Unpleasant

On the Newquay to Stansted flight on Wednesday evening, I had the misfortune to sit next to a couple of employees of a large American corporation whose name begins with G and ends in E with nothing in between.

Over the course of the flight, this pair found themselves to be in vigorous agreement on the following topics:

1. The proper way to refer to anti-war campaigners is 'feminazis'.

2. Dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima was the only appropriate response to the fact that the Japanese had mercilessly killed 50,000 American soldiers on Iwo Jima. Furthermore, we (i.e. the Allies, presumably, as these young fellows were British, not American) graciously gave the Japanese ample time to reflect on the error of their ways, and only dropped a second atomic bomb when the Japanese stubbornly refused to stop killing American soldiers.

3. (My favourite) 'They' don't like having gays in the army because gays are too aggressive. Whereas straight soldiers abide by the Geneva Convention, gay soldiers do not know when to stop maiming and killing. (Using this logic, I can only deduce that the pilots of the planes who dropped the atom bombs on Japan were gay.) Furthermore, the reason that gay soldiers are so aggressive is that they are surrounded by fit young men who refuse to sleep with them.

I was quite glad when we landed fifteen minutes early.