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Trafalgar
We are celebrating Trafalagar. Well, I'm not, but the British nation is. And what I want to know is why?
Two hundred years ago the British fleet under Horatio Nelson smashed the French and Spanish fleet. I guess the long term effect was that Britannia ruled the waves without serious challenge for the next century and a bit.
But the British Empire has gone now. The Royal Navy is a geopolitical irrelevance. The French and Spanish are our partners in a Europe where war between member states is all but unthinkable. The world of Tralalgar has disappeared. The work that Trafalgar accomplished has been undone.
And lets not forget that Tralalgar was a battle not a football match. Something like 7000 people were killed. We're doing this tribal dance of ours on a whole bunch of graves.
So what's left? The memory of a time when we were briefly "top nation"? Hooray.
"A British tar is a soaring soul,
As free as a mountain bird,
His energetic fist should be ready to resist
A dictatorial word."
Et cetera....
And now lets get over ourselves and move on.
Two hundred years ago the British fleet under Horatio Nelson smashed the French and Spanish fleet. I guess the long term effect was that Britannia ruled the waves without serious challenge for the next century and a bit.
But the British Empire has gone now. The Royal Navy is a geopolitical irrelevance. The French and Spanish are our partners in a Europe where war between member states is all but unthinkable. The world of Tralalgar has disappeared. The work that Trafalgar accomplished has been undone.
And lets not forget that Tralalgar was a battle not a football match. Something like 7000 people were killed. We're doing this tribal dance of ours on a whole bunch of graves.
So what's left? The memory of a time when we were briefly "top nation"? Hooray.
"A British tar is a soaring soul,
As free as a mountain bird,
His energetic fist should be ready to resist
A dictatorial word."
Et cetera....
And now lets get over ourselves and move on.
Ah, Holidays...
Germany's big memories have all but been erased after the horrors of the last century, so "THE" big holiday is the re-unification. Not so very much celebrated by the Germans itself, after 10 years of deep economic crisis.
And Italy..well, Italy has two national holidays, a right wing one and a left wing one. Both stemming from the end of WWII, one celebrates the liberation of Italy by the resistance, mostly communist. The other holiday refers to the first elections after the war, where under not really clear circumstances the right wing won against the left/communist fraction, and established a "democratic" government. So, every year, there is one public holiday with all the red and green and rainbow coloured flags, and another one with the, ehm, conservative ones. That's Italy.. everybody gets his or her share, and in the end the decisions are made by other people anyway.
Re: Ah, Holidays...
I love your account of what happens in Italy.....
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Horatio Nelson is a romantic figure to someone who has only seen the movies (he looked like Laurence Olivier, right?) and read history. You certainly put it in proper (and funny) perspective.
So many major holidays are the result of one kind of war or another. We have one coming up - July 4th.
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Nelson was a great military commander and, as military commanders go, an admirable person. And the affair with Emma Hamilton is worth a ripped bodice or two.
It's just this junketing over a battle I object to.
The Queen has been "reviewing the fleet" this morning. I wonder how she rates it out of 10?
"I loved the aircraft carriers, but the battleships just didn't do it for me- and I'd have liked to see a whole lot more of the motor torpedo boats...."
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There are a few places along the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario (mentioned, of course, because I'm familiar with them) that, during the summer, still have the 'blessing of the fleet'. So every person with a seaworthy craft...rowboat to schooner, and sometimes even the Tall Ship that the Royal Canadian Naval Academy uses for training, is blessed by the local clergy. Not just the Catholic priests, but the rest of the clergy as well.
I think it's rather sweet.
Your comment about the Queen reviewing the fleet sort of made me think of that...what about the nuclear subs?
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They were probably being reviewed as well.
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(now I'm being silly...)
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But one still has hope...
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And hope.....
And hope.....
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Which makes me wonder. Is there a Trafalgar song?
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As folk guru Martin Carthy has pointed out, there are several stirring British songs about Napoleon Bonaparte but precious few about British military heroes of that era
Go figure.
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The Battle Hymn of the Republic comes awfully close (and I find it stirring at least), but doesn't really have the character of most war tunes. I think this is ultimately the expression of Puritan values--which are, to be anachronistic, somewhat Kantian (indeed Kant spends nearly his entire time justifying the particular beliefs of Lutheran Pietism)--that can't be rightly said to be possessed by "a people" or that cannot be brought out in others.
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The best British patriotic song- by a mile- is William Blake's Jerusalem, as set to music by Charles Parry. The National anthem- God Save The Queen- is a godawful dirge.
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Of course, a standard critique of Modernist composers is that it is merely a continuation of the Romantic cult of the artist-as-individual as opposed to the artist qua his ability to express cultural ideals.
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There ya go! Quiz Monday.
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