Tuesday, June 6, 2017

London Calling

Twenty seventeen won't be remembered as a year of love, what with the terror attacks in London and the growing bitterness in the campaigns for the parliamentary election in the United Kingdom this Thursday.  Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservatives, incidentally,  have slipped to a one-point lead in the polls over Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. 
May had been Home Secretary in the Cameron Cabinet, which put her in charge of counter-terrorism.  Now, after three terror attacks in Britain on her watch as Prime Minister, she's declared that enough is enough.  It doesn't look good for someone who should have dealt this problem long ago, and Labourites know it.
A Labour win on Thursday would be a huge upset.  It would not only be a rejection of Tory values and a loss of confidence in the Conservatives' ability to handle internal security, it would put in power a more progressive government that would work more in concert with continental Europe even as Brexit proceeds - and form a new paradigm of resistance against the United States.  
We all just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which kicked of the Summer of Love in 1967, but there's no love to go around fifty years later.  Islamic extremists hate the West, there's bad blood between Labour and the Tories in Britain (as well as between the Democrats and the Republicans in America), Europeans have learned to distrust the United States, and Trump has learned to hate them back - especially the Muslim mayor of London for how he's handled terrorism.  "Love trumps hate?"  Boy, was that slogan wrong.  But then, the Summer of Love itself wasn't so much a love fest, what with young soldiers dying in Vietnam and racial resentment exploding in American cities in the form of riots.
Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust? :-O           

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