Surgery was required. The nurse arranged it for me. “You realise I’ll have to report this one,” she said sadly while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. They took me to the hospital where the surgeons detached the glass and determined that I still had the right number of fingers with all tendons attached and therefore would probably regain full use of my hand. I was not completely sure that was a good thing.

 

It was becoming crucial for us all to know as much as we could about these Americans since they plainly held all our lives in their hands. Otto Preminger did his best to help out, with a big cast movie about the ins and outs of US politics called Advise and Consent. Basically, it tells of how the President makes an unpopular choice for Secretary of State and studies the various forces that come into play to try and change his mind. The public reaction to the film was shock at the homosexual scandal outcome, but they were missing the point by about the width of the Atlantic. What was really shocking was how completely baffling the US political system is, even to its best exponents.
    I needed to know more about this and so waded through Allen Drury’s very thick book on which the film was based. The more I learned, the more confused I became. These people, with their trembling fingers on the hair-trigger of the Apocalypse, laboured under a system that nobody understood and which could function of its own accord to create outcomes that no one wanted or anticipated. We were doomed!  The Americans, creating a political system that obsessively strove to avoid falling into the traps that corrupt old Europe had succumbed to, had managed to fall instead into the traps that European democracy had been invented to avoid in the first place.