The British sure know how to welcome a guest, especially when it’s Gee Dubya Shrub on a state visit. Let’s not count the fountain water stained red in Trafalgar Square; it’s the scribblers — wise-asses, poets, professors, novelists and the cream of the theater — whose tone set the example.
Dear Jorge,
Look out! Behind you!!
Hahahahahahahaha, only kidding.
Love,
DBC Pierre
That note, actually by novelist Peter Finlay using his nom de plume, was one of the 21 letters published earlier this week in London’s Guardian. Others who offered their welcome naturally included members of Parliament, none of whose words were as pungent as these:
Dear President Bush,
I’m sure you’ll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
Harold
Pinter
playwright
Chances are that Pinter would not be pleased to find himself in the same reception line as novelist Frederick Forsyth, who minced no words either. He offered a scathing review of the protestors and urged the president to pay them no mind, all neatly wrapped in chauvinist pride:
You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world’s most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.
It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine
second.
Sebastian Faulks, another well-known novelist (who described himself as pro-American), provided a counterpoint to Forsyth:
You can laugh at the old Stalinists who lead the protest march against you and ignore the anti-western ranting of a few journalists here whose pathology is one of guilt and self-hatred. But please do be aware of the distaste felt towards what you have done by reasonable, pro-American Britons. I hate to think what the allied dead of two world wars would have made of it, and of your presidency.
Missing from the letter writers, however, were the tastemakers who really make a difference. What did Rod Stewart have to say? Did Elton John have an opinion? And how about Robbie Williams? That’s not even counting the rappers. Let’s hear it from the heavyweights.
