ninme

Times Online - Republican crisis biggest in US since Second World War. Well, almost, by Gerard Baker

WE NO LONGER live in the real world. We have all been forced to inhabit the semi-fictional world of the headline writer, in which every incremental nudge forward in humanity’s progress is Epoch-Making, in which the banal setbacks of everyday life are Catastrophic Defeats.

This hyperbole addiction can impair our moral discernment, dim our sense of history, and render us insensitive to genuinely important events. In this world Amnesty International can, as it did this week, call Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our times”…

In this world, the French are about to vote this weekend on a question that will determine the Future of Europe, and by obvious extension, the Whole of Humanity. Protagonists on both sides agree, it is historic. It’s either 1940 or 1968. If you throw in political turmoil in Germany, you get what some commentators detect as a “whiff of 1848” across the old continent.

1848? Why stop there? Why not suggest that this might be the most important moment since Romulus and Remus stumbled across that friendly wolf in the barren Latium countryside?

I love Gerard Baker.

But of course this means (once you’ve read the whole thing, you understand) that the Republicans’ absolute and utter ineptness at doing there gosh-darned jobs has even been noticed ‘cross the pond. Lovely.