Re: mystery solved

    Ah, John, the eye of the beholder & so on. And with my kind
    of vision, it’s the superficialities that count. I have not the
    slightest grasp of economics & only the most fleeting interest
    in history – even then only in anecdotal form.

    Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace (for one very brief moment,
    I believe, he was even heir to the Dukedom) & lived his entire
    rackety life in conditions of the greatest indulgence & privilege.
    His ‘frat boy’ days were spent in an officers’ mess playing polo.
    No college or intellectual background – rather the simple minded
    enthusiasms of the autodidact in an army tent when he was bored
    or (more often) hung over. He would never have made his way
    in politics but for the swathe already cut by his father &,
    in the event, produced one of the most spectacular series of disasters
    in English public life. But for 1940, that’s how he’d have been
    remembered, if remembered at all.

    Lincoln, I believe, killed more Americans than all the other ‘war’
    presidents put together. Not, apparently, to free black men & women,
    but for the sake of a particular system of states’ organisation.
    Charming. Throughout his career he was mocked as a hick lawyer making
    his way by crude populism & deals. And he had, of course, no verbal
    skills either. I needn’t remind anyone of the embarrassed silence
    at Gettysburg – after Seward’s (was it?) two hours of highly articulated
    thoughts.

    I wasn’t comparing them with Bush – simply reminding you that time
    has the most damnable way of reversing contemporary judgments.

    Your picture of him & his henchmen has the subtle complexity
    of those top-hatted caricatures you used to enjoy so much in Krokodil.
    People are all a bit more paradoxical & difficult than that, John.
    (Incidentally, there was a discussion recently on the Heming list
    about Ernie’s attitude to verbal obscenity. Someone mentioned
    the rarity of ‘merde’ & I thought I’d remembered ‘con’. I trust
    ‘neo-con’ isn’t some modern version of the same.)

    One personal reason for my sympathy – among the more obvious
    ones, such as our sharing the same GTB336 gene for militaro-fascism
    – is that he is, as I am, a dried-out drunk. I don’t claim this to be,
    for myself, any great thing. But there are surprisingly few of us.
    Rather less than 20% ever really make it. If, as seems to be the case,
    George did so with the help of the Lord ( as well as Laura),
    then I’d be rather inclined to accept his sincerity in the matter.
    I share your squeamishness about public invocations of God.
    But that just makes us as conventionally conformist as the Victorians
    used to be about sex. Tony Blair once nearly gave me a stroke
    by appearing with folded, supplicating hands above an article
    about his ‘prayer life’. That was before my conversion to his side,
    though. Before I realised he wasn’t what you call an ‘evil bastard’
    but rather something much closer to Bambi.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Sat Apr 19 03:13:13 2003