-By Warner Todd Huston
Wow. You know it’s gotten bad in the U.K. when a left-wing actor and British icon is now saying that his country has lost its essential Englishness. It looks like Monty Python alum John Cleese has “funny walked” his way into a bit of a controversy over his remarks, and this time from the left for a change.
Last week the 71-year-old comedian told a Sydney, Australia TV audience that London was “no longer an English city.”
You could see the steam come from the left’s ears over that one.
According to The Sun, Cleese was asked about what he felt about the yob riots that plagued England in August. Cleese apparently wasn’t very sanguine of the state of things in jolly old England.
“I’m not sure what’s going on in Britain. Let me say this, I don’t know what’s going on in London because London is no longer an English city.
“That’s how they got the Olympics. They said, ‘We’re the most cosmopolitan city on Earth’, but it doesn’t feel English.
“I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King’s Road and say to me, ‘Well, where are all the English people?’
“I love having different cultures around but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you’re left thinking, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
Naturally, left-wingers everywhere are a bit miffed at Cleese’s slam of multiculturalism. I won’t waste your time with the critic’s whining, though.
Now Cleese is well known as just another, knee-jerk liberal, so these sort of comments might tend to show how bad things really have gotten in England. If even left-wingers like John Cleese are feeling that things have gone off track due to untrammeled immigration and self-destructive multiculturalism, then it must be bad.
Truthfully, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. England is long dead. It’s like getting mad about someone talking about the fall of Rome or the end of the Persian Empire. They are gone. Why worry about it now?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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