Poppies

Pardon my vast American ignorance, but what are the poppies supposed to represent? Is remembrance day like memorial day? How did it get associated with this particular flower? Perhaps recent immigrants just do not know this whole thing – and why is it an excuse to bash them? I find the person’s arguments to basically be a very thinly veiled excuse to rant about people of color and how they are debasing society.

As WWII gets further away from peoples’ experience, the poppy-wearing seems to get more prevalent. Much more so than in the early 60s, when it was satirically observed (I forget who by, Bernard Levin?) that the English religion was the worship of dead soldiers.
Any road, while she may be correct in her observation in the Edgware Road, which is a short-stay or plutocrat Arab (and their slaves) domain, there are other Muslim areas more populated by the familes of ex-soldiers from “Indian” army regiments where poppy-wearing was quite common this year, to my eyes.
In the case of non-“Indian” muslims (largely Turkish) it was less so, partly at least because they were on the other side in 14-18. That’s getting a bit nuanced for someone as batty as C Gould.

From Ms. Gould’s piece:
What Italian can live without Chianti? What Frenchman can live without wine? Germans have their beer, Russians their schnapps, and so forth.

Lol. This is very funny.

Chris, we must both read Melanie Phillips. let’s keep it quiet? Gould was immensely annoying me this week as I was reading Bertn Engelmann’s “In Hitler’s Germany” and her comparision of that time with London today is sickening. She does like her 1930s comparisons — here is her view on the Glazer takeover of Man U:

…the fury of the Manchester crowds over his purchase of the legendary Manchester United soccer team is a disturbing over-reaction that looks not unlike a Mosley Black Shirt rally in 1930s Cable Street

Anna – the poppy as a war memorial was invented by an American. There’s a nice article in the Telegraph here…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/11/11/ftpoppy11.xml

Respect is due for remembering the Captain Beefheart reference.

Lyrics:

‘I cry but I can’t buy
Your Veteran’s Day poppy
It don’t get me high
It can only make me cry
It can never grow another
Son like the one who warmed me my days
After rain and warmed my breath
My life’s blood
Screamin’ empty she crys
It don’t get me high
It can only make me cry
Your Veteran’s Day poppy.’

Better that ‘In Flander’s Field’s’ anyway, which is a bloody awful poem whichever way you look at it.

Are this woman and the American “people who say Merry Christmas are being rounded up and shot by democrats” cribbing each other’s essays? This rant reads like a search-and-replace job on Bill O’Reilly’s annual christmas persecution specials.

Do people really wear poppies in India or New Zealand or Australia or Canada?

They certainly do in Canada. Around 11/11, you see them all over in Canada.

So Chris, did you wear a poppy on Remembrance Day? And, either way, what were your reasons?

Hektor: I would say they (poppies) are even more prevalent in Canada than in the UK. This may be because the origin is a Canadian poem, or perhaps because of the complex national identity issues tied up in the “world” wars, particularly WW1. However, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other parts of the commonwealth do this to. Here it is organized by the legion … so may be correllated to how organized vetrans groups are in a particular country.

My poppy story:

I was in London for the Spurs-Arse game on Oct 29th, which is outside the “one week” period, but the poppy flowers were available, so I got one. The day of the game, two Spurs fans told me I shouldn’t have worn it because it’s Arse red.

I wonder if Everton and Man City fans feel the same way….

Hektor: Fair enough… I hadn’t meant to suggest that it would be done all over the commonwealth, only that I could think of other countries in it, that might (but I don’t know). Agree that for many it is unlikely. Only those who provided (and lost) large numbers of troops in WW1 have the obvious connections.

I know that it (the poppy drive) is a significant source of funds for the legion/vetrans groups here, anyway.

Hang on, she’s lying through her teeth. ” I took a long walk along Edgware Road” and got a cab back to Marble Arch. The Arab area only stretches up to the flyover at the tube stations, or a few yards past it. 500 yards tops. And it’s only a block or two, east to west from Edgware Road, too.
“along the miles of pavement I trawled ” my arse.

I can explain this bit. She lives in St Johns Wood, on the corner of it and Edgware Road (where that road begins after it stops being Maida Vale). That it’s not ‘densely Muslim’ (more Irish, if anything, at least at first) for about a mile south appears neither here nor there for her.

Keeping in mind that Washington D.C. has one of the worst taxi systems in the world, in part because most drivers can barely speak English and do not know the meaning of the words “cordial” or “polite”, especially where female passengers are concerned,

Washington, D.C., has one of the worst taxi systems in the world because it is denied basic homerule. The system is designed by Congress (to which Washington elects no voting representative) in order to facilitate the cheap and easy movement between the office of lobbyists and those of congressmen. If Washington were permitted to design its own taxi system, it would have a sensible one that allowed tourists and Washingtonians to use a taxi easily and cheaply without worrying about “zones” and such, but rather watching a meter like in every other city.

The idea of blaming immigrants for the absurdity of the DC hack system (as if the cabdrivers of other American cities are well-known for being native-born), when it fact is is the fault of all the native-born congressmen who insist on micromanaging the city, is laughable.

Oh my, I do think all you fellows have it mixed a bit — England, poppies, rememberance — what do they all have in common? Opium, of course! Or have we forgotten, 1830 England, the major drug-trafficking organization in the world! Growing opium in India, of which the East India Company shipped the produce into Canton, for further processing, thereby keeping the good fellows of China in a prolong pipe dream. I know, I know, Americans in Iraq are also trafficking in dreams. Dreams of liberty, dreams of freedom. Perhaps we could sell the Iraqis on the idea of wearing a red poppy on their hijab … over the right ear of course.

Jacob is correct that DC cabs have no meters, and that rates are set by “zones.” For locals who know the zone boundaries, this works well. It also makes sense. Trips within busy downtown areas are cheaper- and drivers don’t mind, because they don’t have to dead-head back downtown for their next fare. Trips to distant residential areas are relatively more expensive, because of the need to return downtown without a passenger. It’s a good system once you understand it. For out-of-towners, though, it’s confusing. You’re pretty much at the mercy of your driver. (Although fares from the airports are flat fee, no confusion there.)
The reason DC has no meters is not Congress. DC has a taxicab commission that has the power to impose meters. But the owner-drivers don’t want meters. Without meters, only the driver knows how much he’s making. With meters, fleets become possible. Corporate capital comes in, and independent owner-drivers are driven out.

There’s an interesting lesson here. Congress did bar meters up until 20 years ago. But in the mid-80’s Congress got out of the taxi business. Everyone thought meters were on the way. But by then an independent class of small business owner-drivers had developed political clout, and they have kept the meters out. The result? DC, unlike other cities its size, has no major cab companies, and drivers have remained independent.

The purple finger shows that you support the war on Iraq.

That’s what’s wrong with it.

I was in Plymouth around 11/11, a navy town, and only about a third of the people I saw in the streets was wearing a poppy. So much for that thesis.

anna in cairo,

After you’ve finished reading In Flanders Fields, you might try another poppy poem by way of antidote: Isaac Rosenberg’s Break of Day in the Trenches. It’s written from another place entirely.
Break of Day in the Trenches.

Wouldn’t it be great if the war memorials were based on the Beefheart lyric above rather than that rotten Flander’s Field crap? Then, instead of a poppy, we would all have to wear squids eating dough in a polyethylene bag on remembrance day. This would provide much needed comic relief in what is otherwise a rather sad and depressing occasion.

A good number of DC cabbies are homegrown residents. And they’re perfectly nondescript: neither as rude as New York cabbies nor so polite as London cabbies.

one prays the Livingstone initiative [to break the white male stranglehold on London cabs] will be approached with caution

She doesn’t get out much, does she? (In the sense of ‘out of London’.) I’d be surprised if there’s a single major city in Britain apart from London where the drivers of taxis and minicabs are overwhelmingly white.

And to pick up ray’s point, “The Knowledge” also looks less vital in this era of satnav systems.