Wh at
manners?
Taki
New York
hey know they cannot help their clumsy, one-handed table manners, and even the most seemingly sophisticated American makes a point of checking which side is correct before using a sideplate. And although they rarely admonish their children for bad manners, English good manners remain the platinum standard acknowledged, respected and regularly deferred to.' I am quoting from a London Times hack by the name of Wapshott, writing about Burrell, and how the butler failed to excite America with his bullshit. Mind you, Wapshott is himself no prize. Has he ever met a sophisticated American who checked which side was correct before using his sideplate? I'd bet my last dollar he hasn't. Why would any sophisticated American lunch or dine with a Murdoch hack? Has Wop shot ever been inside a gent's club, or been invited into an American gentleman's house? Again, I very much doubt it. And what about English good manners? Is the shot wop being serious? Modern English good manners is the greatest oxymoron of them all. Some platinum standard.
The operative word here, of course, is modern. The English used to have good manners, as the French, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans and Austrians still do. Greeks of the old school are very few (they began disappearing as soon as the monarchy was abolished), as are Scandinavians (too socialist to display good manners) and I can count the Belgians with impeccable manners on one hand. (I know all five of them.) But back to the Americans. No one in their right mind doubts that our society is being shaped by the lowest standards of decency and by the nastiest people, but there are a hell of a lot of decent, sophisticated and well-mannered Americans who were appalled by the butler coming over and selling his dirt, and their distaste had nothing whatsoever to do with being insecure. Americans are decent people, and Murdochian bribes to encourage servants to invent stories are not tolerated, and not because of fear of writs, either, as Wapshott
Given the fact that anti-Americanism is now as chic as Marxism used to be before the Soviets were exposed to be without a stitch of clothing. I am not at all surprised that the Murdochian Times insults Americans for being gauche and insecure. Lewis Feuer wrote that Anti-Americanism early became a Marxist theme, for America offered a social alternative that threatened to reduce Marxist modes of thought and feeling into irrelevancies and absurdities'.
Hear, hear. All these scummy types of the Left, especially among the faculties in European and American universities, cannot accept that their Marxism was always an irrelevance as well as an absurdity. (Marxism died with Lenin.) The European elite (bureaucrooks, academics, professional politicians and other such flotsam) hate America because American capitalism has a staying power that cannot be found anywhere else in the world, and, despite the crooks in Wall Street, American will and enterprise corrects itself and forges ahead. Not even the crooked Clinton administration, with its Capone-like blackmail of the tobacco and later of the gun industry, can hold free enterprise back. This drives the dwarfs in Europe nuts.
In fact, the European midgets are starting to resemble those Islamic fanatics who hate America because of its wealth, freedom and power. And now, with the Bush mid-term election triumph, the haters will become shriller than ever. Ergo the Times piece, a rather silly reporting job about a ridiculous butler that only the dumbeddown Brits could possibly put for weeks on end on their front pages, with the de rigueur slur against American gaucheness.
But enough of this. Further good news is that the glow of the ghastly Kennedys seems finally to have gone. Kathleen Kennedy managed to lose the Maryland governorship as a Democrat for the first time since 1966 (Spiro Agnew, remember him?) despite the low blows she used against her opponent. (One of her top aides called her opponent a Nazi, and she refused to apologise or retract it.) Mark Shriver, her first cousin, also lost, as did Andrew Cuomo, running on his wife's Kennedy name, and having his hand held by Robert Kennedy, another busted flush who was once busted for heroin. Last year another RA( son, Max, was forced to drop out of' a Boston congressional race after he was unable to string two words together without a teleprompter. Patrick Kennedy, Teddy's son, is about the dumbest person in Congress, and certainly the shrillest. It is Camelot sunset, and not a moment too soon.
Next week I will tell you all about the best party by far this century, a white-tie affair after a wedding of two very goodlooking young people.
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