Poor, unlovely Gordon Brown desperately pursuing Barack Obama past the chopped zucchini and simmering coulis of that UN kitchen in the forlorn hope of landing one brief photo op of the two geopolitical colossi mano-a-mano. He’s as pitiful as that mentally ill guy in Vancouver besotted with Joe Biden. More so, in fact. At least that fellow did it on his own dime, downloading his ALL ACCESS PASS from the Internet, rather than requiring legions of aides and thousands of pounds to achieve pretty much the same result. The United Kingdom has huge systemic problems: its public spending is at a peacetime high and mostly wasted. Its social capital is all but exhausted: what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family in America, Britain’s postwar welfare state has done to the general population. If Gordon Brown rages naked at his aides, it’s a cry of impotence: like many leaders of exhausted, unsustainable, micro-regulated entitlement states, he can do nothing about anything that matters.
Of all the itsy-bitsy stories in my inbox this week, the one that summed it up featured Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York. He’s promising that the big hole at Ground Zero isn’t going to be there for another decade. “I’m not going to leave this world with that hole in the ground 10 years from now,” he says. In the 21st century, that’s what passes for action, for get-tough leadership, for riding herd. Sure, those jihad boys got lucky and took out a couple skyscrapers, but the old can’t-do spirit kicked in and a mere nine years later we’ve got a seven-storey hole on which seven billion dollars have been lavished. But, if we can’t put up a replacement building within a decade, we can definitely do it within two. Probably. The non-official estimated date of completion for the new 1 World Trade Center right now is said to be 2018. Don’t hold your breath. We’ve got a hot dog to redesign.
It doesn’t matter now what the eventual replacement building is at Ground Zero. The hole is the memorial: a gaping, multi-storey, multi-billion-dollar hole, profound and eloquent in its nullity.
