I missed this a day or so ago, but if anyone has any doubt where Biden's sympathies lie in this world this should really make that very clear:
To be fair, it is a great poem — as are so many others by Yeats.https://t.co/3GdlJBm6Bp
— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) June 9, 2021
I have little to add to that, except to note that I agree regarding Yeats.
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The reaction of the British Government is going to be very interesting to watch.
This is one U.S. intervention that I welcome with open arms.
Ah, Suez.
A very nice thought provoking dig beneath the surface here, should anyone be interested https://www.bu.edu/law/files/2015/11/Warpowers_Conference_PninaLahav.pdf
It strikes me that this is President Biden’s left hook, after the right hook of the demarche, telling off Johnson in no uncertain terms (See: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/10/northern-ireland-biden-brexit-talks-warning-tensions) about his catastrophic mishandling of the Northern Ireland/Ireland situation, almost certainly the product of Johnson’s neo-colonialist disdain for the natives!
Johnson is quoted as saying Biden is like “a breath of fresh air”. It seems to me, in view of these two well aimed hooks from President Biden, that Johnson is mistaking the hot air from his own punctured balloon for fresh air, showing, once again, what a poor judge of matters he is.
Of course, we know exactly what happened at the meeting. Joe said what the US wanted to happen and Boris said “sure, no problem” and then it is all smiles for the camera.
The problem is that this is what happens at EVERY meeting with EVERYONE….. and we know that eventually the contradictions come home to roost.
Indeed….
Is there any point in listening to anything Johnson says? A proven liar many times over, who signs international treaties only to threaten to break them, who betrays the people (or guillible fools?) who voted for Brexit and his party, who plays the clown while being ruthlessly self centered on taking and keeping power by whatever means possible.
I hope Biden has given him a good kicking.
Maybe making too much of this. If you listen to the clip that Stanage lifted from RTE –
1. Biden misquotes (slightly) – which suggests poor recollection of a speechwriter’s desperate attempt to cobble rhetoric together, not an intimate acquaintance with Yeats or intended slight towards the UK gov. Because –
2. The citation is actually ill-served, as no “terrible beauty” is actually presented, rather a difficult situation that has to be dealt with by rounds of discussion and agreement – scarcely a clarion call to capture even the post offices of this world, let alone the banks.
Oh come on….the messaging was very, very clear
One can believe what one wishes,of course; but – unless Stanage has inside information, and he does not indicate this here or elsewhere, that I have seen – I suggest his tweet was merely a provocative joke, rather than a justified asessment of a more virulent US approach to Bloody Johnson’s gov.
Biden does not make mistakes like that
@ ardj
I’m with Richard on this. Political and poetic language can often have much in common, in that they often rely on nuance, mood and tone, rather than on Gradgrindian exactitude.
A famously spectacular example is that of Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, with its poetic “Iron Curtain” image that still shapes our thinking on the issue of competing political models.
An example in which mood and tone was all, was JFK’s famous Berlin declaration “Ich bin ein Berliner”, where the mood and tone were rapturously received, despite the meaning, and not just the nuance, being capable of misinterpretation, since “ein Berliner” can mean a type of doughnut (see: ,https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-real-meaning-of-ich-bin-ein-berliner/309500/), so that JFK could effectively have said the equivalent of “I am a Chelsea bun”, or “I am an Eccles cake”.
No matter – it was enough that JFK addressed Berliners in German, for the point to be made.
Similarly, President Biden’s reference – even if incorrectly remembered, and even if, as another commentator has it, there was no “terrible beauty born”, only terror and civil war – is, I would say, on a par with Luther’s declaration at the Diet of Worms, when asked to recant:
“Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God.”
President Biden has, in other words, clearly stated: “thus far, and no further”, and warned Johnson to mend his ways and deal with the problem of the threat to the GFA, which being the modern version of a “terrible beauty”, and its hope for a peaceful Ireland.
The terrible beauty was born
It was terrible
The beauty was the Irish state
The price for securing it was high – Yeats knew it would be
Wikipedia has quite a long discussion of whether Kennedy’s phrase was ambiguous or not, and inclines heavily towards not. It attribute the contention that it was to a character in a 1980s Len Deighton novel (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
As I understand it, Kennedy asked his (native German speaking) translator to write out the phrase for him phonetically, as a parallel to “civis romanus sum”. The doughnut was not called a “Berliner” in Berlin at that time, and the “ein” is correct when using the phrase figuratively (I am a Berliner in spirit) rather than literally (I come from Berlin). The point was the subject of an academic paper nearly 20 years ago: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30153239 in which Jürgen Eichhoff (himself a Hamburger) goes so far as to say that Kennedy’s phrase was the only correct way of saying what he meant.
More, including the handwritten notes, here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-does-everybody-think-jfk-said-im-jelly-donut-180963779/
Where do Biden’s sympathies lie? He spontaneously told the BBC he is Irish.
I’ve heard of all sorts of hyphenated American identities, but people there seem much readier to identify themselves as Irish American than British American or English American.
Of course
There are more Irish Americans
And more reason to unite in memory of the Great Starvation (not famine) that the English used to force them out if their home country