This year's Empire:
"These Americans represent the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go"
Harold MacMillan 1943
Dear sweet stodgy old Harold MacMillan, what did they call him when he was
summoned to the Palace to save the U.K. from Anthony Eden's naive', unilateral, and ill advised attack on Egypt in 1956?
"SuperMac" as I recall.
What a saphead...poor dim bastard.
Gotta hand it to Harold though, he became Prime Minister proclaimed "you have
never had it so good" and then sat blithely unaware that his cabinet was
equally divided between fixers, pervs, and narcs for the KGB.
No wonder J.F.K. treated him like a crazy old Uncle...naivete' was never an
attribute of even the dumbest Kennedy. The Late President could see what
deleterious effects two hundred years of empire building had wrought in Great
Britain. Chiefly bringing to power a particularly helpless sort of slack
melonhead covered with a thick layer of baffled nostalgia ergo the Right Honorable Mister MacMillan.
Used to a system composed of global imperial actors embattled wartime Brits were hard-wired to look for a companionable Empire on the make...for some reason they decided the U.S.A. was destined to be the next big planetary real estate mogul.
George Orwell observed that there was something ineffable about serious empire building as it seemed to bring more and more third rate personalities into politics. Hence a nation that once boasted a Disraeli as Prime Minister was soon reduced by a mere seventy years of empire to the boneheaded likes of Neville Chamberlain as His Majesty's Chief Minister.
Which brings us to today's screed, that word "empire" is now being gleefully
whispered by the likes of Dinesh D'Souza and other sleek snitches in the
punditariat. The National Review is openly shilling for an english speaking alliance (the U.S. Great Britain and-and yes Australia!) to keep the global peace. Yer garden variety suburban liberals will look at the current cover of the NR and shudder in despair. I prefer to see this as prima facie evidence of how quickly the radical right starts rubbing it's anglo-saxon supremacy fetish and murmuring supplications to the caucasian power god when things get dicey.
So the words of the Former Prime Minister and other infernal British Universal overseers are slowly coming back into vogue...and there is nothing we can do so long as the incense is burning before the lost temple of Cecil Rhodes.
Cuz' once we've smashed Iraq it's on to Teheran and Damascus to repeat a wave
of conquest that was old hat when Vespasian burnt the Temple.
Last year these all chickenhawk jack offs wanted to do was "destroy terrorism" and retire to their think tanks to watch the election returns. But Bush's polls faltered last summer and so thus his year they've moved on conquering the whole wide world and
turning it into a laboratory for the Cato Institute.
But somehow it's become hip to be an imperialist now...as long as someone
else's kids do the dying.
The sad thing is, when all is said and done when the U.S. is bankrupt, our
alliances in shambles, when we've been beaten down, and other nation states
have reared their ugly heads...when it all goes to smash doubtless someone as foolish vain and safely conservative as Harold MacMillan will be in the White House.
How old will Neil Bush be in 2016?