Let’s declare independence from Britain each and every year on this day

 July 4, 2022

Let’s declare independence from Britain each and every year on the Fourth of July. Independence Day. Surely one of the most important days in human history. 

Some might ask what we need to be independent of, actually. I see a lot of undue influence on our country from Britain, but I’ll start off with a light touch.  The Crown, for instance: someone made a Netflix show glorifying the private lives of the British “Royal Family” and we were expected to love it? For God’s sake, why? How have theybeen behaving lately? I make a point not to care about any one of them, but you can’t not hear some things, because the whole British “Royal Family” is a propaganda machine. How have they been treating Meghan Markle, who is black? With barely-veiled racism while trying to be clever: why they wanted to move to Canada, as if that’s any better. And a suspicious $3 million something something deposited into Prince Charles’ charity accounts - for what services or reason? None. And notice won’t you, that the British Broadcasting Service uses racist discourse about Africa and Africans whenever they want to make a point about something being “bad.” Britain is a remarkably unfree country…

And it should have no impact on us in America. 

How shall we declare independence from Britain, this year?

You know, back in the day, we used to make one of the local lawyers get up on the bandstand on Independence Day and try to read out loud the Declaration of Independence, each year. Poor guy. But a great tradition. 

How shall we declare independence from Britain this year?

I’m not insensitive to the issue of China and other Great Big Geopolitical Issues Of Our Day. But the interesting and useful thing about the conflict between Free China (Taiwan) and Communist China is that when you leave aside the conflict about politics as war and the creation of constitutions, the deeper and bigger truth is that it is a conflict about the politics of language. 

In Communist China they gathered a bunch of minds together to modernize the Chinese language. For technological, not humanistic purposes. But in Free China (Taiwan) they used the language to modernize the Chinese mind. And that is why Communist China remains mired in a low level of literacy and education to this day. 

This proposal is not about China but we are allowed to learn from other cultures. The best way to be a Buddhist as a Christian in the West, for example, is to appreciate deeply what is Buddhist about Christianity. 

From a linguistic perspective, American English and British English are already distinct language dialects. But why should we hold to a rotten status quo where we look to British English for ethos? With its marked lack of rhythm, atonal sense of pitch, and sycophantic servility to the “Received Pronunciation” propagated by the British Crown and the last remnants of feudalism - face it, it is their last grasp on power over the Anglophone world. The last gasp of a dying ethos, that needs to die for democracy to live and educate it. 

Have you ever noticed that for apparently no reason at all, someone speaking in a British accent is given more credibility right off the bat than they really deserve? Like the British accent “makes you smart?” But when you listen to the words they are speaking, there is “not much there?”  That’s the problem.

Who and what has Britain produced in the past two hundred and fifty years or so of any note to history? What have they these days that makes them worthy of any unjustified authority because of their accent and pattern of speech?

In general, this normative hierarchy for speech patterns is anti-democratic and obscures the real ideas communicated by speech. All I hear in this ethos preference for British “RP” (“Received Pronunciation”) is sycophants to the queen. 

We should declare independence from Britain every year on the Fourth of July. It’s one of our great American traditions. This year let’s declare independence from British norms of speech.