12-03-2010, 09:00 AM
From cartoonist Steve Bell in The Guardian
What the former MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and her colleagues knew
![[Image: Steve-Bell-12.03.2010-001.jpg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/3/12/1268358266104/Steve-Bell-12.03.2010-001.jpg)
Satire on a satire that says it all.
A play on Oscar Wilde's 'The importance of being Earnest' - itself one of his best demolitions of the puffed up arrogance of the Victorian English upper classes. The exclamation refers to the following dialogue:
OK - a little esoteric English but the offensive 'Uncle Tom' servants in the background plus the Dick Cheyney water-pouring lookalike should commend it to those in the USA too. You can be sure that Manningham Buller will see it and that she and here ilk be suitably outraged - after all they are SUCH superior beings eh?
What the former MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and her colleagues knew
Satire on a satire that says it all.
A play on Oscar Wilde's 'The importance of being Earnest' - itself one of his best demolitions of the puffed up arrogance of the Victorian English upper classes. The exclamation refers to the following dialogue:
Quote:Jack: I don't actually know who I am by birth. I was... well, I was found.With Manningham Buller in the Lady Bracknell role.
Lady Bracknell: Found?
Jack: Yes. The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentlemen of a kindly disposition found me and gave me the name of Worthing because he happened to have a first class ticket to Worthing at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It's a seaside resort.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this charitable gentlemen with the first class ticket to the seaside resort find you?
Jack: In a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: [closes eyes briefly] A handbag?
Jack: Yes, Lady Bracknell, I was in a hand bag. A somewhat large... black... leather handbag with handles... to it.
[pause]
Lady Bracknell: An ordinary handbag.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this Mr. James... or, Thomas Cardew come across this ordinary handbag?
Jack: The cloak room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own...
Lady Bracknell: [Shocked] The cloak room at Victoria Station?
Jack: Yes. The Brighton line.
Lady Bracknell: The line is immaterial.
[begins tearing up notes]
Lady Bracknell: Mr. Worthing. I must confess that I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it have handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French revolution, and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?
OK - a little esoteric English but the offensive 'Uncle Tom' servants in the background plus the Dick Cheyney water-pouring lookalike should commend it to those in the USA too. You can be sure that Manningham Buller will see it and that she and here ilk be suitably outraged - after all they are SUCH superior beings eh?
Peter Presland
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims"
Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12]
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
Claud Cockburn
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims"
Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12]
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
Claud Cockburn
[/SIZE][/SIZE]