A most hearty congratulations to The Right Honorable Boris Johnson who succeeded Theresa May yesterday, July 24, as the UK’s new Prime Minister. May certainly gave it her best shot but was never able to figure out the flaming dumpster wreck that was Brexit and so off into the sunset she rides. So long and thanks for all the fish, Mrs. May! You will most likely in the annals of history be neither missed nor remembered.
As for the current incoming PM, The Right Honorable Boris Johnson… oh man, this is going to be good.
I will confess something now, which is only fair: I was initially very much opposed to both the Donald Trump presidency here in the US as well as the Brexit referendum in 2016. From everything that I’d read online, it’d seemed to me that all of the experts and professionals who’d studied politics, economics, sociology, etc, for a living were all making dire predictions about what both a Trump presidency and a Brexit would entail. All of the political, academic, and economic elites –people with Nobel Prizes, Pulitzers, MacArthur Fellowships, etc– were all shouting from the rooftops grave warnings about what would happen if we continued down these two populist paths.
But we’re now nearly three years into the Trump presidency here in the US (and in this time, Brexit has yet still to happen) and I think I’ve changed my tune. The person who convinced me most was Michael Lewis, actually. Recently, I finished reading The Fifth Risk which was a remarkable book about the US government and just how many unsung heroes work tirelessly in civil service to serve us average Americans. Yet, despite all their efforts, the public servants in US government continue to occupy an incredibly despised and ungrateful quarter in the collective public imagination. As Lewis writes, “Big Government” continues to be repeatedly used as a pejorative term by many American citizens, especially in many conservative and rural areas. It is consistently unappreciated, derided, and mocked. On one hand, while many Americans happily accept social services provided by Big Government (the interstate highway system, Social Security, Medicare), they merrily/happily/ignorantly give Big Government the finger with their other hand. It’s really quite a sad situation. If I worked in government at all, I’d be extremely depressed. How to do you continue to dedicating your life to helping people who hate you?
Continue reading “Congratulations, Mr. Prime Minister!”