The flag is recognizable to a goodly number of Americans, but not to most. There's been this commercial here in the US, I first noticed it the day after Chirac told Sharon he was no longer welcome in France. It's a fast food company, its logo-golem bantering with a frenchman, or an actor with a broad french accent. It ends with a gesture of disdain on the part of the golem. The subject of their conversation is the company's transforming its "french" fries to something more appetizing to its customer base. The frenchman is cathartically humiliated with his own cliched gesture.
The pit bull, or Staffordshire Terrier, that a few years ago was frightening honest citizens and nervous mothers throughout the land, was bred for entertainment. It was bred to survive contests in pits, mortal contests. Like cock fights only with mammals. The people whose sport that was were useful to the kind of men and women who ran things in the England of that era. A kind of symbiosis, two utterly different types of human being co-operating, one with its weak blood and cunning mind and inherited power, the other with its strong back and its numb heart and dim intellect. It is exactly that spirit, the spirit of that symbiotic bleakness and violence, the blood lust of people who have absolutely no hope of grace, that now saturates America, though the American royalty are completely invisible to the so-called common people.
