Our enemies are right to mock us
11 April 2007
A taxi driver in Mexico City, who in my presence had just paid la mordida (the bite) to a traffic cop, taught me some lines by the 17th-century Creole nun and poetess, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz:
O who is more to blame,
He who sins for pay
Or he who pays for sin?
The application of this particular moral conundrum to the recent events in our own country is all too obvious. But whatever answer you may give to it, one thing seems indisputable: Britain has been shown in the past couple of weeks, quite accurately, to be a country of very slight account, with a population increasingly unable to distinguish the trivial from the important and the virtual from the real, led by a man of the most frivolous earnestness who for many years has been given to gushes of cheap moral enthusiasm (cheap, that is, for him, not for others who have to pay for it).
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