So now we know: the universe is just a figment of some bloody Fleet Street sub’s imagination. I’ve long suspected as much. And give me a cook who cooks, not one who insists on bearing his soul and expressing himself

There are a couple of cutting edge science stories I suspect you might have missed while you’ve been giving your all to Strictly Come Prancing and Masterchef: The Professionals. They come to a grateful world courtesy of a certain paper in Britain which might well, given it’s fears for house prices and the multitude of causes of cancer, be known as the Daily Whail.

First off we have this, a dire warning that it is pretty pointless getting out of bed tomorrow (or even getting into bed tonight if you are reading this during the day) because - you guessed it: the universe is collapsing. Well! And I thought I was doomed to die of a second heart attack. Further details are here. Just in case you feel that this is just another load of the cack our free press regularly produces, you can opt for this cosmic disaster scenario instead. It is marginally more interesting, though equally as much total bollocks.

Here ‘scientists’ (it’s a wonder they don’t call them ‘boffins’ because that’s what Fleet Street’s finest usually do) postulate that - if I understand it correctly - the universe is just a hologram and just a figment of our imagination. No, I haven’t understood it correctly, but then given some of the goobledegook the Mail Online bods insists on printing (e.g. ‘In a black hole, for instance, all the objects that ever fall into it would be entirely contained in surface fluctuations. This means that the objects would be stored almost as ‘memory’ or fragment of data rather than a physical object in existence. In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a ‘two-dimensional structure projected onto a cosmological horizon’ - or in simpler terms [love that], the universe we believe we inhabit is a 3D projection of a 2D alternate universe.’

As I say gobbledegook and incomprehensible garbage, but that won’t stop various men - it will invariably and exclusively be men, I’m afraid - in pubs, clubs and golf club bars up and down the country boring for Britain as they insist, several rounds into the conversation, on explaining at

length a fascinating new theory they read about ‘in the paper’. Their account will most certainly be concluded with a platitude or other along the lines of ‘makes you think, doesn’t it’. No, it doesn’t. Just makes you wonder why 19/20 of the population of this green and pleasant land are allowed within 100 feet of a ballot box.

If you’re interested (and shame, shame, shame on you if you are) you can read the Mail’s story here.

All we now need is some explanation as to why it is bothering printing two such stories, both of which mean the other one must be complete bollocks.

. . .

I don’t know whether it is just my age, also my age or mainly my age, but not only is everyone, not just policemen and bank managers, starting to look decidedly younger, but much of what is on television is beginning to get decidedly more pretentious. Now I can understand it to a certain extent when we have a small gang of arty types sitting around discussing literature, drama, film and ballet, but when bloody cooks - sorry, chefs - start giving those arty types a run for their money, I do start to wish the universe really were a hologram.

The other night I was on my way home from work in Kensington to my brother’s flat in Earl’s Court when I decided I was still quite hungry. It wasn’t greed because I hadn’t eaten much at all since lunchtime and even then it was just a mug of soup and two small rolls. So passing the Dragon Palace, a Chinese restaurant of the parish (and where a few weeks ago I bumped into a certain Paul D. and promised not to talk to him when I also dropped in for a plate of something or other), I decided that to have a latish supper (and no, I didn’t bump into Mr D. this time).

On such occasions - I often have a plate of pasta nearby on a Sunday night - I tend to haul out my excellent Huawei smartphone and seek out a wifi signal to watch a bit of TV. As it happened there was none at the Dragon Palace, so I gave 3G a whirl. Oddly, althought 3G is good for radio, I’ve never before had much luck with TV, but last Tuesday night it worked a treat. Must be something to do with the universe collapsing or other, though don’t hold me to that, I’m not much good on science and rely on our free press to keep me informed on advances in science. (Apparently scientists now know why dogs scratch themselves, which must come as a relief to all those who were a tad disturbed by that particular gap in our scientific understanding of the world.)

Having got a signal wasn’t really the main problem, however. What now stumped me was what to watch on my smartphone (courtesy of BBC’s iPlayer, by the way, if you’re wondering). You see, I don’t really watch a great deal of TV these days because a great deal of TV these days is so fucking dull on the whole I prefer to sit in the bathroom for hours on end and pick my nose. But rather than sit and talk to myself - people often think you’re nuts when you do that - I decided to give something a go while I worked my way through a plate of something spicy with noodles and settled on Masterchef: The Professionals.

I don’t doubt that the television concept of Masterchef has travelled around the world several times over these past few years but for those still unacquainted with the programme and its ilk all I can say is: don’t worry, you’re not missing much. (There is a variant of it here in Old Blighty called Celebrity Masterchef which is equally as dull.) Don’t get me wrong: I happen to enjoy cooking very much and was very happy watching cookery programmes many years ago when they were still about cooking and learning new techniques and dishes. But they aren’t any more. They are all about ‘competition’ and ‘being passionate about wheat/mushrooms/carrots/lard’ and ‘boiling a kettle of water doesn’t get harder than this!’, cue dramatic music.

In the particular episode I saw last Tuesday (or of which is saw part, because mercifully I had finished my plate of something spicy with noodles long before the programme was due to end), the emphasis was on ‘putting your emotions and feelings into a dish’.

OK, it wouldn’t be at all difficult to make me out to be some sort of cantankerous old sod for complaining that that is 24-carat, grade A bullshit, but if that is the direction you’re thinking is now taking you - that I’m just another old fart for not being intrigued by the mystery of cooking - then you are banned from ever reading this blog again. But don’t take my word for it - after all, I am the Luddite fuck who refuses to believe the universe is about to collapse - so here are a few snippets: (t/c)

Why the ‘historic’ agreement with Iran is mainly just good for business. Which is what it was all about, really

If you follow the news at all, you can’t have missed all the hoo-ha about the recent ‘historic’ agreement between Iran and the West, but it was – to me, at least – quite noticeable that details of what exactly had been historically agreed were quite sparse.

There was a certain amount of spurious drama about it all, what with the talks apparently coming to naught a few weeks ago, to everyone’s disappointment and the finger being pointed at the French for being pernickety, then out of the blue came the breakthrough, and the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and our very own Foreign Secretary William Hague as well as their counterparts from Germany, Russia, China and someone described as ‘Baroness Catherine Ashton’ dropped everything, grabbed their toothbrushes and took the first flight out to Geneva for an historic photo opportunity, sorry, make that ‘agreement’.

When news of the ‘breakthrough’ came through, I was rather baffled as to what had actually been achieved, because apart from being told the ‘agreement was historic’ and that ‘sanctions would be partially lifted’, no on actually said what had been historically agreed. To make it all the more confusing, on the one hand Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araqchi immediately announced that agreement was a great deal for Iran in that the West had agreed to loosen sanctions and that it could carry on enriching uranium, although to a lesser degree than it had done so far; on the other hand John Kerry announced that it was a great deal for the West because as it had agreed to loosen sancstions, Iran had agreed to give up enriching uranium completely.

Well, they couldn’t both be right, I thought, and why haven’t news reports highlighted the discrepancy (which they hadn’t – they were spending far too much time trying to persuade us how ‘historic’ it all was and that now, surely to goodness, there was certainly no reason why everyone shouldn’t start sending each other Christmas cards and start going to each other’s drinks parties again (which is what diplomats do, apparently). But I was still puzzled.

The question remained stubbornly unanswered: what had, in fact, been agreed after all those high-level, late-night talks in Geneva? I was doubly intrigued when yesterday I came across an interesting news report on Der Spiegel’s online site, the first sentence of which ran: ‘Der Durchbruch im Atomstreit mit Iran lässt die Deutsche Industrie jubeln: Maschinenbauer, Chemiebetriebe und Zulieferer der Auto- und Flugzeugindustrie hoffen auf gute Geschäfte. Doch sie bekommen Konkurrenz von unerwarteter Stelle: Auch US-Firmen wollen profitieren.’ Loosely translated: The breakthrough in the row with Iran about uranium enrichment has got German industrie cheering: machine manufacturers, chemical works and car and aircraft industry suppliers are hoping to do good business. But they face competition from an unexpected source: US companies want some of the action’. You can read the report for yourself here.

Put aside the Spiegel’s apparent surprise that competition from US companies was ‘unexpected’ (was it really ‘unexpected’ and why is the Spiegel surprised?), here you have in black and white why after several years of sanctions the West and Iran suddenly found themselves able to reach a ‘historic’ agreement with which everyone is happy.

We have been getting news reports since the sanctions were imposed how they were biting, prices were rising ever higher and inflation was growing sharply, and even that if the shortage of goods caused by the sanctions worsened, there might even be civil unrest. But when I read that Spiegel story it all became very clear to me indeed: it wasn’t just Iranians and Iranian companies who were suffering. So were a great many firms in the West (and probably China). Bugger whether the Iranians were or were not building nuclear weapons, the sanctions were increasingly bad for business. And I don’t doubt that they all informed their respective governments as much in no uncertain terms.

Is that too cynical an interpretation? Not at all: as George Bernard Shaw put it very succinctly: The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. Or here’s Ambrose Bierce’s take on such cynicism: a cynic, he says is ‘a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be’.

It was then that I decided to try to track down what was in the agreement. It didn’t take too long, although the so-called ‘serious’ journalists on the BBC website, The Telegraph and the Guardian didn’t bother recording it. Finally, I find it – or rather a link to a pdf of its text – on the Financial Times website. You can read the ‘historic’ agreement for yourselves here. It didn’t knock my socks off, but there again, at least its back to business as usual for those who care about such things.

PS Sunday, Dec 01: At least we can be reassured that our governments aren’t in danger of doing something wildly out-of-character and risking the status quo.

JFK: saint or sinner? Well, neither, really, but don’t let that influence your particular prejudice. How’s about just another rich, jobbing politico? Or to put it another way, save me all the Camelot crap

Unremarkably, everyone and his favourite pony is commenting on The Death Of JFK. If they are over 50, they invariably inform anyone who cares to listen that he was a saint and changed their lives, and if they are under 50 they inform everyone who cares to listen that he was a saint and would most certainly have changed their lives had they not had the grave misfortune to have been born after 1960.

Then there is the minority who are loath to let pass an opportunity to describe John Boy in the most lurid terms: he was a devil, a drug-taking, adulterous philanderer who, if not actually a mafioso was so in cahoots with The Mob that he liked nothing better when not taking drugs and philandering adulterously than rustling up a mean spag bol while hanging out with others in the family.

According to these apostates, JFK would have been impeached and hounded out of office had he lived and worked several decades later (i.e. now) when our Press and TV weren’t such sycophantic pussycats as in the Sixties. Well, given that everyone and his favourite pony is commenting, whether to sanctify or damn the man, it really would be amiss of me not to join in.

Let me first answer that hoary old question: where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been assassinated? I was in my first year at my boarding school (note I am egalitarian and enlightened enough not to call it ‘my public school’, although naturally not sufficiently egalitarian and enlightened not to slip in the fact obliquely and let you know anyway. Subtle or what?) and we first year boys all lived in a house about a mile away called Junior House.

We had just finished supper and were in the junior changing room underneath the gym at about 7.45pm gathering our gear to make our way to Junior House when a prefect turned up and called us to order. Once we were all quiet, he told us (and I can’t remember him crying uncontrollably or his voice breaking, the insensitive bastard) that Kennedy had been killed. That was it. I can’t remember talking about it with anyone or anyone else discussing it, although we might well have done. It’s just that I can’t remember it.

Of course it was a shock, but not quite for the reason bandied about today. It was a shock because it seemed so unlikely, for, like the Pope and The Beatles, the President of the United States was unique. At any one time there is only one of him (yes, ‘him’ - I doubt we shall be saying ‘her’ for many a year yet). It was a similar shock to hear almost 20 years later that John Lennon had been killed (and, as you ask, I was on my way to work at the Birmingham Evening Mail, just driving away from West Bromwich hospital nurses home after spending the night with my girlfriend. I heard the news on either the 7.30 or 9.30 morning news - shifts started at 8am or 10am). Again, there was nothing special about Lennon, who is now inexplicably regarded as a saint who ‘worked for peace’. The shock was merely because it was so unexpected. But by then we were getting used to prominent figures being bumped off, so used to it, in fact, that when John Paul II got his, we all wondered why it had taken so long.

When someone tried to shoot Ronald Reagan 15 months later, we were already getting used to the idea that if you were in the public eye, having some nutter try to kill you came with the territory. When two months later someone tried to kill Pope John II, it hardly raised an eyebrow. ‘He probably had it coming’ was more or less then general attitude.

As for JFK, I think the sanest and most reasonable view to take is that he was neither particularly bad, nor particularly good. JFK fans conveniently forget that he was the presidend, not Lyndon Johnson, who got the US involved in the Vietnam War to begin with, although at first the poor saps being shipped over there were still euphemistically called ‘military advisors’ (or ‘advisers’ if you work for the Daily Mail, though why I don’t know).

When LBJ was sworn in, he already had the mess to deal with. JFK most certainly kept his nerve during the ‘Cuban missile crisis’, though here again I’ve heard that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as all history would have us believe (though I’m a tad hazy on the details). It seems there were elements of Kennedy helping the Soviet’s Nikita Krushchev in a power struggle with elements in the Kremlin who were a damn sight more hawkish than he was. (And the Soviets were later desperate to convince the US that they had bugger all to do with JFK’s assassination in Dallas.)

It was also LBJ, not Kennedy who brought in, against huge opposition, the civil rights reforms which set America’s blacks a little freer. I can’t, at this point, resist pointing out that the number of American blacks who are in jail, on death row, unemployed, homeless and drug addicts is still in 2013 vastly disproportionate compared to whites, and I should imagine it is scant consolation that Hispanics run them a close second. What Kennedy had in his favour was relative youth, good looks, a glamorous wife and the fact that he was voted in when the first post-war generation came of age. He was, to use that cliche, in the right place at the right time. Oh, and unlike Nixon he didn’t sweat in the sweltering heat given out by TV studio spotlights.

Finally, of course, JFK has the distinct advantage over the rest of them because: like Lennon, Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Rupert Brooke, Wilfried Owen, and several more he died young. We never got to see JFK in his dotage. I don’t think a single legend has yet survived the sight of a drooling, half-witted, skeletal and bald old codger in a wheelchair. JFK had the wit to die young, though it has to be said he didn’t have any say in the matter. But let’s, please, forget all this crap of either St John F Kennedy or Kennedy, Evil Personified. PS I was just hunting down a cartoon piccy of JFK to illustrate this entry. Of all those I found none was in the least bit disrespectful, showing him in some rather ridiculous light or other. That more or less sums the - in my view rather disturbing - sanctification process which has surrounded the man. So far there are no reports that he once walked on water. I suppose we’ll have to wait a few hundred years for that one. It does rather underline the principle which has made Press barons rich these past few hundred years: give the public the truth or a myth and they’ll opt for the myth always. I mean do we really want to be reminded that the Queen is obliged to poo at least once a day like the rest of us?

Hello again, I've been away - well sort of. And here’s why

This entry is written as the result of getting an email from a friend who reads this blog regularly. Why, he asked, had there not been any recent entries? Was something wrong? Well, nothing is particularly wrong, I told him. What follows is more or less the email I sent him in reply.

There’s actually a very straightforward reason for not having written anything for a while, quite apart from trying to avoid, and usually failing to avoid, being some kind cut-price, Asda bargain pseudo-commentator dispersing commonplace observations and platitudes on what’s happening in the world. It is this: all my life (I inherited it from my dad) I have suffered from depressive periods, once or twice very badly, usually not too badly, though on each occasion I could have done without it. And this is one of them.

Why it has slowly started again I really don’t know. And the first thing to say is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with feeling ‘fed up’ or ‘unhappy’ or anything like that. It seems to be a physical thing. Looking back over my life and having gone through it many times, I can now spot the symptoms and know that I am in for another bout. It has gone on since I was young. Certainly, it can be brought on by upsets, problems and difficulties in one’s life – we are, after all, an amalgam of the physical and the spiritual, and I don’t use the word ‘spiritual’ in any religious or metaphysical sense – but to this day we are very unclear about how the one relates to and influences the other, and I’m not about to start here.

For example, various ‘talking’ and psycho therapies, if undertaken over several months, seem to help some people. But the question is: did the talking actually help or was the affliction they were intended to treat self-correcting? That is, would they have cleared up anyway? Similarly, many of us – and the ‘us’ means that obviously includes me – have been prescribed various medications, of which the most up-to-date (as far as I know) are SSRis, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (e.g. Prozac and Zoloft). They seem to work, although they can have unwanted side-effects, yet some researchers claim it is all stuff and nonsense. And many are, anyway, uncomfortable with reducing it all to a physical level, a debate which can lead into the old, and never-ever ending, debate about free-will and determinism (after turning a few more corners, of course, and a debate I make a point of avoiding always as one being perfectly futile and a waste of time.)

I remember from my childhood having periods of being oddly very listless and reluctant to ‘do’ anything. It might have seemed like laziness, but it was nothing of the kind: it was, quite literally, an overarching reluctance to do anything whatsover and then some. I put off everything. I have also suffered extreme bouts of homesickness which is thought to be related to depression. When we moved to Berlin from Britain in June 1959, we first lived in a very large flat in the Olympische Straβe in Berlin-Charlottenburg, then moved to a house in the Heerstraβe few months later. About seven months later, I suddenly, and it was sudden, got very, very homesick. It was odd. I was also very homesick in my first year at the OS and spent the whole time in abject misery.

As I say it has plagued me all my life, but I should stress again that any ‘fed-upness’ has to do with irritating physical symptoms. In my case I have a very persistent and perpetual headache, which is rather like a mild hangover. I also don’t particularly like being with other people or wanting to be in company and would far prefer to be alone (‘I vant to be alone‘). I can’t say anything, of course, and I doubt anyone notices, but on these occasions I would far, far, far prefer to be alone. I also get to be very impatient with what I happen to be doing and want to move on to the next thing as soon as possible, irrespective of what that next thing might be. And, of course, once I have moved on, I immediately want to move on again. I cannot settle.

I find it almost impossible to concentrate on anything, especially reading, which is why I find it quite useful to do a lot of swimming or go to the gym, because it keeps me occupied. And this difficulty in concentration and rush to move on to something else has, unfortunately, in the past and to this day been the reason for certain slapdashness in my work. Now you know. When I am going through such a period, I also want nothing more than to go to bed and then to sleep, and I look forward to the moment I can put the light out and put my head on the pillow. I have to be careful that I don’t go to sleep to early, as I then wake up during the night and am awake for hours. Thankfully, I dream a great deal and apart for the very occasional anxiety dream – I had one last night which included trying to ring work to tell them I would be late, but failing every time to key in the right number on my mobile phone, which anyway began to crumble away like a biscuit. Oh, and once I had found the train I wanted and jumped on, I discovered I was travelling in the wrong direction.

However, I very rarely have bad dreams and enjoy dreaming. The trouble is that eventually I always wake up and while waking up I am conscious that I am waking up and am supremely pissed off. I try to turn over to go back to sleep again, but I never can. In the past when I have been going through a severe bout having a drink has temporarily helped, but I am loathe to do that these days and just grin, i.e. grimace, and bear it.

These days we insist on all kinds of enlightened attitudes to everything (though it has to be said that our enlightenment rarely progresses beyond the ‘insisting’ stage), but ‘depression’ – a horribly uselss catch-all word if you think about it - is still regarded with suspicion, despite innumerable Radio 4 programmes and newspaper features suggesting otherwise, as though the sufferer is in some way ‘less’. It is pertinent, for example, that despite what I have just written, I still feel a little shamefaced telling you about it as though I were admitting to stealing from a church poor box.

Perhaps you who are reading this have in the past been afflicted or are now being afflicted and know what I am talking about. Perhaps not (and thank your lucky stars if you haven’t). Perhaps you are one of those who feel that the only true solution is to ‘pull yourself together’. Well, if that’s your view, you know bugger all about it. You wouldn’t, for example, tell someone suffering from sinusitis or from cystitis to ‘pull themselves together’. At the end of the day all you can do is grin, grimace and bear it.

Incidentally, if you know of someone nearby who is living alone, consider giving up and hour or so to visit them. The chances are that they are rather lonely, and loneliness can also lead to depression.

Here’s a case for making out why we’re in the Golden Age Of Bullshit. Or how it is all-too-easy for us to kid ourselves.

There was a void in my life. Damages had finished, and I needed to fill the void. Ray Donovan did so for a week or two, but that has only been through on series, and as I had the week off with very little to do except nothing at my own slow pace, I watched an episode, and sometimes two, a day. When it finished (and the finale was good, but gets an A- rather than an A+), the void beckoned again.

Then I recalled a series which I had read about several times while proof-reading the TV pages. The paper trails several programmes from all channels as ‘highlights’, though given that all-too-often a programme might be something as scintillating and attractive as a ‘a month in the life of a council dog warden’ dragged out over five or six episodes, you might guess why I rarely, if ever, bother with terrestrial TV these days and prefer to watch series on the net. (If you think my, admittedly fictional, example is a tad exaggerated, I can assure you it isn’t: quite recently one channel had a six-part series on the working life of a town planner, its tribulations and difficulties. There are wall-to-wall fucking cookery programmes – ‘making a jus can get no tougher. This is cooking for the big boys’, that kind of crap.)

The series was an HBO production called The Newsroom. Well, I thought, I’ll give it a whirl. But, dear reader, a whirl is all I gave it, and all I shall be giving it. It is from the stable of Aaron ‘The West Wing’ Sorkin, and it shows. The dialogue is superficially smart, but in fact pretty damn awful. Folk don’t talk like folk, but as folk would talk in an Aaron Sorkin TV series. I gave up on The West Wing pretty damn quickly as I got fed up with all the smart one-liners everyone had, the hip speak, the innumerable two-second conversations the characters had with each other while walking past each other quickly in corridors. Oh, and the oh-so-liberal attitidues. I thought it was bollocks.

The Newsroom got and will continue to get equally short shrift from me. I saw about 20 minutes before I turned off and went looking for some drying paint to observe as likely to be rather more entertaining. The first episode begins with a TV anchorman ‘losing it’ and coming out with a long rant about how the good ole’ US of A just isn’t the marvellous, superb country it once was. Here is that speech.

 

I didn’t actually retch, but it was a damn close thing. The world’s greatest artists? Cared about neighbours? Would that be Cuba? And take good note of the piano tinkling away in the background.And although I went on to watch another ten minutes of that episode, I knew The Newsroom and I were not a match made in Heaven.

This speech should have warned me. But then came the theme music and that, dear reader, was all the proof I needed that The Newsroom would be thoroughly and slickly dishonest cack. Here it is.






There are only two points to be made here:

1 Nothing good can come of a series with them music as seriously schmaltzy as this.

2 Strings are always - always - a no-no. I can never take strings seriously, and nor should anyone else.

After sitting through that theme music, I sat through another ten minutes, but that was my lot. No more The Newsroom for me now or ever. And please forgive the rather abrupt ‘fade out’.

. . .

That speech was the killer. It is one so grossly dishonest, so utterly misleading about the US that the Sorkin should be prosecuted. Certainly, the Yanks aren’t the only ones to hark back sentimentally to a spurious golden age. Many Brits are still firmly convinced that the British Empire was wholly a force for good whose one purpose was to bring civilisation to those parts of the world which were still going through a dark age. But whereas Britain has finally and firmly got all that shite out of its system, the US still has a long, long way to go. I don’t doubt that when assorted liberals in the US tuned into the first episode of The Newsroom and heard the anchorman’s speech, they thought to themselves - with a manly sigh if they were men, with concealed tear if they were women - ‘he’s right, you know, what has happened to our dear, dear old country. The only problem is that there never as a US golden age when the New World’s prime and almost sole objective was to bring peace, stability, order and humanity to the world.

I shall restrict myself to a few examples, but there are many. Far from the Civil War being about ‘emancipating the black man’ as if still fondly claimed, it was about the Northern States consolidating their hold on power. And a great many bastards in the North made great fortunes out of the Civil War. For many of the North’s businessmen, the ‘unfairness’ of slavery had absolutely nothing to do with inhumanity to blacks, and everything to do with the fact that landowners in the southern states who worked slaves were getting labour from free, gratis, buckshee, while they were obliged to pay their workers a wage, however small and pitiful.

After the Civil War, far from being freed, as innumerable young US kids are proudly informed, the fortunes of the blacks got worse if that could be possible. None got their land and their mule. Certainly, they were no longer slaves in name, but they were still slaves in fact. Just listen to Billie Holiday’s rendering of the song Strange Fruit to remind yourselves just how liberated blacks were in the 100 years following the end of the Civil War. Then there’s the odd matter of the American/Spanish war.

Ostensibly this was to help colonies rid themselves of the Spanish yoke. In practice it was just a takeover from one old colonial power by a newer colonial power, with a sharp eye on creating markets for its goods. Or how about the little matter of the extermination of the Native Americans by the good, freedom-loving white folk? For scale, if not in execution, it rivals the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis.

All three are examples of why the TV anchorman’s liberal cri de coeur for a return to the good, ole’ honest US was 24-carat bullshit. Incidentally, the above is in no way intended to make out that the US’s enemies are any better. To keep things simple, just regard it as a warning to be very wary of anything wit such schmaltzy, syrupy them music.