Bracing, like a shot of battery acid

Author George MacDonald Fraser, OBE (of the Flashman novels) died last week.

(Telegraph obituary here.)

Framing his parting shot for him, the Daily Mail ran an excerpt from Fraser's 2002 memoirs, The Light's On At Signpost.

It's an extended and vitriolic rant against political correctness, and I read it with something approaching pure pleasure:

I loathe all political parties, which I regard as inventions of the devil. My favourite prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not because he was on the Right, but because he spent a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing.

This would not commend him to New Labour, who count all time lost when they're not wrecking the country.

I am deeply concerned for the United Kingdom and its future. I look at the old country as it was in my youth and as it is today and, to use a fine Scots word, I am scunnered.

I know that some things are wonderfully better than they used to be: the new miracles of surgery, public attitudes to the disabled, the health and well-being of children, intelligent concern for the environment, the massive strides in science and technology.

Yes, there are material blessings and benefits innumerable which were unknown in our youth.

But much has deteriorated. The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic.

My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British.

The last testament of Flashman's creator: How Britain has destroyed itself

Hat tip: Abu Muquwama

A.A. Gill on Brits in New York

Is there anything more bracing than a well-written rant, delivered by a man with a gutload of venom, a sense of timing and a way with words?

A.A. Gill, in the most recent Vanity Fair, unloads on Brits in New York City, and specifically a little strip of shops on Greenwich Avenue, around the corner from where we live:

What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery.

Lovely.

Although reading a scathing critique of Brits in New York City in Vanity Fair is a bit like seeing an op-ed criticizing the doctrine of papal infallibility in The American Catholic.

Letter From New York: Brits Behaving Badly (A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair, March 2007)

Related: Campaign For Little Britain In The Big Apple

"Our short national nightmare"

Hitch isn't impressed with the selective-memory eulogies of Jerry Ford:

...[T]here was endless talk about "healing," and of the "courage" that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana republic...

...To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

Our Short National Nightmare: How President Ford managed to go soft on Iraqi Baathists, Indonesian fascists, Soviet Communists, and the shah … in just two years. (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, December 29, 2006)