Statues in makeshift bikinis require a good explanation, even in Hartsville, Tennesee. The reason is that G&L Garden Center received so many complaints about exhibiting statuses in classical style, ie nude, that they decided they had to cover them up.
At least it got a bit of attention, and since all publicity is good publicity, sale is apparently going up. The story does not tell if the buyers keep the 'clothes' on the statues.
After 9/11, I wasted many months urging formal imperialism on the Americans. The hands-off approach — "He may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch" — gave us the House of Saud and most of our present troubles. Better to kit out the chaps from the Beltway think-tanks in solar topees and ostrich feathers and make American imperialism an administrative reality. It could hardly get a worse press than the informal, cultural imperialism of hamburgers and "Dude, Where's My Car?" that provoked Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the former French defence minister, to claim America was dedicated to "the organised cretinisation of our people". Might as well make the cretinisation more organised, I'd say.
But no takers. America hasn't an imperialist bone in its body. For one thing, there's nobody to staff an imperial governing class. If you were the average 19th-century Englishman, life in the colonies had plenty of attractions: more land, better weather, the opportunity to escape the constraints of class. None of these factors applies to the average 21st-century American: if you're in Maine and you're sick of it, you can move to Hawaii rather than the Malay states. [...]
In Iraq, they're betting not on imperialism, but on liberty. That's a long shot, given the awful passivity and fatalism of the Arab world. But it's not inherently more preposterous than the fake Hashemite kingdom imposed on Mesopotamia by Britain. America may fail. But it will be an American failure. Imperial nostalgics who wish to live vicariously will have to look elsewhere.
Now that is an interesting historical theory: bad weather as a cause of imperialism.
If that were the case, Norwegians would be super-imperialists. Well, when I think about it, we were. Indeed, the economic capital of the modern new 'empire', New York, is named after York in England, an anglisized form of the name 'Jorvik' given to it by successive viking rulers, Danish and Norwegian. Later, when Britain was conquered in 1066, it was by people from French Normandie calling themselves Normans.
