There is a striking disconnection in Athens between the blithe lack of concern that the government evinces, and which it has successfully communicated to much of the public, and the objective seriousness of Greece's plight.
Consider, too, the recent record of the party which laughably still calls itself Conservative: David Cameron and George Osborne's claims that there is a "global race" which can somehow be definitively either won or lost, their blithe return to fiscal dogma that was discredited in the 1930s – and, come to think of it, the dire decline of public libraries that has happened on their watch.
I've come to the end of my menstruating life without realising that, and I haven't realised that because there is nothing blithe or casual in how we talk about periods.
The older I grow, the more blithe idiocy seems the route to sanity.
I started in Germany, where a team of ignored inventors, in a blithe attempt to make a few thousand bucks from a struggling business venture, had accidentally crippled a global industry.
But while this is certainly a more defensible position than breathless technophilia, or the blithe stories of triumphally self-regulating urban ecosystems the vendors themselves peddle, I happen to believe this is not the case.
Did the blithe contempt for historical accuracy tweak your bustle?
The demand that American presidents emanate this sort of blithe nationalism therefore does have a racist and probably sexist upshot, even if there is no bigotry behind it.
Indeed, the trade gap in the first five months of this year was smaller than in the same period in 2006.But a closer look suggests that currency markets, rightly or wrongly, are blithe about trade imbalances.
As to what comes now, Mr Runciman is neither bleak nor blithe.
But Flemings claim that they have been driven to this sort of rigour by the blithe Walloon assumption that Flemings will always be able to speak French.
