sixteen at the time of Suez (1956) - and at school on a small island colony serving as a staging point for that event - I heard and read much grandiloquence about British character and the gift of independence to an Empire then undergoing reformation as a nascent Commonwealth for a New Elizabethan Age while successive Home Governments carried out a savage repression of independence movements - most fiercely where that savagery could the more easily be swept undercover
and at home in Britain itself? The ongoing fabrication of a mythic tribalism : for the English component a hilarity and a perplexity of inheritance - of wandering lanes fashioned by wandering drunks who however befuddled knew their place within John Barleycorn's scheme of things - and who now all these years later must embrace yet more hypocrisy - that of Nu Labor out of neo-conservative back to basics - tinted with an all-things-green eye-wash for an only apparently meritocratic society - topped with the egregious conceit of monarchy : in truth a Ruritania of foolish aristo-titles for hire-purchase - titivating the unedifying net-curtain Nazism that is the norm in middle England - plus ça change etc
when on formal occasions Americans salute the flag by placing their right hands on their hearts they may also be securing their wallets - acknowledging a truth...self-evident that the business of America is business : that Capital - the gratification of appetitive taste - and lawn order - are all that matter to most - most anywhere - most anytime
here too - on high days and holidays - one old Briton expects to go on raising a small - even - number of fingers to any manifestation of civic or ethnic nationalism
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