Just looked up a bit about my Parliamentary MP, whom I never see or hear. It set me thinking.Who is your Euro MP? Exactly. And compared to EU MPs' pay, exes, fiddles and nepotism, Westminster MPs are poor relations and almost Simon-pure.
What do you think will happen when "ever-closer union" (that definition of a black hole) is achieved? A boom in ermine and coronets, silk swags and bunting, grand sandstone palaces, plum strudel at Demel's, superb black coffee, and secret police.
Somewhere even now, a new Jaroslav Hasek is inventing a new Schweik.
UPDATE
Here's how to find your MEPs. Does anyone you know, remember voting for them?
Good question, but even then there will be room for only one top dog, so I would expect lots of scheming and intrigues to be the order of the day, followed in due course by the whole edifice collapsing into chaos and recrimination. To dream the (not so?) impossible dream....
ReplyDeleteHi, Nomad. Fukuyama is wrong: history has not come to an end (or a . to quote "1066 And All That").
ReplyDeleteBut we must beware of welcoming the conflict, a mistake Rupert Brooke made about the impending WW1:
"To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary..."
There's time to turn it away now:
"So proud and lofty is some sort of sin
Which many take delight and pleasure in
Whose conversation God doth much dislike
And yet He shakes His sword before He strike"
... to quote the old carol "Christmas is now drawing near at hand" as sung by the Watersons in the Sixties.
A boom in ermine and coronets, silk swags and bunting, grand sandstone palaces, plum strudel at Demel's, superb black coffee, and secret police.
ReplyDeleteA fine red you were on, it seems. Pity I couldn't join you for lunch.
And of course you're right here.
No wine -
ReplyDelete"But if it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water"
- glad you liked the phrasing!
Only once in my career did I bother to check the claimed qualifications of a job applicant. He'd lied. Later he became a Euro MP.
ReplyDeleteMr S: Quite so, which is why I really do fear for the future.
ReplyDeleteThis was posted by Mr Old Holborn chez Guido. Since it fits, I repeat it here just in case you and your readers missed it. It requires the fullest distribution possible (IMHO!).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnMtc_QJ4-E
DM and Nomad: thank you. Your comments have been passed to Security, who will be with you shortly.
ReplyDelete"Hasek's saga starts with this very incident [the assassination of Franz Ferdinand], in the discussion of which at a bar Svejk makes statements like, "A shocking loss. You can't replace Ferdinand by any twopenny-halfpenny idiot. Only he ought to have been still fatter... Then of course he'd have had a stroke long ago, when he was chasing those old women at Konopiste when they were collecting firewood and picking mushrooms on his estate, and he wouldn't have had to die such a shameful death." For several other statements like these Svejk was hauled straight from the bar to a prison. The bar-tender was also taken in as he had said, "the flies shitted on His Imperial Majesty" (his photograph, really)."
From: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Soldier-Schweik-Jaroslav-Hasek/dp/0140035680