Norms and Parameters

~As I was saying yesterday, it's Queers for Palestine all the way down - or, even more bizarrely, NPR Ladies d'un Certain Âge for Somali Daycare Fraudsters. Traditionally, the Chinese curse you to live in interesting times. On my first long-ago acquaintance with the Land of 10,000 Quality Learing Centers, Minnesota - like my neighbours across the Connecticut River in Vermont - appeared cursed to live in irredeemably boring times. If you were as skilled as the respective creators of the Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart sitcoms, you could parlay that into big bucks. But in neither state was it enough for the NPR types. So they decided to make their states "interesting" - and once "Somali daycare" becomes a common or garden expression there are no easy routes back.

Minneapolis in that sense can stand for almost the entire west. One expects what Sir Sadiq Khan calls a "great world city" such as London, or New York or Paris, to be vulnerable to a surfeit of diversity, but not Minneapolis or, a little east of me in Maine, Lewiston-Auburn. Yet it happened - and, as evidenced by the scenes on the streets, half your neighbours are willing to take a bullet to keep it happening.

If we could reduce, urgently, that deluded half to, say, a third, there might be a sporting chance of saving the western world. That is the existential question for all of us - whether enough of our kith will abandon enough of their fever dreams in enough time to enable enough of a course-correction. Speaking for myself, I hold the same views on public policy I held back in the disco era - except in two significant respects: a) flared trousers; b) the US military. As a foreigner, I had no grasp of quite how captured and corrupted was the Pentagon. So I am now in favour of not permitting America's soldiery to leave barracks except on day release - for three-hour dictator-kidnapping raids or a bit of nuclear bunker-busting. But I would not support any lengthier foreign warmaking until every single beribboned US commander from Victory Over Japan Day to Non-Victory Over Pushtun Goatherds Day is six feet under. For that reason, I view with grave misgivings this month's decision to increase the Pentagon's already bloated budget by over fifty per cent: insufficient of the folding stuff is not the reason why America's money-no-object military can't win a war.

And, in any case, the real battle is for the home front.