While wandering through The Independent (or at least one particular subsection of it) on-line earlier this week, I stumbled across this article by Christina Patterson about the UK's previous Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, now a Labour MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It occurred to me when I saw the link that I actually don't know a whole lot about Gordon Brown, besides him being an ex-Prime Minister and an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. I also remembered something random I'd read in London a while back. So I gave the article a read.....
Of course, it's always dangerous to get a picture of a major public figure from just one article about said person, even an article as relatively long as this one (notable in our short-attention-span world). If you deign to read the comments about the article, quite a number of which border on the vitriolic, to put it one way, the need to read with a certain level of skepticism in mind is reinforced, even if the nastiness of the comments makes one feel uncomfortable. And the article does somewhat cringe-inducingly come off as a puff piece about 'Broon' in overall time, in the sense of trying to seem like a public rehabilitation for the drubbing he took as PM.
(Naturally, if this had been a US-equivalent article about Dumbya and the vitriolic comments were all about what a slimebag POTUS he was, none of us would object. But 3CM digresses, as usual.)
At one in the article, I couldn't help thinking about a superficial parallel between GB and the best President we were robbed of, not quite 10 years ago:
"....I cast around for questions I think will pass the test of blandness. In that tiny pause, Brown leaps in and starts interviewing me. So, my father came from Scotland? Ah, and my mother's Swedish? Well, Gothenburg's very interesting, isn't it? Yes, Gothenburg is very interesting, and in other circumstances I'd love to talk about it, but not, perhaps, when I've got a few precious moments with a former prime minister. Bloody hell! I thought this was meant to be a man with no social skills! And now he's got me chatting away about my family, and how the light here is really rather Scandinavian, and the poor man can't get a word in edgeways."
Patterson also compares GB to her own father, both men:
"...who could be both witty and dour....
.....who could be socially awkward, but whose arguments could silence a room....
....with a big brain and a big heart...."
GB's own assessment of the best thing he did as PM is as follows:
'And if he was to pick one thing that he was proudest of? Brown doesn't hesitate. "I don't think people yet understand how near the most sophisticated financial system in the world was to collapse, and I think that I understood what was happening. Look, for most people, the last two years have not been anything like what people portrayed in the 1930s, but the financial collapse was originally as big as the 1930s, and so the fact that we managed to steer the economy, and prevent massive unemployment, and prevent high levels of mortgage repossession, and the fact that we got world-wide action through the G20 to do that, I think when people actually look at it in history..." He doesn't quite finish the sentence, but he doesn't need to.'
This gets me back to the something random I'd read in London, alluded to in the header. Not an article in The Guardian or some other UK paper, or a book, or a magazine, or anything like that. It was a graffito, somewhere in Notting Hill, which read something like:
"Why should Brown pay for Blair's war?"
Deep down, that taps at the root of the mess that Brown inherited during his short tenure as Prime Minister. Of course, what the graffitist inadvertently meant was not merely Blair's war, but Dumbya's war. In turn, playing the meta-game of infinite regress further and going back to Al Gore, Dumbya's war resulted ultimately, because in November 2000, as Jacob Weisberg put it:
"....if Gore is at fault.....so, too, is the public, which failed to see through what are, in the scheme of things, superficial faults to elect the more capable, intelligent, and experienced man."
Elections do have consequences that play out years down the line. We're going to find out on the Missouri Prop C vote this coming Tuesday (but that's a diary for tomorrow). So this fall, who's staying at home, or not voting Democratic, this fall and letting the Repugs and teabagger bigots take over? Brown inherited a mess from Blair, as President Obama did from Dumbya. The question is whether President Obama will go down as GB did in due course. As Weisberg notes, that ultimately is up to us, if we continue to show up, no matter how much it hurts or feels lame.
OK, it's Saturday night, and time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week below....