President Biden has arrived
I hope you don’t mind, brothers and sisters, if we (and I am not using the royal “we”) borrow your President for a bit. One thing I can promise you, there will be no Biden baby balloons, no signs with words of angry protest along limousine routes, no demonstrations against an administration tacitly supporting entrenched racism, no need for this President to avoid the public here. Except among the unevolved minority, the people of Britain love Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, the real President of the United States.
In Mr. Biden’s own words, “America is back,” and the world knows it. When Joe Biden became President our days got just a little easier, our lives a little less dangerous, our hopes for the future that much brighter. For my part, I no longer feel the sting of shame nor the need to apologize for the man representing the country of my birth.
After landing in Britain at the Royal Air Force Base Mildenhall, Suffolk, President Biden delivered an impassioned speech to American service members stationed there, telling them, “This is my first overseas trip as President of the United States. I’m heading to the G7 [in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, in Cornwall], then to the NATO ministerial and then to meet with Mr.Putin, to let him know what I want him to know.” With those final words the men and women erupted in applause, as if to acknowledge the understatement that the former guy betrayed his country to Putin.
It was symbolic of how everyone here feels. The endless hatred, the angry tweets, the boasting, the dog whistle racism, the blaming, the whining, the dangerous naïveté and deadly carelessness are all a thing of the awful past. The world is breathing easier and can dare to hope again.
So thank you for letting us borrow him. We will cherish him while he’s here and return him, however reluctantly, at the sad and proper time of parting. But we will never again forget what it was like when the leader of the free world was a monster, nor ever cease to praise and thank this good and kind and wise and ancient man for bringing those terrible days to a sacred end. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.