The former is likely to wash its hands of the modern world, lament how things have gone to hell since the Brits stopped shoving civilization down the ululating maws of Wogland, and announce that you’re all welcome to your polyglot mishmash - I’ll be over here getting smashed on port and reading Patrick O’Brien novels. But at least they seem dedicated to enjoying life on their own terms; if they’re cultural conservatives, they retire to their version of Heston’s apartment in “The Omega Man,” surrounded by the remnants of Western glory, keeping to themselves, and venting their spleen now and then by burping off a few rounds at the moaning zombies outside in the darkened park.

The hard left, on the other hand, demonstrates all the symptoms of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure - there’s a rancid bitterness, a pissy miserablism that makes you feel very, very sorry for them. The world is going to hell, and they’re stuck in the last car with a newspaper they’ve read six times already; the only person they can harangue is sleeping off a skinful of lager, and they’re trying to work up a hot batch of hatred for the woman in the skin-cream ad above the traincar’s window, but she is rather pretty, in a Sloany way. (Bitch.) They’ve given up on convincing the rest of us fools that we’re trampolining with scissors and knives - all they can do is sneer, whine, mope and spit. In high school terms, they’re the skinny spotted unpopular kids who cannot believe the cheerleaders don’t know how wretched their empty lives really are. Sure, they have dates. Sure, they’re going to college. Sure, they’re going to meet big beefy guys with MBAs and end up in a nice house with a big garden, but don’t they know how empty it all is? Don’t they know that their very existence on the planet causes poverty in Peru and kills fish in the Atlantic?

As for aluminum cans, well, I think it goes without saying that they’re all crushed by hand by welfare-to-work recipients making three cents an hour, and shipped to Sierra Leone where desperate locals lick the dried beer from the sharp shards of old Bud containers, thus contributing to America’s shameful record of encouraging alcoholism and tongue laceration in the Third World. They say on a bright day the reflections from Mount Alcoa - as the locals sarcastically call it, and whose maintenance supplies 93% of the area jobs - blinds a rare breed of parrot and forces them to fly into buildings.

"Giant abattoir for converting the flesh of third-worlders into sausage"