If you suddenly need a new national motto...

...it may indicate you've utterly lost the plot. Via Karol, we learn that Gordon Brown thinks Britain apparently needs a national motto.

Well, at least Brown is showing a vague concern about national identity but there's just no way modern Britain can produce a relevant and inspiring motto. Not one that will ever pass political muster, anyway. As you can tell by the article, no one in Britiain believes in anything anymore, except for the ones who will lobby for THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND MOHAMMED IS HIS PROPHET. They will come up with some immiserating cloying ahistorical Successories! horsehockey like Diversity and Progress!!!!!!!, and the post-reality cynics will croak out their grim sinister death rattle for the West all the louder.

My nomination? UVA UVAM VIVENDO VARIA FIT.

Or, more seriously: BUT IF NOT...

People grow accustomed to the narcotic effect of their own passive reception of today's sensory blitzkrieg of surfaces. They recoil from the more demanding nature of active engagement with the nuances encoded in the limitless permutations of 26 signs on pages. Besides, reading requires two things that are increasingly scarce and to which increasing numbers of Americans seem allergic -- solitude and silence.

In 1940 a British officer on Dunkirk beach sent London a three-word message: ``But if not.'' It was instantly recognized as from the Book of Daniel. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are commanded to worship a golden image or perish, they defiantly reply: ``Our God who we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods. ...''

Britain then still had the cohesion of a common culture of shared reading. That cohesion enabled Britain to stay the hand of Hitler, a fact pertinent to today's new age of barbarism.