I'm a European. Perhaps that's why I'm somewhat more touched by the flamboyant logorrhea of this latest pedantic outburst of a somewhat illiterate nitwit proclaiming doom and disaster looming, from hither side of the Atlantic, over yonder apparently not-so patriotic effete representatives of British, well, whatever risible company Mr. Pearce wishes to hang out in.
I can't quibble with his first paragraph. The second and third are a marvelous run-up to a breathtaking train wreck, far too glorious to scorn it with that unfortunate snip:
That dislike co-exists with a wide affection, among those who have travelled in that country, for so many Americans. The ones we met were kind, friendly, civil, good to know, yet they are the subjects of so much power held in such dreadful hands and seem most of the time so submissive to it. They recall Orwell's definition of England in the thirties as "a family with the wrong members in control". But his charge against the Baldwin people was weakness; anxiety at the American elite concerns an over-blown strength. Distaste for the United States is directed not only at what its politicians and military do, but, in part, at what the American state and society have become.
That nation is, for a start, absurdly militarised. It is a fearful thought that the US should hold nine times the total nuclear weapons reserve of all the other nuclear powers combined. Clearly, General Eisenhower's remarking, in his 1961 farewell address, of "a military-industrial complex" was the plain truth, and the truth has deepened across 46 years.
I could cut it short with a brief reminder of that wrong member in control in Downing Street, who -- currently amidst a rather amusing little scandal over old-fashioned corruption in the way of party donations received in exchange for peerage, speaking of twisting some more contradictory facts into this third millennium of advanced societies -- now looks back on no less than ten years, unmoved and unmovable in spite of his colossal responsibility in enabling precisely that which this poor, poor Pearce person finds so objectionable, namely waging a dangerous and utterly unnecessary war. I believe that wrong family member is to step down on his own terms, somewhere in June or so; I'll refrain from expounding on my connotations of a general-turned-dictator in some Southern European country, who also left the grand stage of mortality on his own terms, leaving the mess for his survivors to clear over the past thirty years. But I digress: the topic isn't war criminals tolerated by a feckless electorate too much caught up in self-inflicted excuses of "but if we don't vote for him... the nasty
Tories will have won!"
I won't digress even further by referring, for example, to the abominable role played by European governments, perhaps just as much infected with that outbreak of lack of principle and integrity, to not see evil, not hear evil, and not speak evil of the "extraordinary renditions" that right under their noses was breaking a host of international conventions and a bunch of national laws to boot. Until, of course, the scandal couldn't be denied anymore, and a weak European Parliamentary commission did the honors of exposing the shameless, gutless and dishonorable deeds of European governments, of which that wrong family member closer to poor, poor Mr. Pearce's home was an extraordinarily instrumental specimen for setting up that underground railroad of foreign spooks running schmucks out of daylight, and into the dungeons of states that didn't mind torturing a few poor souls extra on the side. What's a little brutishness among civilized friends, n'est-ce pas?
And I won't even less so distract with the wholesale murder of truth perpetrated in that very same benighted country, sighing under the whims of that reprehensible excuse for a member of the family of social democrats, to sell a war in lies so sleek and bold, that novelists undoubtedly will struggle for years ahead trying to surpass the new high mark of fiction.
But what really annoys the snot out of me is that that
moron Pearce didn't even pause to read back what he had just typed away in that smashing third paragraph of his. Either he's too illiterate to read the cleaned-up version handed back to him by the spell checker, or he's just as much in adoration of Tony "Big" Blur's swanky ways, to see through the holes in his conscience.
That nation is, for a start, absurdly militarised. It is a fearful thought that the US should hold nine times the total nuclear weapons reserve of all the other nuclear powers combined. Clearly, General Eisenhower's remarking, in his 1961 farewell address, of "a military-industrial complex" was the plain truth, and the truth has deepened across 46 years.
An idiot who can't distinguish a well-armed country from a militarized one (let alone spell "militarized" properly) should be brought before a Siberian tribunal and summarily shot.
Admittedly, his train wreck is tantalizingly well twisted. For example, he overlooked the twofer in that same bit: at the very moment that General Eisenhower pronounced his farewell address, the build-up of the US' nuclear arsenal was peaking. Today, we can sigh with relief that it's considerably shrunk. Yes, there was that other place on the other side of the Atlantic, some absurdly militarized superpower armed to the teeth with nuclear doomsday devices, but who's counting when there's a great exercise in hypocrisy in the making?
You know what, I'll leave it at that. Fewer things irritate me more than insignificant and hollow whines of a scoundrel denouncing barbaric foreign ways, while living at the expense of an opportunity to prove more useful in cleaning up his own pigsty. But darkly worried about the state of British presumptive fellow travelers on the path to progression we certainly should be.
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