From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 12: Swallowed by Leviathan
Basic Russian for crash test dummies
Recently, I was at a boomer backyard barbecue in Boston.The males had Ivy League degrees and high incomes evident in subtle ways. The wives who were white had the perfect cheekbones and teeth that only generations of breeding and expensive maintenance can produce. The nonwhite wives had PhD’s instead.
The host in a Yes We Can T-shirt sneezed. “Barack you!” said a preppie-looking man, and explained with a broad smile that it’s a new locution replacing “Bless you.”
I walked up to the Obamapod and said, “I like your barackhlo line.”
“It’s Barack you,” he said, with the typical linguistic obtuseness of the American born-and-bred, of which genus he turned out to be a prize specimen. A Harvard MD, native of North Carolina, smart and personable, he told me how he grew up in a genteel and racist home where only the N-word was used to refer to Afro-Americans. He also said that since Barack Obama’s election he was at last able to breathe.
Belgium Nearer to the Brink
These elections highlighted the fact that Flanders and Wallonia are two different nations. While the left won in Wallonia, it was crushed in Flanders.
In the Walloon Parliament (75 seats) the leftist green partyEcolo won 14 seats (+11), the Parti Socialiste (PS) remained the biggest with 30 seats (-4), the liberal-conservative Mouvement Reformateurreceived 18 seats (-2), the centrist christian-democrat CDH won 13 seats (-1) and theFront National lost its 4 seats. The greatest surprise was that the PS was only marginally affected by the tsunami of corruption and other scandals (even one involving child pornography) in which it has been entangled.
In the Flemish Parliament (124 seats), however, the picture is entirely different. The Socialists dropped to 19 seats (-6), the leftist Liberals to 21 seats (-4). The biggest party are the Christian-Democrats with 31 seats (-4). The Greens won 7 seats (+1). The Flemish-nationalist Vlaams Belang (VB), which advocates the independence of Flanders dropped to 21 seats (-11), but two other parties, also explicitly in favour of Flemish independence, made a major break-through: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which won 16 seats (+16), and the liberal-conservative LDD party, which won 8 seats (+8).
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