Digitus Impudicus

I'm Back. Just When Great Britain Left

I've got lots to say about the British servicepeople who were recently released from Iran. However, I'm not going to say it. At least not yet because I really don't know what to think. Instead, I'll quote what former Englishman John Derbyshire recently said on National Review Online.

The Diana-ifictaion of Britain [John Derbyshire]

Iain:

I am at the point with this business about the British hostages where I really can't trust myself to post any more, I'm so mad. Toby Harnden indeed says much of what needs saying, but I think he is too kind to the enlisted men. They are saps and worms, insults to the Queen's uniform. I'd better change track right here—see what I mean?

One thing the whole business has revealed to me is how it is possible to hate your own country, a thing I never understood before. Not that I hate my country—which is, as of five years this coming April 19th, the blessed U.S. of A. I maintain strong sentimental ties to England, though, and I've been burning with anger and shame at the dishonor these giggling buffoons have brought to their country, the country of my ancestors (all English, for as far back as I know), the country I was raised in. Yes, there have been moments when I've hated England.

I've told this story before, so I hope I'll be forgiven for telling it again. My Mum, Esther Alice Knowles (1912-98), eleventh child of a pick'n'shovel coal miner, in one of the last conversations I had with her, said: "I know I'm dying, but I don't mind. At least I knew England when she was England."

I discounted that at the time. Old people always grumble about the state of the world. Now I understand it, though. I even feel a bit the same way myself. I caught the tail-end of that old England—that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior—the English Gentleman—that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

That's not the first thing he's had to say about this.
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