahoo chauvinism was temporarily vanquished by its most deadly enemy – satire. Would that we had more of it.
You probably have a similar story of your own but in a different setting and with a different accent. ‘Twas ever thus.
4. What To Avoid.
And so we try to define a “Scouser.” As if.
No, not all that tedious aren’t-we-all-lovable-naturally-warm-comedians-with-family-values, and its opposite, hostile hubcaps-and-shoplifting-malarkey, the sort tiresomely parodied by the likes of Harry Enfield. Both tiresome because repetition is intrinsically boring. We want the REAL thing, the so-called authentic character.
Which as usual has little to do with stereotypes such as the hard Scouser who died and had “Who’re YEW lookin’ at?” carved on his headstone. Or the Norris Green catholic who went into a confessional beneath the instructive sign “Eight items or less.” We’ve heard all that mundane stuff before. Hell, we even started it because we needed something to do while the so-called recession wore off. Wools and other strangers just took it seriously while we were laughing at adversity. So let’s give that pantomime a rest for a while. After all we have been appointed European Capital of Culture for 2008. You don’t win that kind of thing merely because the prime minister’s wife comes from the tepid boredom of a bank-owned Barratt semi-detached house in suburban Crosby or Wirral, or Debtors’ Retreat as they are both known locally. If you want character and real culture, antiseptic suburbs are absolutely the last place to look.
I mean, for instance, what did the dead hand of suburban Wirral (the WIRRAL!) ever produce apart from second-rate IT salesmen, self-righteous tight-arsed Suits, shipping clerks, spivs, bookkeepers and some Mersey Tunnel revenue? No wonder the Vikings landed there, got to Bromborough and said, “Screw this. Let’s just massacre a few locals and get off sharpish.” Which they did, leaving it, according to local records, to horse thieves and gypsies. It hasn’t changed much, except now the horse thieves and gypsies wear suits, shell and otherwise. Prior to that the Romans waited for the Dee to silt up and then did one as soon as their sandals could get on the roads they had made to help conquer the thirty Celtic kingdoms they found throughout England. No, there’s no point to the Wirral, none at all. Quite rightly we don’t want them and neither does Cheshire. It should be cut off south of Runcorn, towed out to sea and sunk by a salvo of missiles.
Natives of Wirral will only be allowed membership if they have documentary proof they were never a part of that comic reactionary lower middle-class twin-set-and-pearls 80s psychosis known as Wirral Out Of Merseyside. Do not think I exaggerate their behaviour. At one point there was even – I kid you not – a Hoylake Out Of Wirral move. The further West you go on that odd peninsula the more suburban weird they get.
No, what we need is old “Scotty” Road firing on all cylinders, a pub on every corner and a yarn, a comedian, a song and a banjo in every bar. It really was like that many years ago. Scotty Road has long since disappeared. So has Wavertree Road. So has………well, insert your own nomination. Now you’re lucky to keep your eardrums intact against a level of decibels blasting from a CD of the biblical assault on Jericho – all of it as background to some goddamn kitsch city centre theme bar peopled by greasy, spike-haired zombies on haha sherbet, or practising the faintly disgusting lower middle class habit of drinking straight from a bottle. A city pub crowd these days looks like a herd of hedgehogs on heat.