Failed States

America, from Florida in 2000 to Washington this week.

And her three special friends at election time, although she didn't always necessarily do anything for two of them once the votes were in:

- The Irish Republic, arguably more a Church with a State than a State with a Church (although that was never remotely what the State's founders had in mind, to say the very least), but unarguably where both have now collapsed;

- Italy, which as a unified republic most people there have never really wanted anyway, with Italian-Americans defining themselves as such only because that was how they were all lumped together on Ellis Island; and

- Israel, where the last remaining livers of the secular Ashkenazi nationalist dream are on the streets, studiously ignored by the Western media, as America prepares to withdraw her dried up teat, marking the end of paying somewhere else to maintain the social democracy most vigorously opposed at home by the most vigorous defenders of that spending abroad.

Add in America's favourite international project after Israel, the EU, which is now inconceivable without Schengen and the euro, both of which are now merely waiting for the Germans to put them out of everyone's misery, as was always going to happen at some point, the point that has now arrived.

And add in that state within so many states, the Murdoch Empire, which includes all of its nominally British client-politicians, the people who have hijacked both main parties and turned them into vehicles of unbridled global capitalism together with a willingness to die for America in a war against Britain, or for Israel in a war against either.

All pure products of Modernity, of course. Very embodiments of it, in fact.