John Cleese -- and imperialist humour

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Tom for your insightful contributions. I take the point about
Marx and Balzac. But to adapt a famous phrase: "John Cleese is no
Balzac". I think the relation between the politician and the
entertainer (roles which Rumsfeld manages to combine) could be seen as
John Cleese's being Lord Owen's court jester. The whole team is to my
mind facile and superficial. I think their background ideology is the
unquestioned dominant and triumphalist British cliche of Whigism, seen
as the victory of the underdog against Kings and priests. But they,
especially perhaps Terry Gilliam, push that particular envelope in the
direction of the anarchistic version of it -- what Marx in the
Communist manifesto called "bourgeois (individualist) socialism". (By
the way, some of my best friends are anarchists). I wonder if that is
why the team finds it so easy to joke about splitting; if you don't
organise you don't split, so you don't feel the urgency or the agony,
so you can laugh at it.

I followed your link to Tom O'Lincoln in Arthuriana. Prior to that I
had thought you might be one of the Galway O'Lincolns :-) [Comrades, I
have been known to smile!]

JD