Idle question for pwhysall
In recent decades an irritating verbal tic has taken hold of US presidents, though not of presidential candidates. It is usually phrased thusly:
No, it was only after the assumption of automatic upward mobility gave way to the perception of a game of musical chairs, as the nation’s physical plant grew visibly shabbier and its politics more squalid and nakedly corrupt, as its global hegemony grew costlier to maintain even as ROI declined, that presidents began piously and disingenuously assuring us that what looks to any sane person like a declining curve is actually further progress on the Republic’s ascent to glory. Aspirants to the office, of course, say no such thing when it is held by the opposition: they warn us, rather, that everything’s turning to shit owing to the ineptitude or outright malice (Bill Clinton as KGB sleeper agent recruited in 1969; Barack Hussein Obama groomed from birth back in Kenya—sired, according to mad Pam Geller, by Malcolm X!—to establish the Marxist caliphate on these shores) of the incumbent. And after the election? Why, we’re on the road to rapture again—”America’s best days are still to come!”
My question is: is there an equivalent in contemporary politics in Auld Blighty? The closest thing I’m aware of, scarcely to be regarded as “contemporary,” is Harold Macmillan’s 1957 declaration “Most of our people have never had it so good,” which it seems to me had the advantage of being true, particularly with the memory of rationing and air raids being then fresh in the memories of most adults. But surely if he’d got up and proclaimed that the best days of the British Empire were yet to come, he’d have been laughed off the stage, don’t you think?
What’s the most fatuous sort of political phrase going around in your green and pleasant land these days?
cordially,
America’s best days are still to come!Now, I have not gone a-googling for the origins of this bromide, but in seems to me that one heard it less frequently if at all from those blokes back in the day, possibly because the assertion would have struck listeners as self-evident and trite: upward mobility was pretty much a tenet of civic religion, and if from one decade to the next the family car was fancier, the pay envelope fatter, the ranch home in a tonier suburb, then obviously the country as a whole was getting better and better. It was a seductive notion, and I daresay it’s still persuasive in the upper echelons of our classless society. My hedge fund’s doing great! What are these takers whining about?
No, it was only after the assumption of automatic upward mobility gave way to the perception of a game of musical chairs, as the nation’s physical plant grew visibly shabbier and its politics more squalid and nakedly corrupt, as its global hegemony grew costlier to maintain even as ROI declined, that presidents began piously and disingenuously assuring us that what looks to any sane person like a declining curve is actually further progress on the Republic’s ascent to glory. Aspirants to the office, of course, say no such thing when it is held by the opposition: they warn us, rather, that everything’s turning to shit owing to the ineptitude or outright malice (Bill Clinton as KGB sleeper agent recruited in 1969; Barack Hussein Obama groomed from birth back in Kenya—sired, according to mad Pam Geller, by Malcolm X!—to establish the Marxist caliphate on these shores) of the incumbent. And after the election? Why, we’re on the road to rapture again—”America’s best days are still to come!”
My question is: is there an equivalent in contemporary politics in Auld Blighty? The closest thing I’m aware of, scarcely to be regarded as “contemporary,” is Harold Macmillan’s 1957 declaration “Most of our people have never had it so good,” which it seems to me had the advantage of being true, particularly with the memory of rationing and air raids being then fresh in the memories of most adults. But surely if he’d got up and proclaimed that the best days of the British Empire were yet to come, he’d have been laughed off the stage, don’t you think?
What’s the most fatuous sort of political phrase going around in your green and pleasant land these days?
cordially,
