If Buckley had been known in England, he would not have been revered as an intellectual, but that is because the English do not go in for revering intellectuals .In fact we do our best not to be considered intellectual. In Britain, we think it odd that the Americans are prepared to devote acres of print to a seemingly trivial question like whether Christopher Hitchens has shifted an inch to the Right or the Left in his most recent statement on Iraq.

 

  In fact, his dedicatory quote at the front  of The  House Of Wittgenstein is a most damning indictment of intellectualism. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s own words (translated):

” There are an an enormous amount of general empirical propositions  that count as certain for us. One such is that if someone’s arm is cut off it will not grow again.”

 He was observing his brother’s partially armed state and deriving a general proposition from it. In the light of modern science  how wrong he was.  

 At the end of Alexander’s review he warns Buckley Junior

Christopher Buckley will discover in the years to come that his relationship with his deceased parents has changed,  to consider, quite seriously, writing another memoir of his parents in about 12 years time

 Here Alexander  is  remembering his own memoir of his father in Fathers and Sons. If I have one criticism of that excellent book it is that, written soon after his father’s death, it does not deal with the relationship between his father and his grandfather  with the same discernment that he deals with the relationships between his grandfather, and great grandfather, and the other greats back through time. He was feeling the death of his own father too keenly and desiring too intensely to memorialise him fondly and lovingly to be able to write dispassionately. Indeed he even accepted uncritically stories propagated  by my dear brother partly in jest. One such is the story of the Bananas that appears in my brother Bron’s  memoir, “Will This Do?” regurgitated in Fs and Ss, and again in Alexander’s review of Pups and Mums. The story goes that Evelyn, in monster mode, on his return from War ate the whole family’s ration of Bananas while his children and wife looked hungrily on. The true story is more complex more mundane and less damning. It is a conflation of several stories. The first, for which I was not bornbut which was told me on solemn oath by my nanny in the nursery, was that it was not Evelyn who was the pig but Auberon, and it was not Bananas that were devoured but scones with clotted cream and Jam.  Evelyn the conquering hero was returning home from soldiering . The family had collected  their cream and jam rations to celebrate his triumphant return, and had gathered under  the Welcome Home banner at the front door to greet him when it was noticed that the six year old Bron was missing. The lure of the cream and Jam had been too great for his wartime tummy to resist. Filial duty had been abandoned in favour of scone scoffing.

    In more prosperous times Evelyn did indeed once see off a small jar of Caviar under the hungry eyes of his children.  A very kind American millionairess called Mrs. Cutting had adopted the Waugh family as a family-in-need  and had taken to sending us Christmas hampers to lighten our hearts in the festive season. I am sure that at the time there were hundreds of thousands of families who received similar munificence from other soft hearted Americans. But Mrs. Cutting excelled. The Christmas hampers kept coming till I was eleven years old: a full 17 years after the war had ended . In one , maybe the last one, among the fruit and nuts and pecan pies, there was a small pot of caviar, and I think, in retrospect, that my father took the wise decision to save us from the pain of an acrimonious partition  by devouring the whole pot himself.

     The third story does involve fruit and does my father less credit. There were two actors: my father and my mother, and two witnesses: myself and my sister Hatty. The two witnesses argue to this day about whether it was Bananas or Apples that were thrown. I favour apples. Three Coxes Orange Pippins had been gathering wrinkles in a bowl on our dining room table. Nobody would eat them and my father had been demanding, in the way that men did in those days, that my mother should remove them. But the apples stubbornly remained in place. Finally he swore that if they were not removed by the next day he would throw them at my mother. The apples stayed and the next night he kept his word, and my mother stood scornfully and wordlessly as the apples landed quite gently bonk bonk bonk on her forehead.Hatty and I were appalled. It was Laura three; Evelyn nil. I became a feminist overnight. But  it was not a reflection of their relationship. It was a strange event. They had a companionable and loving marriage. Maybe my father’s classical imagination was fired up by the three apples and he saw them as golden apples, and my mother as Atalanta, and himself: Hercules. He did at that time have a thing about keeping his word.

  Despite this one failing that I have elaborated on at great length, I do recomend Alexander’s book Fathers and Sons. It casts strong and universal light on the nature of Father Son relationships, and further I commend Alexander himself who is a polymath. Not only does he write books, but he composes music beautifully. He has co-written with his brother Nathaniel a wonderful Gothick comic musical, called Bon Voyage, with Baroque and Romantic scores which won the top musical award in Britain, but has not yet been put on commercially.  There are plans to take New York by storm with it once the backers have been found.  

This is unbelievable, but true! Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 600 employees and has the following employee statistics.
29 have been accused of spouse abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
9 have been accused of writing bad cheque’s
17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year
Which organisation is this ?
It’s the 635 members of the House of Commons, the same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us inline.
What a bunch of bastards we have running our country - it says it all. And just to top all that they probably have the best ‘corporate’ pension scheme in the country!!
If you agree that this is an appalling state of affairs, please pass it on to everyone you know.

It’s time to stand up to this lot ! 

 

The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another term.

Will someone please explain why this bloodless transfer of power to the civilian legislator first in line for the presidency, in a sovereign nation, is any business of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers, or Barack Obama? For all have denounced the “coup” and demanded Zelaya’s immediate return.

The hypocrisy here is astounding.

Chavez was imprisoned for his bloody coup attempt in Venezuela in 1992. And to have Fidel Castro’s dictatorship of half a century denouncing a glitch in the democratic process of a Western Hemisphere republic is beyond parody.

What percentage of the 200 member nations of that septic tank of anti-Americanism, the United Nations, are democracies? How many leaders of its member states came to power through free and fair elections?

And what happened to the idea of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Western Hemisphere republics? At this writing, Honduras is not buckling.

“We have established a democratic government, and we will not cede to pressure from anyone. We are a sovereign country,” said Roberto Micheletti, who was named caretaker president to serve out Zelaya’s term, which ends this year.

Unlike Tehran, where hundreds of thousands protested the election, the streets of Tegucigalpa have remained calm. No one has been shot, beaten with clubs or run down by thugs on motorcycles.

Just whose side is Barack on in Latin America?

Though elected as a center-right candidate, Zelaya has moved into the orbit of Chavez, whose idea it was to change the Honduran constitution to get Zelaya another term. Hugo even provided the ballots. In Latin America, term limits have been written into constitutions to prevent a return to the time of the dictators and presidents-for-life. The folks who put Zelaya aboard that plane are friends of the United States.

Why are Obama and Hillary Clinton meddling in the affairs of a friendly country, to dump over a friendly government, to reinstate a friend of Hugo’s, whose goal is to bring Honduras into his anti-American “Bolivarian Revolution”?

Like Barack’s strange behavior in Trinidad, where he grinned away as Chavez handed him an anti-American tract, then listened for an hour to Daniel Ortega berate us for cruelty to Castro’s Cuba, without protest or retort, Obama is coming off as one who shares the international left’s view of the United States.

There is another issue raised by Obama’s denunciation of our friends in Honduras. Does he put ideology ahead of U.S. national interests? Does he prefer hostile democracies to friendly autocrats?

What comes first with Obama?

“He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB,” FDR said of one Latin dictator. What FDR meant was that, in those grave times when Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Japanese militarists ruled most of Eurasia, America must take her friends where she could find them.

In World War II, we welcomed the alliance with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and the neutrality of the autocrats of Madrid and Lisbon. We partnered with Stalin. Gen. Eisenhower cut a deal with Vichy’s Adm. Darlan to get GIs safely ashore in North Africa.

From 1961 to 1979, Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian ruler of South Korea who sent 50,000 troops to fight beside ours in Vietnam. Was he not a better friend than Olof Palme of Sweden, Pierre Trudeau of Canada and Willy Brandt of Germany, who burnished their democratic credentials by scoring points off the United States?

For most Cold War presidents, U.S. national interests always trumped democratist ideology. Ike preferred the Shah to the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh. Richard Nixon preferred Gen. Pinochet to the elected Salvador Allende.

Even George W. Bush, who had pushed for Palestinian elections and insisted on Hamas’ inclusion, perhaps because he thought they would lose, did a somersault when Hamas won.

How to explain the universality of the attacks on Honduras —  when few United Nations members outside the West condemned Tehran and Hugo Chavez rushed to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — other than the fact that this “coup” removed an adversary of the United States?

Anti-Americans stand by their own, no matter how they came to power, or retain power. Only in the West do we seem always prepared to abandon our flawed friends who do not measure up.

This is a formula for eventually not having any friends.

That Obama finds himself in camp with Castro’s Cuba, Ortega’s Nicaragua and Chavez, who is openly threatening Honduras, should tell him something about where his ideology is taking him, and us.

One day, Obama is going to have to decide whether he wishes to be the darling of the international left or the unapologetic leader of the nation that is most resented and reviled by the international left.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.