The brilliant Fintan O’Toole
absolutely nailed the disingenuous and embarrassing myth of British
exceptionalism in a piece in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/11/coronavirus-exposed-myth-british-exceptionalism.
A whiff of that particular
myth has been steadily seeping under the door during the current lock down, accompanied
by nostalgic radio music evoking thoughts of how Winston Churchill and Vera
Lynn led the plucky Brits to victory over the foreign menace, with a subtext
that our uniquely indomitable spirit will see us through the current crisis, regardless of
the serial fuck-ups that have marked our response so far.
Johnson is apparently on the
mend but, according to his father, had his own dulce et decorum est pro patria mori moment, by almost “taking one for the
team”.
Britain undoubtedly does have
some admirable national characteristics in its societal DNA, but so does every
other country on the bloody planet, which is hardly surprising given the boundary-crossing ebb and flow of people over the last 10,000 years. To be
constantly banging on about our national greatness is more like an embarrassing
show of adolescent insecurity than an adult response to an indiscriminate global crisis.
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