Continuity?

This blog is about when I find things, not about when they happen. Sorry, but you'll have to get used to that. Christopher Hitchens, as usual mixing up the essential with the circumstantial, notices life through the lense of literature, making his own quirky sense of it. Spengler would have liked this (the fact, not the sentiment):

If there was one thing on which I would have wagered a good deal, it was the impossi­bility of Britain’s ever again being governed by a waistcoated charmer from that particular school. Yet here we are 70 years on, and the British Conservatives are led by an old Etonian named David Cameron, who was also a member of a Brideshead-type dining club at Oxford. And all the indications are that he could oust “New Labour” from power. I dare say you could call that promising.

Mr. Grumpy Future was always convinced that British democracy was a charade played by the Etonian elites for public consumption*1). I, for my part, go with this quote from Conolly:

In spite of the slow conversion of progressive ideas into the fact of history, the Dark Ages have a way of coming back. Civilisation—the world of affection and reason and freedom and justice—is a luxury which must be fought for, as dangerous to possess as an oil-field or an unlucky diamond.

What can I do? I'm a child of my times!

*1) Note added June 16th: Just in case anyone gets me wrong, I think Spengler's conception of English democracy was already barely tenable when he wrote "Decline of the West". The 20th century opened even the top jobs to a much wider range of backgrounds. But, as we see, that doesn't mean that someone of the old elites will never again get a chance.