I could almost hear the howls from Davos, and I was only 150 miles away. Kushner’s plans for a new Gaza-Riviera almost had me howling too—70,000 dead and this bum is thinking of real estate opportunities—but nothing compared to the screams from fat cats after Trump proposed to replace the useless UN. It was even better earlier. Last Tuesday evening I watched my Alpine TV as the great warrior performed “lukatmi,” the hardest and most lethal of martial arts, for close to three hours. Yes, I do mean The Donald’s press conference, when he outdid all samurai in valor, bravery, fearlessness, and courage. So much so, he has leftwing Americans dumbfounded and open-mouthed, and many Brits seething with anger. I read two conservative British newspapers, and both were hooting with outrage, but I will get to the Brits in a moment.
I also noticed that The Donald has tamed the White House Correspondent clique, in the past an extremely demanding lefty group that took itself far more seriously than any president, with a ghastly old hag in the front row showing off with provocative attacks at the expense of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. Trump has trimmed the gang down to size, with mostly unknowns asking polite questions.
But back to the Brits, and why they dislike Yankee-doodle-dandies. The kindest words written by a right-wing columnist described The Donald’s “lukatmi” exhibition of martial prowess as “having fallen into a Caligulan psychosis.” It may sound knowledgeable and smarty-pants, but I detect British envy surfacing like a U-boat about to surrender after it has unsuccessfully launched its torpedoes. The second columnist simply wrote that the great lukatmi artist “is no longer compos mentis.” But my favorite was the one that brought in Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, not the Hollywood one: “Cleopatra died 2,000 years ago, but the Great Pyramid was built more than 2,000 years before her by Khufu… so putting that into perspective, Trump’s shenanigans are a mere bump in the road.”
Boy, that was a good one—Cleo, Khufu, pyramids, The Donald. What he forgot to mention was the fact that Hollywood’s Cleo, Liz Taylor, married eight times, whereas the real Cleo was Mark Antony’s fifth wife at the time of her death. Oh well, a Hollywood win for a change. The next day brought on more abuse for the once rich little boy from Queens. Again, The Donald did not deserve it, especially after he correctly reminded the Davos crowd that they would all be speaking German if Uncle Sam had not entered the war. “A blaze-starved pyromaniac,” was the best a right-wing commentator could do. (I hate to think what the lefty British media is writing, with words I couldn’t possibly repeat in The American Conservative’s elegant pages.)
Never mind. Trump keeps them bemused but confused, and his unpredictability keeps everyone off balance. Telling home truths to European basket-cases does not a popular teller make. What I find most annoying, however, is British anti-Americanism, as prevalent among the bluebloods as it is with lesser folk in the media and entertainment world. Why doesn’t French or Italian anti-Americanism, of which there’s plenty, annoy me? Well, the Frogs hate everyone, but they were the first to help back in 1779, with Rochambeau and Lafayette and so on. The Italians had the largest and richest communist party of Europe after the war, and, with a little help from the Soviet kitty, their media preached anti-Yankee sermons for close to 50 years. That’s why the Brits stick out; unlike the Frogs who loathe everybody, or the Italians who were paid to hate Uncle Sam, Brits are simply envious of American success. I’ve seen it so much during the 45-odd years I lived in London, among good friends who did it unwittingly, as well as yellow-bellied lefty hacks who were and are as likely to resist an opportunity to denigrate Uncle Sam as they are to refuse a free meal or drink.
No matter two world wars won by Uncle Sam with the British bulldog taking all the credit, at least in their media, their movies, and during drunken evenings in grand country houses. Is it 1776, later on the surrender at Yorktown, or even the Treaty of Ghent in 1815? It can’t be Suez in 1956 or Grenada in 1983; no one’s this petty. Margaret Thatcher loved the good Uncle, and she never stopped praising his capitalist energies until the end of her life. She was a friend of mine and came to stay with me in Switzerland.
Here’s another commentator writing in a conservative newspaper about what’s wrong with Britain today: “We’ve been infected by American individualism. Marriage and birth are out of style, pews are empty, and people only watch TV. No nation can resist the power of America or the temptation of individualism.” I say it’s not a bad infection, but the pews are empty because the Church of England went woke a long time ago. As have successive so-called Conservative governments. The Brits are getting what they richly deserve.
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