The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.

In the case of England, however, I am happy to report that troops will not be necessary. The British are, it would appear, allied with us Americans in the War On Terror. I found something rousing about this sense of shared purpose - this sense that they, too, were fooled by spurious intelligence; they, too, were, while in a state of fear, too quick to believe what they were told by their leaders; they, too, are willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of an endless war against what is essentially an imprecise noun, a war that is, semantically speaking, analogous to a War On Patriarchy, or the Very Energetic Siege Of Narcissism. It all reminded me of the second world war, or, to be more exact, movies about the second world war, in which, typically, the American and the British soldiers are not only the most handsome in the bunch, but speak English the best, and co-operate in the subtle teasing of the French guy, who is wearing a beret.

We Americans can learn much from the British. One thing they do here, which is a very good idea, is they have millions of tiny cameras hidden everywhere around their country. Say a terrorist is in his little terrorist house, playing his terrorist music too loudly. What happens is, the little camera in his house detects him and his friends dancing, and the police descend on the house and put a stop to the terrorist dancing. And they do not even need a warrant and there is not even a trial! Or, say, a terrorist dog poops in a park and the terrorist does not clean it up. The cameras see both the pooping and the non-cleaning-up, and soon dozens of policemen (which here are called "bobbies" or "Tories" or "pitches") descend on the terrorist and his dog (which here are called "favours"). We Americans are years behind in this technology. No doubt thousands of terrorists are smugly dancing to loud music in their homes all over our nation, while scores of smirking terrorist dogs poop blithely in our parks, and we do not even know it.

We seem to be ahead of the British in other anti-terrorist areas, however; for example, secret Cuban prisons.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 3:38 PM  |