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Sunday, November 09, 2008
The American Presidency and the English Garden
In the U.S. we call it “taking the bull by the horns.” In England it’s gardening over dumping spots. For, John Levett, it’s also remembering Uncle Syd.
A garden at Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s home in Kent
Photo: John Levett
By John Levett
I was up all night awaiting the Second Coming buoyed by the post-modernist assembly of disparate, conflicting, transcendent, gutter-crawling elements making up the BBC’s election coverage: Gore Vidal fired by gunpowder & bourbon; John Bolton restrained from leaping through a screen to get at a Beeb reporter giving the Colorado Republican chief a hard time; Simon Schama fresh from hospitality morphing more and more into a Lewis Carroll caterpillar; Christopher Hitchens rubbishing Palin in absentia with a venomous hilarity he ought to franchise; brave microphone thrustings towards naffed-off red staters who clearly use Deliverance as a training film; anchor David Dimbleby refusing to call the obvious the obvious despite the arriving outcome being obvious (“What a wuss,” said Schama). Family fun from midnight to almost dawn. I missed the moon landing; I wasn’t going to miss another (metaphorical) one.
Clearing out the utility room a few weeks ago, which involves taking everything out and putting it all back without getting rid of anything, I came across the mostly-forgotten The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H White; I remembered it from a course on American politics in my first year at university. Now I read it prior to the current ‘making,’ with remembrances of Hubert Humphrey smiling-whilst-falling through New England snows.