I'm Back

I'm back, with a host of comments on books I've read. Here something from Melbourne, a 1950's biography of the Whig Prime Minister William Lamb, born and bred for leadership, so to speak, but clearly one of the most useless human beings ever to be alive. In the late 1820s he was appointed Irish Secretary, and this is what an oblivious David Cecil has to say about the Irish--this is, recall--written in the 1950s: "Under a frail veneer of eighteenth-century manners, [Ireland] wallowed in bloodstained medieval chaos. The Protestant governing class divided their time between bullying the natives, wild Hibernian rollickings and killing each other in duels. The mass of the people, savage, superstitious and on the edge of starvation, now fawned on their masters in oriental servility, now gathered together in secret societies with fantastic names--Caffees, Bootashees, Whiteboys and Ribbonmen--to plot their overthrow by means of atrocity and assassination" (193). Where to begin? "Savage"? "Superstitious"? "Oriental servility"? Lamb himself liked to do nothing, and when faced with momentous challenges to the feudalistic governing system in England, did everything to delay, defer and vacillate. Yet the Irish are seen as "natives'--much like any usual group of barbarians, barely under control of themselves. Is this the history of the world: a kind of ignorant incapacity to understand others who, through the very policies and actions devised by their masters, deign to rebel against the intolerable? I can see parallels between George W. Bush and William Lamb, useful tools for a coporate elite.