Poseur Presidents & Prime Ministers
And, are there any Great Men in the world today? Where — this is a question I've been asked by several readers recently — are the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Titos, the Lloyd Georges, the Woodrow Wilsons, the de Gaulles and Clemenceaus?
Our present band of poseur presidents and prime ministers cannot come close. Bush may think he is Churchill — remember all that condemnation of Chamberlain's 1938 appeasement we had to suffer before we invaded Iraq? — but he cannot really compare himself to his dad, let alone our Winston.
Bush Junior looks like a nerd while his friends — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest — actually look disreputable. French President Jacques Chirac would like to be a Great Man but his problem is that he can be mocked — see France's equivalent of Spitting Image. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has a worse impediment. He has become a mockery of himself. Blair's self-righteousness and self-regard would have earned him my dad's ultimate put-down of all pretentious men: that he was a twerp. And my dad, I should add, kept Churchill's portrait over the dining room fireplace.
[Excerpt from "Wanted: Great world leaders", by Robert Fisk ("British Columnist"), in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 19 April 2005.]