Gerard Baker - Times Online - WBLG

Cutting and Running

Last weekend, at the invitation of a good friend, I found myself in Eminence, Missouri, a place that is, geographically speaking, just about the aortic valve of the heart of middle America. A town of 548 souls, the signs say, about 200 miles southwest of St Louis, the very paradigm of rural American simpicity, the kind of place where , as one of my hosts put it, "all the houses have wheels and none of the cars does."

I was there not to take advantage of the hiking possibilities in the magnificent northern reaches of the Ozark mountains nor to sample the canoeing on the nearby spectacular Jacks Fork River, but to gatecrash a very private reunion and in the process to learn a little about the sharp end of American foreign policy.

Flag Burning

Non-Americans will never understand the significance of the flag to Americans.  To outsiders it looks suspiciously like, at best, something of a fetish, at worst, a manifestation of ugly nationalism.  To amend the constitution to ban desecration of it, as the Senate tried but just failed to do this week,
looks to America's many critics like an example of a growing willingness to suppress the rights of dissenters in defence of a blind belief in the nation right or wrong.

Bad football analogies

Everybody's tempted by it.  The confidence that no reader will be thinking about anything else this time of the quadrennium draws even the most cautious writer to have a go at the "life is just like the world cup" passage.  The analogy is crying out to be struck, curled with perfect, Beckham-like, precision into the corner of the column.

But this one one from our dear friends at The Guardian, I'm afraid, ends up high in the stands, where it should, if there's any justice, be confiscated, never to be returned to the field of decent debate.

Roughly summarised, it says: England's repeated failure to win the World Cup is just like America's repeated tendency to commit "murder" when it goes to war.   Nice one, Gary.

Next up?  How losing on penalty kicks in the knockout phase is just like being beheaded by an angry jihadist.

American Philanthropy

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