Arthur's "Creeping Anglophila"

(Another note from Marin County...)

I confess to creeping Anglophila. Two of my ancestors fought the English and their Hessian mercenaries in the Revolutionary War. I'm not sure if they bled for the birth of the nation, but I am sure they shivered, ate short rations, lived in crappy conditions and were enormously relieved the war was over. There is no, repeat no family history of that glorious war. That leads me to believe that the "glory" of that war was entirely lost on my ancestors. I suspect it was more a matter of being given a crappy job and doing it, then going home.

But I like the Brits. We stopped fighting ever so long ago and in recent years they sometimes come out with really intelligent assessments of the world. The end of their empire was only about fifty years ago, and they tend to shy away from the idea of becoming colonialists once again. Sometimes they make bad alliances, but what I like is that they appear willing to revisit bad decisions and work to understand what went so badly wrong. And write about it in newspapers. Fairly intelligibly.

Some of those folks just sat down to do a bit of a think about this Bush "War On Terror" thing. They decided against it, thanks anyhow.

Meanwhile the Swiss have a political campaign posting flyers and billboards showing three white sheep kicking a black sheep out of Switzerland, with a slogan something like "To Create Security". That suggests that our country does not have a monopoly on racist and zenophobic targeting of other races and culture groups. They are just a bit more direct about it.

Arthur