Letter from America, part nine: Where are your balls, Theresa May?

New York, 6/15/2019 (Note the proper way to write the date!)

Dear Friends Across The Pond,

Here’s my burning question for Theresa May. Where are your balls?

A foreign dignitary, the same dignitary who has personally disparaged you in the past, now disparages the mayor of your capital city while en route to a state visit to your country … and what do you do? Nothing!

You’re an outgoing Prime Minister with absolutely nothing to lose and absolutely everything to gain, including your dignity. And you do nothing!

Where are your balls?

You’ve just kicked off from Europe and your own political party. You seem hell-bent on political and economic self-destruction – for yourself and your country.

Why did you not double-down and send Trump home right there on the tarmac? Tell him to take his hate speech, his bigotry, his anti-Muslim rhetoric and shove it in his pie-hole! Turn his plane right around and withdraw the invitation as he walks off the plane?

You would have been a national hero. Hell, you would have been a hero the world round. But instead, you wilted like a sad, dying flower desperate for water.

I’m reminded of that scene in Love Actually between Hugh Grant and Billy Bob Thornton. At the pivotal press conference, Grant’s character finally grew a pair: “I fear that this has become a bad relationship. A relationship based on the President taking exactly what he wants, and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain.

“We may be a small country, but we’re a great one too. Country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot, David Beckham’s left foot.

“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward [Britain] will be prepared to be much stronger.”

If only you had spoken these words and sent the Donald, tail between his knees, back to the US.

Instead, you settled for appeasement, like so many before you in the face of a bully.

I can see Winston Churchill now, cigar in one hand, brandy in the other. The look of disdain and disappointment in his eye. He’d say something so profound and deeply layered that you’d instantly realize your place of infamy in history, your personal failure in the moment of choice that could have signaled a retreat from our almost certain dystopian future of unchecked international autocrats. But instead, you fueled the machine.

“This is not the end,” he’d say. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Illustration: Theresa May by Rowan Tallant

Letter from America, part eight: Bohemian Rocketman

Letter from America, part seven: Come on UK, do something funny already

Letter from America, part six: So you’re getting divorced …

Letter from America, part five: Big Pharma chases Big Poop