![]() What is manifest, instead, is a touchingly resilient holiday spirit.Īround 1 P.M. There is Partygate, the scandal surrounding Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s participation, or non-participation, in a series of Downing Street parties held in defiance of lock-down rules, and Brexit, which to a cosmopolitan outsider seems like the squalid, pointless mess it was always sure to be, but they are not on the day’s shipping manifest. ![]() One looks for signs of discontent, dismay, the disconsolate, and the disillusioned-all the disses, in fact-and, though they must be lurking, on these days they merely lurk. Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee-her platinum, in fact, celebrating seventy years since her coronation-which began to be seriously, formally celebrated in London on Thursday, at the start of a four-day bank-holiday weekend, is of that kind. An event of that kind can slip away uncaught, because resisting the familiar language resists the familiar point. ![]() We try to use language to avoid cliché, but there are certain public occasions that are so deliberately crafted as clichés, or so allow themselves to be entangled in them-clichés in the positive sense of consoling continuities, familiar things that capture unchanging tradition, like Christmas lights or the first pitch of baseball season-that to avoid the cliché is to fail to capture the event properly. ![]()
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