Splendid to see Boris developing the Apocalypse Now theme for 2009 which he road-tested in the Spectator Christmas issue. Here’s what the Mayor says in his New Year message:
I want to quote Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now when he says ‘Some day captain, this war is going to end’, and some day, this recession is going to end. We can speed the demise of this recession if we all help the poorest in our community and if we make the vital investment that we need in our mass transit system and in fighting crime, so that London emerges at the end better placed to compete and entrenched in its position as the greatest city on earth.
Polymath that he is, the Mayor is as fluent in the idiom of repeat-viewing DVD as he is in quoting Homer. And he is right to accord Apocalypse Now the implicit status of a key text for our time. Indeed, when he was editor, he commissioned me to write a piece on the relevance of that great movie to the post-9/11 world.
We have all grown used to quotes from The Godfather, an endlessly rewarding source of wisdom on power and its exercise. But as financial napalm rains down upon the world, Coppola’s other masterpiece may indeed prove a better guide to the tumult of 2009 and “the horror, the horror”.
Comments