Like pretty much everyone else not hiding under a duvet, I've read and heard a fair number of opinions about yesterday's Jubilee bash. They float past harmlessly, scarcely disturbing the ear or eye, so prolific is their number. I'll stick my neck out nonetheless and risk the judgement that the second least intelligent one I've come across is this from some aimless ruminations in an editorial in today's Guardian:
Significant, too, were the different categories of vessel. The prominent place allocated to the "little ships" of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 - and to the planned jubilee Lancaster and Spitfire flypast - gave much pleasure to many. But they are enduring reminders - as was a royal barge bearing the name of Churchill's home - that Elizabeth II owes her unarguably special hold on British life not simply to heredity but also to the fact that she, like the little ships, is a living connection to modern Britain's founding wartime myth. That connection cannot endure indefinitely. The past may be another country. But so is the future.
So, too, is the thinking of the Guardian's editorialist. This passage is of a piece with the leader from the same paper that I featured here. The Groan for some reason is getting restless about any national fondness for recalling Britain's role in the defeat of Nazism. Why it is hard to imagine. Let 'indefinitely' take care of itself; but to have played a part in the rescue of civilization - and I'm not speaking in inverted commas here - from a regime of cruelty and criminality that even today knocks the breath away however many times one has read the details, is something worth remembering and celebrating so long as there are others who deny, ignore, marginalize or minimize it.
I said this was the second least intelligent opinion. The least intelligent is the one (repeated round and about the internet) which on account of yesterday's pageantry would link Britain to North Korea. It's about as clever as comparing Robert Redford with Hitler because of the moustache.
