One of the private satisfactions I got out of George Bush’s re-election was the smack in the eye this dealt to the Guardian crowd in London.
The Guardian is the smarmily leftwing London newspaper whose pathological hatred for Bush,and most other things American,led its editors to procure a copy of the electoral register of Clarke County, a swing district of Ohio, and urge its readers to write personal letters to the 11,000 Americans on the list, advising them to vote for Sen. John Kerry in the interests of stopping the war, preserving the U.N. and saving the global environment.
Frequently, and misleadingly, quoted as the voice of Britain by the London correspondents of the like-minded New York Times and CBS, the Guardian and its acolytes, among them some of Britain’s most pompously self-righteous glitterati, were convinced that their “advice” might swing Clarke County,and with it the rest of Ohio,into the Democrat column.
The Guardian’s arrogance knows no bounds. But it was punctured like a hot air balloon when Clarke Countians,who voted for Al Gore in 2000,thumbed their noses at this egregious attempt to intrude into America’s political business.
The county went decisively for Bush, prompting me to tell the Guardian that Bush not only did better than he did in 2000 in 45 of the 50 states, but that his vote increased substantially in New York, New Jersey and Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts (hardly the Bible Belt).
“Too bad the Guardians readers never got around to writing to New Jerseyites and Pennsylvanians,” remarked the conservative London Spectator. “If they had we might be looking at a Bush landslide!”
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I got back to Washington from England on Election Day and ever since have been speaking to surprisingly large audiences in the Southern states about the likely impact of Bush’s win on U.S. relations with Europe.
Tony Blair’s trip to the White House provided a useful peg and a sense of forward movement on the Middle East.
But in parts of the South I confess to sometimes feeling like an inmate returning to a madhouse!
How so?
For one thing,as the president and prime minister were plotting their next moves in post-Arafat Palestine,the main news in Georgia was a fight over Adam and Eve.
The Cobb County school board had stuck labels on its biology
students’ textbooks warning that they contain “material on evolution which should be approached with an open mind” and evolution is “a theory, not a fact.”
Expensive lawyers for the ACLU ever since have been arguing that this breaches the constitutional separation of church and state. Lawyers for 2,000 parents hit back with claims that the books should be withdrawn because they fail to present the alternative narrative of the origins of life, whereby God created all things in seven days.
A federal judge has promised a ruling within a month. But in the meantime, if you live in Atlanta, forget Iraq, or energy policy or the deficits that threaten the dollar.
Like our California TV stations, which devoted 10 times more air time to Scott Peterson than to the next steps in Iraq, the media in Atlanta were agog with the issue that most people thought had been settled when Clarence Darrow, the great advocate, whipped the great commoner William Jennings Bryan in their debate about “everyman’s grandpappy being a monkey.”
That took place in the summer of 1925, in the backwoods town of Dayton, Tenn.
I arrived home in OC on Veterans Day, as the Marines still were fighting and dying in Fallujah.
It then emerged that millions of Americans would not be allowed to watch the movie, “Saving Private Ryan” on their TV sets because the FCC objected to some of the language used by actors playing the parts of the GIs who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, 1944.
Since Janet Jackson bared a boob during last spring’s Super Bowl festivities, the federales have been pressuring TV stations not to air rude words, like the original version of “nuts” that one of the U.S. generals who landed in Normandy used when he rejected a request that the 82nd Airborne surrender to the Nazis at Bastogne.
At the time, I was a youngster in the Royal Air Force, stationed near one of the ports from which the Brits and Americans embarked on the greatest and most hazardous amphibious operation the world ever has seen.
And I can testify that some of the language used by the grunts of both invading armies was a far cry from the vocabulary one encounters at polite dinner parties.
Yet it’s the down-to-earth authenticity of “Private Ryan” that makes it a great movie. And a disgrace that the FCC threatened ABC’s affiliates with a possible loss of their licenses if they screened it before 10 p.m.
My only complaint about “Private Ryan” is that it omits any mention of the Brits who landed far more men and took more casualties than the Americans in Normandy in World War II.
But shame on ABC for yielding so pusillanimously to “banned in Boston” type censorship. y
Thank God, too, for the courage of our vets, who like their successors from Korea to Iraq, fought to defend our right to tell these Holy Joes in Washington to, how should I put it, get stuffed!
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, journalist, former member of the House of Commons and undersecretary of state in the U.K. government.
