There'll Always be an England

"Garden sheds, sloe gin and pickled walnuts," itemizes one Richard Bos, otherwise unknown to me, writing to Michael Quinon and quoted in Quinon's weekly words newsletter.  "The English do love their traditionality," Bos continues; "perhaps they love their traditionality even more than their traditions.”

Hello Again...

My friend Joel reports that Catholics may soon be a majority in England for the first time since the Reformation, what with all that immigration (I assume he means the Central Europeans, not the Middle Easterners).

Anyway, it delights me to think of all those Jesuit priests crawling out of their hidy holes in the mansions of great aristos, blinking and bewildered before the TV cameras, and the first daylight in 350 years.

Remembering Salvatore

Yesterday I linked (via Michael Froomkin) to this wonderful story about the long-forgotten time when France thought it a cool idea to merge with the United Kingdom. It prrompted my memory of another such episode, almost equally bizarre. Does anyone remember Salvatore Giuliano, the the bandit king of Sicily (as I suspect some newspaper called him) who spread a bit of hope and a fair amount of misery around Sicily just after World War II? He’s a case study of what Eric Hobsbarm anatomized in his superb contextualized study, Bandits (although Giuliano does not appear in the index).

Giuliano seems to fit the classic bandit model pretty well—decentralized peasant population, exploitative and inefficient government, superstition, bitterness, apocalyptic dreams. I first learned about him from Eleanor Clark’s Rome and a Villa, one of the more successful entries in the crowded field of Italian travel books. There is also apparently a movie (here is an enthusiastic review), although I never saw it.

Anyway, among Giuliano’s many wild ideas was the notion that Sicily should merge with the United States. He wrote a friendly letter to Harry Truman (sovereign to sovereign?) exploring the possibility. I don't remember that he got an answer ("President Truman has read your letter with great interest...") It takes a bit of imagination to remember back to the time when people in other countries wanted to join up wholesale with the Anglo-American world—instead, I guess, of just doing it retail, as has become the pattern.

Soon enough, Giuliano came to be a nuisance to what passed for a government in rural Sicily—the Mafia—and they squashed him like a bug. And no, he is not the grandfather of the Mayor of New York—“o” (singular) instead of “i” plural.