https://www.ft.com/content/bd511177-f2a3-4787-937a-f67856e09c4e
"Into
Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on
a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a
character named “Senator Stuyvesant-Oglander”. Each and every drink has ice in
it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of
England’s great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an
illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing.
And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britain’s establishment was clear
back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldn’t
look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas.
If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in
trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for
their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does
not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US
Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future
will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the
dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its
four-word expression."
Via Wilco Roos, who wrote:
"This does explain a lot to me, the whole political posturing, the reckless
abandon of jumping of the Brexit cliff, the notion that trickle down economics
(proven not to work) does work in the UK, and all other crap going down in
England.
They only look to the US & confuse their country with it. That explains so much
that is otherwise just way too stupid and confused to be explainable…
I feel for the poor people in Britain, the road down the drain has just begon,
where it ends no one knows, and remember, you put those blithering idiots into
power and kept them there…"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
