Long to reign over us

Hard to get any sense out of the British papers today, given the Jubilee celebrations. The Queen was wearing a stunning ensemble from the Dowdy Matron collection, circa 1955. My fellow cultural historians will have a field day in future generations explaining Dame Edna Everidge and Ozzy Osbourne’s prominence. God forbid they should celebrate with excerpts from Shakespeare or, I don’t know, Upstairs Downstairs.

Speaking of the fear of high culture, TNT just ran a version of King Lear transposed to the Old West (haven’t seen it yet) with Patrick Stewart. Notably, in their commercials for it, they didn’t mention Lear or Shakespeare.

A court in India makes illegal any assembly of 4 or more pigs. Cows, meanwhile, do whatever they like. Can’t we all just get along?

A girl in England has been excused from school because she bursts into tears every time she sees a school uniform. She has been diagnosed with “school phobia.” Of course when a middle-aged Tory bursts into tears when he sees a school uniform, it’s something else entirely.

A couple of Salvadoran military chiefs look to go on trial in Florida for atrocities committed in the early 1980s. Two more war criminals I didn’t know had been given asylum. I’m not sure what they’ve been doing while here. You’ll remember that the guy who shot the Vietcong captive in the head in the most famous photo from the Vietnam war owned a pizza shop in Virginia.

Arafat overrules a court to keep in jail someone Israel has ordered him to keep in jail, and fuck the rule of law. Actually, the NY Times quotes a Clinton staffer as saying that their policy in such cases was “I don’t think we really cared about due process.” Hey, no kidding. As I’ve been saying, the US policy re Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, etc has been that “terrorists” should be kept in jail, no “revolving door,” but not actually ever put on trial.