Three weeks from now, America will be marking the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The observances will be muted in New York, but not in Kabul - because that's the privilege of victory. So, ahead of that grim date, I thought we'd revisit August 2001 with a few columns of mine from that last summer.
We began a fortnight ago with the summer of sharks, and continued with racial demagoguery then and now. For this week's entry, I see Joe Biden is under fire for taking off for Camp David as America suffered a pitiful global humiliation. He'd barely been back in Washington for a day before it was decided that he'd heading off for a long weekend back home in Wilmington, Delaware. Apparently, Sleepy Joe finds it hard to sleep at the White House: possibly Trump made sinister modifications to the MyPillows before he left the residence.
Well, it's hard to see that it makes any difference where Biden sleeps as it's only the useless US media still maintaining the pretense that he's exercising executive authority. Sot here, from The Spectator of August 25th 2001, is a column of mine about a far more leisurely presidential break. I wouldn't cite this as my best work, but, quite unintentionally, it captures well the lazy languorous quality of what came to be called America's long "holiday from history":
ACCORDING to his tanned spokesman, George W Bush will cut short his vacation in Crawford, Texas, and return to Washington next Friday, 31st August. The President arrived in Crawford on 4th August and it was thought he intended to stay at least until Labor Day, 3rd September, thus beating Richard Nixon's 1969 summer sojourn and earning his place in history as the taker of the longest-ever presidential vacation. On the other hand, even at a paltry twenty-eight days, it's almost certainly the longest vacation anyone's ever taken in the Greater Waco area. Don't try to book online: the computer will redirect you to more glamorous resorts such as Crawford, Florida, Crawfordsville, Indiana, Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, or the Crawford oil field in the middle of the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And, if you insist that no, really, you really want to spend a month in Crawford, Texas, the entire site crashes.
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