Reflections on a Pile of Bunting

...With the exception of Cromwell's Commonwealth, no revolutionary settlement in England has brought the nation to a constitutional full stop...

...The strength of the British system has been an ability to maintain the essential nature of the country, while allowing ample room for gradual change...

...Words, like alcohol or drugs, are terribly dangerous when improperly used...

...The Tyrant George is dead...

...Yet the basic traditions which give the nation its unity and self-respect without resorting to any idealized concept of the State have stood up well to enfranchisement of the working class and the rise of British Socialism...

...However, an educational system engaged in leveling rather than teaching (espoused by the last Socialist Administration in England as being more truly egalitarian and thus the model for their new system) has created a society which has been given the most dangerous tool available to man...

...One sees the President cast in the role of Charles I, insisting on the Divine Rights of Presidents, while a Cromwellian Congress takes steps to cut off the money...

...Persons now taught to read, write, and communicate without having any understanding of logic, rhetoric, or even the basic structure of a language are peculiarly open to manipulation...

...But in America we have put in his place a less colorful specimen...

...In practice such an attitude is not totally unreasonable since so many "pragmatists" lack a philosophy which invites an individualistic approach to issues, but rather have a devotion to the preservation of personal power or influence at all costs...

...Though still somewhat disorganized, the celebration machine is being cranked into action and by 1976 the peoples of these United States will be doing all they can, under the circumstances, to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of their deliverance from the hands of British Tyranny...

...one must not discount the perversity of human nature...

...The British tradition of government is still essentially just that—a tradition...

...In fact, America has always been a lawyer's paradise...

...All sorts of fleeting comparisons between present-day America and former days in Britain come to mind...

...The Honors List provides ample recognition without bestowing the corrupting influence of money or particular power, a recognition which depends on respect for traditional institutions...

...The poor old Constitution, relic of a day when written truth was God, like the Bible of the fundamentalist, is now open to so many interpretations, and lies prostrate before the secular Higher Critics, the Legal Experts, the Pantheon of Justices of the Supreme Court...

...We used to share a Common Law...

...The wholesale indoctrination of college students with revolutionary materialism, accepted with the zeal of religious enthusiasm, is only one symptom of this disease...

...One can't help reflecting that the present political scandals in America, while delighting the shade of Sir Robert Walpole, must undoubtedly horrify the ghost of the much maligned, though thoroughly upright George III...

...I am sure that most of my readers will decry some of the sentiments which will follow, but I trust that they will leave retribution to the natural trend of events which will allow the writer to be deluged by offers of BiCentennial coins, shopping bags, t-shirts, beer mugs, and reproductions of the Declaration of Independence inscribed upon the posteriors of men's pants, all, of course, manufactured in the Crown Colony of Hong Kong...

...Tradition is difficult to eradicate, and its experts are held in scant respect...

...As we have seen of late, the Flag can be a symbol of disunity, representing to the conservative an ideal which seems to have been lost, and to the liberal, an establishment to be overthrown...

...In England, he was never really alive...

...Despite the fact that Puritan tradition obliged judges to attire themselves as Calvinist ministers, the rights of man were constitutionally safeguarded by a tradition of law based on centuries of experience...

...Of course, any resident alien of British birth soon gets used to a certain amount of hostile press...

...All of which causes the mere suggestion of uneasiness to a British Subject whose little card proclaims him to be "a resident alien," and who was brought up to believe with Sellers and Yeatman in 1066 and All That that American history came to an end with the Revolution...

...We hear little nowadays of the great "English Speaking Union" linking hands across the sea—peoples joined not only by law and language, but also by birth...

...To add to the burden, the law becomes daily more complicated as government churns out an endless stream of enactments...

...Can an Englishman not wonder whether Crown and Parliament do a better job, expressing unity in terms of family—and a real family at that, warts and all—and representation for the people in a manner affected by dayby-day public pressure, as the Executive stands open before the legislators...

...Even Jane Fonda might react to the possibility of becoming a "dame," although one is forced to admit that John Lennon's membership in the Order of the British Empire did little for him...

...Meanwhile, McGovern with his band of Levellers and Fifth Monarchy Men, armed with a Puritan horror for the weakness of the Reprobate, dream of the Millennial Rule of the Saints, and no doubt have selected a new "Praise God Barebones" to act as Speaker of a Rump Congress after the Civil War...

...Senator Sam Ervin, like Pym and Hampton before him, does battle against a corn rupt court of favorites...

...A little harder to take, perhaps, is the constant insistence on the part of leading politicians that America is Top Nation, with the best system of government, the highest standard of living, the greatest amount of personal freedom, and the biggest everything, which, even if true, ultimately sounds like a form of boasting (Not British you know...

...One wonders, for instance, how Tony Boyle or Eric Hoffer would have performed as union leaders with a good chance of becoming peers of the realm...

...In a country like America, made up of such a conglomeration of cultures, races, and ethnic backgrounds, such an antiquated scenario doesn't seem to serve well...

...or a process somewhat reminiscent of the type of propaganda fed to the "Lower Orders" by dictators when things are not going so well...

...The Honors System still gives inducement to politicians and public servants to conduct themselves with a minimum of corruption by awarding them a suitable title (albeit now a rather pathetic Life Peerage) at the end of their lives...

...At the same time I shall be eccentric enough to suggest that America would have done better to have retained a system, represented in England by the Monarchy, the Honors System, and a parliamentary form of government...

...George V's handling of Ramsay MacDonald and his colleagues, and their subsequent careers, in this context, prove illuminating...

...Daniel Boone" as portrayed by the Hollywood histories of television always comes out in shining coonskin as he battles against boorish British soldiers led by caddish officers...

...On the subject of this inheritance, which the two countries seem to be destroying together, allow me to highlight two of its ingredients: a system of law which has protected the essential freedom of the citizen, and a language which has framed the virtues of responsible individualism...

...The only symbols of national unity left, now that the Presidency is reduced to being solely a political office, are the Flag and the Constitution...

...More and more, the American system of government shows the strain of what might be termed a fundamentalist concept...

...While the Right loses sleep over the plots of the Left, and the Left dreams dreams of Utopia, the real tyrant, the Pragmatist-Expert, works his wicked will, and a Bi-Centenary of Freedom more and more resembles the Passover Feast of the captive Jews in Babylon...

...We once shared, despite Shaw's opinion, a common language...

...Yet as religious fundamentalists have found, once confidence in inerrancy is lost, nothing much remains...

...America, however, with the confidence of eighteenth-century rationalism, still rests hope in the authority of the Written Word, the invincibility of Reasonable Thought...

...The power of the Media is another...

...A second, oft ignored quality of British government is a built-in system which acknowledges and therefore allows for the natural thirst of the trappings of distinction...

...I'm really not so sure that there is much to celebrate, for both Britain and America have been doing their best to destroy the heritage they once held in common, and those institutions which I feel America might wisely have retained are being abandoned or neutralized in the Mother Country...

...At present, with the loss of Empire and the emergence of "The Common Market" the British system is under severe strain...

...The Left and the Right huddle together in mutually exclusive camps, viewing an irenic approach or a moderate position with distrust and even contempt...

...Faced with such complexity, it becomes less and less possible for anyone to remain law-abiding, and the citizen is often forced to spend considerable sums of money and even more trust in engaging legal advice...

...Even the subtle innuendos against America's only reigning monarch, in describing Queen Elizabeth on her recent tour of Canada as "the British Queen" rather than Queen of Canada, are borne with patience...

...He is the Expert...

...He excels in gaining and holding power, in drugging the populace with a torrent of words, in dealing in those vast areas of our life which we can no longer manage...

...If Britons and Americans are sinking together in a legal slough of despond, wailing together with less and less comprehension, in other respects their plights are sharply different...

...The Expert, a person traditionally mistrusted in a free society, gains more power every day...

...Today law is a slow, painful, expensive business, and although justice is probably eventually, done, it is less and less seen to be done...

...It is not accidental that the growing inability to think for oneself has produced great divisions in society...