Summum Bonum

We’ve come a long way since January 2009. The British press has also recovered from their love affair with Obama and have coined a new name for our illustrious president: President Pantywaist.

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, a post-modern panoply of lectures, sponsored by the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia, promises to be anything but boring during the weekend of October 4 and 5. Hitchens will be evangelizing for athiesm and Cardinal George Pell of Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, will be speaking on the emptiness of secularism and the humanizing nature of believing in God. Pell is a lion when he speaks and he is an intellectual heavy-weight, more than a match for Hitchens; Hitchens is a bright man who obsessed with God. He reminds me of Malcolm Muggeridge before his conversion which took a number of years to achieve. Hitchens’ anti-God protestations are so labored and so fulminating; he seems hounded to me like a man who has to keep defending his beliefs out loud in order to continue to convince himself.

I consider England my second home many weeks out of the year. I am a student of English culture, an admirer of its history and literature, and therefore sad at its loss of basic democratic and Western ideals. However, the British government’s latest deal with Libya for oil and the release of Lockerbie bomber is disgusting, beneath contempt, and will greatly weaken the already low esteem that US citizens in the know have for the UK. Given the consistent fatalism of the British public and the utter corruption of the British government from the top down, nothing will change the sleazy and appeasing political landscape of the UK, except some kind of conversion to reason. There is virtually no positive political will, in the sense of the affirmative, within its government. Gordon Brown is pathologically weak, is without even a vestige of integrity, and garners zero respect from any nation. And Britain’s people seem to like it that way. The country continues to tolerate a kind of soft totalitarianism with regard to civil rights enshrined in its bureaucratic little-red-book devotion toward “multiculturalism,” abridgment of religious liberty for Christians, lack of respect basic freedom, and intolerance toward dissent from their politically correct code of conduct. In a word, the stiff upper lip is completely sagged.

I have experienced the NHS and would not wish this system on my family–maybe my dog. Those who can afford private insurance in Britian, buy it; otherwise the more lowly classes are stuck. This is the fact of the matter: the NHS reinforces class distinctions and the have and have nots, especially in the case of serious illness.

In the UK the tears being shed over Michael Jackson’s pathetic demise is positively disturbing. The last time we saw this kind of overdone out pouring was at the death of Diana. At least in the case of Princess Diana, she had tried to accomplish something despite the open wound which was her life.However, this Jackson hysteria reminds me of another hysteria I witnessed here last summer: the Obama hysteria. This too continues; although the brightest of the Brits are now realizing the paralyzing debt in which he has placed the United States. The UK press like our own is still swooning over him as if it were at “Britain’s Got Talent” taping. Nevertheless, there are some signs of worry amongst some of the more savvy citizens of England. Today as I was riding on the Tube I remarked to a colleague that this Michael Jackson fanaticism is ridiculous and I was given a stern look from several of the Brits around me reading their tabloids on the lurid details of his passing as if they were reading Holy Scripture. Interestingly, the anniversary of the 7/7 bus bombings has been trumped by Jackson’s demise.