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That’s it…we give up….you win…our surrender is total, complete and unconditional!!!

Where do we sign the terms? Where do you want us to stack our weapons? We won’t even let our officers keep their swords….it’s yours, every bit of it from our newest nuclear warheads to GI pocketknives and trenching shovels.

And of course we’ll sign a non-aggression, no retaliation, no rebuilding of even defensive weapons for a hundred…no make that a thousand years….treaty. Anything you want. .

The American Eagle lies prostrate at the feet of the British Lion at last. We shall offer public apologies for all our excesses of 1776 and 1812. We will further bear witness that we should have landed in Europe in 1914 and not 1917…entered WW2 in 1939 instead of 1941. We should have joined you in the Suez invasion of 1954 and offered more than passive help from our satellite communications systems when you gloriously took the strategically located Falkland Islands away from the heathen Argentines under the leadership of the ‘Lady in the Iron Girdle’.

All of this and more we promise if only you don’t export to us any more TV programs like THE WEAKEST LINK which landed on our shores two scant weeks ago and signals once and for all the dire death knell of Western Civilization.

All the while we were expecting the last days of our unique culture to come from the overpopulated  East, from the billions of souls in the orient or what used to be called ‘The Soviet Union’. 

We knew it would most likely come in the form of a nuclear strike or an unforeseen environmental disaster or perhaps a genetic experiment gone wrong. Some of the more imaginative were convinced that the earth would be destroyed by a hostile race from another galaxy wanting our land for colonization and ourselves for food.

But no, we are witnessing the final, painful gasp as the American Experiment is brought to its knees by a bespectacled, middle-aged, school-marm-type intoning night after night ‘you are the weakest link’ to minds no longer able to tell the difference between culture and horse dung, between reality and hype, between taste and tasteless.

There was a time, untold eons ago, perhaps, nobody really knows for sure,  when Americans were in awe of British culture…of their writers and their novels and their plays. And, later, even of their Television. We all knew names like Shakespeare, Hardy, Wilde, T.S. Elliot, Tom Stoppard. As recently as the 1970’s educated Americans sat around their TV sets on a Saturday night and caught the latest episode of Monty Python on their so-called Public Television channel, which is a little, just a little like your BBC except they give away coffee mugs and umbrellas twice a year when they are asking the ‘public’ for funds. Even local PBS stations vie with one another to hire any announcer with a real or feigned British Broadcast accent. 

But in recent years true comedic genius like Lenny Henry’s has not been well received within these shores. Too much dumbing-down of American taste and standard took place during the last two decades of the twentieth century to allow the best of British Culture to survive for long over here. Then came Benny Hill,  and later, Madonna, and even Hugh Grant shilling for the British tourist industry. (“Our cows are not mad, just a little bonkers.”). The doorway was now open for a flood of imports that could only accelerate the last days of the world as we know it. Add the imports to America’s homegrown cultural wasteland and the end time is surely upon us.

And so, my British friends, we come to the present moment, a time when we can endure neither our vices nor their remedies. All you have to do is remove forever all references to THE WEAKEST LINK…and all that you see across this vast land is yours. 

An American missionary and her baby were killed, last week, when their plane was shot down by the Peruvian Air Force craft guided, we think, by another plane under control of our C.I.A.. Much of the episode is in dispute…did the missionaries file or not file a flight plan, for instance?…but the bottom line is two American civilians were killed and mistakes were made by the Peruvians, our C.I.A., or both. An investigation is in progress. Finger pointing goes on between Washington and Lima.

The mother and daughter are simply the latest casualties in what we call the “War On Drugs”. American has been engaged in this war since the Nixon Administration. We spend enormous amounts of dollars every year in the effort, we arrest and lock up hundreds of thousands of our own citizens, we seize, interdict, harass drug people all the way up the line to the Central and South American cartels who control that trade…and…we are losing this war as surely as we lost the tragic fiasco in Vietnam. 

So deeply ingrained is the ‘War’ concept in dealing with illegal drugs that other avenues and saner approaches to the problem have little chance to get noticed.

We will come back to this topic from time to time. For now let it simply be noted that a tragedy has taken place, two innocents have been needlessly slain, and the drug war goes on. There is no end in sight of either the war or the massive use of drugs on this side of the Atlantic. What is going on over there?

What will we discuss in two weeks?  I don’t know but I believe that the idiots who are running your government or ours will present us with ample material for indecent exposure.
 

 Ciao