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Monday

3 April 2006

The Borders of Appeasement

Borders Books has always prided itself on its annual fight against the dark forces of censorship by promoting banned books with special displays and readings.  Mind you, such a principled stand is easy in a country that supports the First Amendment to a fault and where the worst that Borders confronts is a concerned parent in Nebraska questioning whether Debbie Does Dallas should be in the kindergarten DVD library.  However, when Borders faces a load of real fascists who threaten to burn and behead people and have made it quite clear that they mean it, Borders goes for appeasement faster than you can say Neville Chamberlain. 

In the latest demonstration of a distinct lack of bottom, Borders has refused to carry copies of Free Inquiry magazine, which reprints the famous Danish cartoons.  This is not at all surprising, given that Borders has taken to stocking the Koran on top shelves only after a couple of complaints from the Brown shirts concerned Muslims. 

Being a private business, Borders is allowed to show the white feather if it chooses, but as a private citizen I am free to take my business elsewhere and encourage others to do likewise, which is what I am doing.

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Forest and Trees

In a refreshing bit of analysis, StrategyPage points out that the important news in Iraq is not in the steady drip, drip of casualties that the mainstream media trades in, but in the big picture.

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Krystalnachet 2006

Anti-Semitism has returned to France with a vengeance as Muslim gangs coerce women into luring Jewish men into traps to be robbed, tortured, and murdered.

It's like some perverted nostalgia craze.

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The War That Dares Not Speak Its Name

Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Steyn points out that the problem isn't with the miniscule anti-war movement, but with the majority of people who are for fighting the Islamofascists, but would prefer some more Churchillian frankness from our leaders about the nature of the enemy.

But my point is there's no mass anti-war movement. Some commentators claimed to be puzzled by the low turnout at a time when the polls show Iraq increasingly unpopular. But there are two kinds of persons objecting to the war: There's a shriveled Sheehan-Sheen left that's in effect urging on American failure in Iraq, and there's a potentially far larger group to their right that's increasingly wary of the official conception of the war. The latter don't want America to lose, they want to win -- decisively. And on the day's headlines -- on everything from the Danish cartoon jihad to the Afghan facing death for apostasy -- the fainthearted response of "public diplomacy" is in danger of sounding only marginally less nutty than Charlie Sheen.

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Another Step Closer

It looks as though the diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear crisis is becoming less likely and the military more so as Whitehall starts making contingency plans for a Coalition attack against the Mad Mullahs and their Atomic ambitions.

One can only hope.

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Good Things Come in Small Packages.

And just in case the balloon goes up, the SBS has recently acquired a mini-submarine capable of doing everything from scouting out beachheads to booking a decent hotel room.

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Sir Isaac Walton Turns in His Grave

Just show that Labour isn't wasting the taxpayers' money, the government has found another tough, urgent problem that must be overcome immediately if Britain is to become the Blairite paradise that we all aspire to.  We now learn that too many anglers are white, male, middle aged, and middle class.  Declaring that This Must Not Stand, the government has vowed that it will do all it can to make sure that as many women, youngsters, and ethnic minorities as possible will be lined up along the Grand Union Canal with a stick, a bent pin, and a tin of worms-- at bayonet point, if necessary.

When asked why the government can't just let people make up their own minds whether they go fishing or not, a spokesman acted as if the reporter had grown a second head.

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Drawing a Bath

I was going to give the above story the Nanny State Prize, but that has to go to the Right Hon. Mary Creagh (MP Labour), who has introduced a bill that would require all new baths in Britain to be fitted with mandatory regulators to make it impossible to draw a hot bath, least people scald themselves.

Now people can't even be trusted to bath themselves.  When they start putting CCTV cameras in the Karzi to make sure we've all wiped properly, then I fear will have reached to point of no return

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Toast!

On the brighter side, Tom Bartlett over at Slate has a rundown on the best in current toaster technology.  And if you can't get enough of all things toast, then check out the toaster museum.

Life is good!

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Headline: Jill Carroll returns to the U.S., Teen drug use declines

Clearly, Miss Carroll's homecoming has had a beneficial effect on young people

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Tuesday

4 April 2006

MechaMcKinney

""Ain't nobody gonna make me show ID!"

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D. Georgia) revealed how she plans to keep uppity white policemen in their place.

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Wednesday

5 April 2006

Ernest Stavro Blofeld, Call Your Service

From the news of the last week, it is clear that not only are the Mad Mullahs of Iran watching too many Bond films, but they've been concentrating too much on the ones starring Roger Moore.  That seems to be the only logical conclusion that one can draw from the increasingly bizarre boasts of superweapon upon superweapon that Tehran claims to have perfected and deployed to protect its "peaceful" nuclear weapons power programme from attacks by the Great Satan and the rest of the Coalition. 

It's always fascinating to see a totalitarian dictatorship  doing the military propaganda two-step.  The Fascists did it,  as did the Soviets Castro, the Communist Chinese, Saddam, and the North Koreans.  It's a very simple dance.  All you have to do is to set out to build a giant war machine or get your hands on nuclear weapons.  Then when the democracies take your threats seriously you claim that you are a peace-loving people who have never had any intention to acquire anything more lethal than a bottle of Squeezy Liquid, and in the next breath claim that no one had better dare attack you because you have an arsenal of secret atomic robot ninjas that make you invincible.

A harmless, yet invincible totalitarian regime.  Right. 

Iran's entry into this rogues gallery of bluff and doublethink comes in a week when its claims to military supremacy mixed with fluffy-bunny innocuousness started with a statement that they had developed a new surface to sea missile that was capable of evading radar.  That didn't cause too much of a stir beyond some cautious interest in military circles.  After all, there has been a lot of sabre rattling over Iraq's atomic ambitions and Tehran has long had an appetite for missile technology, so the news that what might perhaps be some variant, or just a renaming, of a Chinese silkworm missile being deployed was plausible enough.  Just add it into the Google news alerts keywords and carry on.

They followed this with a test firing of a new ballistic missile that they asserted had multiple warheads.  Okay, maybe the missile is real.  The "multiple warheads" was a bit optimistic, but maybe it's an early experimental job or a Chinese import.

Then came the announcement that Iran had put into service a torpedo that was "invisible to sonar" and could travel underwater at speeds of 225 miles per hour.  Given that your average torpedo travels at less than 60 knots, that was a little on the Buck Rogers side of things, but not too much.  After all, the Russians had developed what is known as a supercavitation torpedo that is propelled by a rocket motor and forms an air bubble around itself to reduce friction to almost zero allowing  it to reach remarkable speeds, so it does exist.  It's experimental, not very practical as a weapon because it is short range and flies blind,  and is cranky enough that it may have been responsible for the sinking of the Kursk a couple of years ago, but Iran and Russia do have close ties and it is possible that Tehran bought a couple of the little suckers.  Not likely, but possible.

So far, the Iranians were still on the pages of Jane's Defence Review rather than Fantastic Adventures,  but that changed when they went just one step too far when they declared that they had developed a flying boat that "no radar at sea or in the air can detect" and can carry precision missiles.   Unfortunately, they had to bad judgment to include a photo of the alleged superweapon with this boast.

This was greeted with blank stares at the Pentagon and Whitehall, followed by giggling, followed by outright hooting and laughing.  In a classic example of overreach, the Iranians had tried to palm off what was clearly nothing more than a variant of a commercially available GEV seaplane as a super-stealthy missile platform capable of taking on the most powerful navies in the world.  Worse, they didn't even have the good sense to Photoshop out the engine mounting on top of the fuselage, which made it about as stealthy as the Rock of Gibraltar. 

Just for the record, let's do a little compare and contrast.  This is what a boasting Islamofascist dictatorship puts out as a fearsome military advance:

Iranian "flying boat" superweapon and a GEV seaplane: Separated at birth?

And this is the sort put out by a real military power:

The Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer

Aside from the amusement of watching the Iranians going through the sort military posturing that one associates with the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, this bellicose wishcraft shows that Iran is taking that threat of a Western strike against their nuclear programme and the Mullahs themselves seriously enough to indulge in the sort of superweapon worship that the world hasn't seen since Hitler was in his bunker muttering about how his V2s were going to force the Allies into the sea.  It also shows that even if these announcements are half true, then Iran is not the invulnerable fortress that many Western commentators have made it out to be. 

True, a land campaign may be infeasible in the near future, but if quirky supertorpedoes and stealth flying boats are the best that Iran can field without the fighter planes and heavy weapon platforms to back them up, then if Iran continues to play at brinksmanship, it may find itself with a series of smoking holes in the ground where its military used to be within a week of the Coalition starting its air campaign with its terribly boring arsenal of Tomahawk missiles, Paveway bombs, B-2s, F-117s, Tornadoes,  Nimitz carriers, Trafalgar submarines and others that may not dazzle, but they do destroy.

Provided, of course Tehran is not high bidder on Stromberg's terrifying minisub.

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Thursday

6 April 2006

One Day in the Kitchen

It was shortly after this that Hoskins acquired the nickname "Lefty."

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Friday

7 April 2006

The Long War?

Regular readers of Ephemeral Isle will know that the one topic that I take very seriously is the war against the Islamofascists and if there is one serious thing that I try to do here it is to impress upon people that we are in a very real war with a very real enemy.  I try to point out that this is not some nice little faraway conflict that we can choose to fight or not as the mood suits us; that it involves evil men who actively hate us; and that to treat it lightly, as a metaphor, or as a tool for political opportunism is to court disaster.

That being said, I also try to keep my comments on the war in a firmly cautious vein.  I try to make it clear that when I refer to Muslims I am excluding those who want to live in peace and harbour no dreams of a New Caliphate of a Judenfrei world.  I also try not to get too deeply into discussions of Islam as a religion-- not because I feel that it is irrelevant or out of politically correct squeamishness, but rather that to do so would be to confuse the ideological nature of Islamism with the very serious theological problems of Islam itself and court the danger of conflating one with the other. 

One thing I definitely try to do is to keep the whole war in as sharp a perspective as I can manage.  I read enough of the comment pages on some web sites to know when the discussion is going to run out of intellectual content and descend into gratuitous Mohammed bashing and I've no desire to indulge in similar here.  I am also determined to avoid overstating the case for the war effort or the danger posed by the enemy, because I feel that to do so is as bad as to understate it.

Take Mark Steyn's current column, for example.  I usually like Steyn's work.  I think he has a solid grasp of what the Islamofascists are like and the absurdity of a Europe bent on slothful self-destruction, but sometimes he can go a tiny bit overboard when he says things like,

The only question about Europe is whether it's going to be (a) catastrophically bad or (b) apocalyptically bad, as in head for the hills, here come the Four Horsemen: Death (the self-extinction of European races too self-absorbed to breed), Famine (the withering of unaffordable social programs), War (civil strife as the disaffected decide to move beyond mere Citroën-torching), and Conquest (the inevitable victory of the Muslim successor population already in place). I'd say option (b) looks the better bet, for a few if not all Continental nations: united they'll fall, but divided, a handful might stand a chance.

Then there is the science fiction fantasy of Robert Ferrigno's book Prayers for the Assassin that describes a United States in 2040, where a coordinated nuclear attack has decapitated the government and economy followed by a civil war as the population rushes to convert to the Religion of Peace like lemmings at a cliff sale. 

The second half of the Superbowl began right after mid-day prayers. The fans in Khomeini Stadium had performed their ablutions by rote, awkwardly prostrating themselves, heels splayed, foreheads not even touching the ground. Only the security guard in the upper walkway had made his devotions with the proper respect. An older man, his face a mass of scar tissue, he had moved smoothly and precisely, fingers together, toes forward, pointing toward Mecca. The guard noticed Rakkim Epps watching him, stiffened, then spotted the Fedayeen ring on his finger, and bowed, offered him a blessing, and Rakkim, who had not prayed in over three years, returned the blessing with the same sincerity. Not one in a thousand would have recognized the plain titanium band, but the guard was one of the early converts, the hard core who had risked everything and expected nothing other than Paradise in return. He wondered if the guard still thought the war had been worth it.

This is echoed by writer Dan Simmons, who in a recent blog posits a visitor from the future warning his present-day grandfather about a 122-year war with a monolithic Islam that makes Adolph Hitler look like a beloved uncle:

I give you eight million Jews dead in Israel – incinerated – and many more dead Jews in Eurabia and around the world. I give you the continent of Europe cast back more than five hundred years into sad pools of warring civilizations

I give you an Asian world in chaos, a Pacific rim ruled by China after the vacuum of America’s withdrawal – this nation’s full resources devoted to fighting, and possibly losing, the Century War – a South America and Mexico lost to corruption and appeasement, a resurgent Russian Empire that has reclaimed its old dominated republics and more, and a Canada split into three hateful nations.

As I said, I am a great thumper for alerting the world to the threat of radical Islam, but I sometimes there are those who slip over into alarmist exaggeration—at least, I hope it’s alarmist, because I really don’t want to be proven wrong on this one.  The danger is that by exaggerating the threat posed by the Islamofascists one ends up fostering not alertness, but despair.  And despair engenders paralysis and defeatism.  It is, after all, as much a fault to overestimate one’s enemy as to underestimate him. 

This was a common failing of the West during the Cold War when it turned out that the Soviets were not the steely-eyed superpower that they purported to be.   The history of the fight against the Communists is littered with episodes where a fleet of bombers at a Moscow parade turned out to be one bomber circling the city,  where a vast lead in Soviet missile numbers proved a fiction, and where supposedly crack battalions couldn't even march across the square without dropping their rifles.  More than once we imagined ourselves in a standoff on the verge of Armageddon over Cuba, the Middle East, or whatever only to learn decades later that the Kremlinites were soaking in flop sweat for fear that their bluff was going to be called. 

And the Soviets were at least competent strategists, which the Islamofascists are not.  In many respects, their weakness is more endemic, being founded in the Oriental approach to warfare rather than a matter of circumstance.

John Keegan summed up the situation best back in 2001:

Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up battle, and go on until one side or the other gives in. They choose the crudest weapons available, and use them with appalling violence, but observe what, to non-Westerners may well seem curious rules of honour. Orientals, by contrast, shrink from pitched battle, which they often deride as a sort of game, preferring ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit as the best way to overcome an enemy… Relentlessness, as opposed to surprise and sensation, is the Western way of warfare. It is deeply injurious to the Oriental style and rhetoric of war-making. Oriental war-makers, today terrorists, expect ambushes and raids to destabilise their opponents, allowing them to win further victories by horrifying outrages at a later stage. Westerners have learned, by harsh experience that the proper response is not to take fright but to marshal their forces, to launch massive retaliation and to persist relentlessly until the raiders have either been eliminated or so cowed by the violence inflicted that they relapse into inactivity…  It is no good pretending that the peoples of the desert and the empty spaces exist on the same level of civilisation as those who farm and manufacture. They do not. Their attitude to the West has always been that it is a world ripe for the picking. When the West turned nasty, and fought back, with better weapons and superior tactics and strategy, the East did not seek to emulate it but to express its anger in new forms of the raid and surprise attack. September 11 was a declaration of war. October 7 (the beginning of the Afghanistan campaing) was the declaration of a counter-offensive. The counter-offensive will prevail.

In other words, the worst danger we face if our efforts to blunt the Jihad go pear shaped is not war without end, but spectacular Muslim atrocities, up to and including nuclear attacks on our cities, alternating with massive Western counterattacks until the Muslim countries are in ruins and  the Islamofascists break and run.  In other words, nasty, but not exactly the hordes of Suleiman beating on the gates of Vienna.

And I don't think the worst case scenario needs to happen.  If the West wakes up and recognises what is happening and action is taken now, then we have a chance to come out of this thing with only a few scorch marks.  Iraq and Afghanistan are already acting as an inoculation of democracy in a region of tyranny.  The Axis of Evil can still have its fangs pulled by facing them down one by one and showing the survivors what it in store for them if they don't do a Khadaffi.

The only real problem area is Europe.

Europe can still draw itself back from the abyss and get to grips with the problems of Islamofascism and a large, unassimilated Muslim population.  I'm not optimistic about it, but it can be done.  To tackle it in a civilized manner will require hard decisions about the acceptability of an alien religion and culture on European soil-- of whether these new arrivals are immigrants or colonists.  It will mean immigration laws along the line of Japan's.  It will mean a demand for assimilation.  It will mean an end to the welfare state that has enervated the people to the point where they don't even reproduce.  And it will mean the abandonment of the poison of multiculturalism and self-loathing that have infected the Continent for so long. 

But it has to be done soon.  To wait means foregoing a peaceful solution for one that is bloody and tyrannical.  I don't believe that Eurabia is really going to happen.  I don't think that the crescent is going to stand atop St. Paul's or that women will be stoned to death in Trafalgar square.  I don’t think the whole of Europe is going down the plug hole.  What I do think is that if we don't all, and by that I mean the entire civilised world, get onboard in this war, then we will see the people of Europe forced into action for the sake of their own survival.  I think we might see the Muslim population in France rise up in open revolt in a way that can't be blamed on unemployment.  We may see Wembley stadium hit with a nerve gas bomb.  We may even see one small country such as Holland or Belgium fall under sharia.  But when that happens, the rest of the continent will be so alarmed that all utopian pretence will vanish like tissue paper in a fireplace and we will see countermeasures that would give Torquemada pause.  We're talking Islam being outlawed, enemy alien acts,  pogroms, mass deportations, ghettos that "no leave" rather than "no go" areas, and the capitals of Europe the echoing with machine gun fire and RPG explosions. 

It won't be 122 years of war against the New Caliphate nor will it be the tit for tat of atrocity followed by an Anglosphere pounding, but it will be a return to the bloody days of the 20^th century.   And that will be bad enough.

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Monday

10 April 2006

Great Moments in Ice Cream

Meredith could never understand why his super deluxe extra double jumbo supreme 60-gallon ice cream cones (Buy four and get a free carrier)  were less than a runaway success.

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Tuesday

11 April 2006

Good Old Fashioned Nightmare Fuel

I have got to stop eating cheese before I go to bed. 

Now, don't get the idea that I am opposed to the curd.  Far from it.  I stand second to none in my admiration for a good, ripe Stilton.  My mouth waters at the thought of a ploughman's lunch topped with a thick wedge of yellowy delight.  I regard my omelette as incomplete without a bit of Wenslydale.  I have a Wallace and Gromit fridge magnet stuck in a place of honour and my favourite Monty Python sketches is the one in the cheese shop where John Cleese makes a fruitless attempt to purchase some cheesy comestibles in the face of unrelenting bouzouki music.  To me, cheese is a little slice of fermented heaven.

No, it is not cheese I object to, but the effects that it has on me-- especially after bedtime.  Last night I had rather a triumph in the kitchen when I came up with a ham and cheese pastry made with a sharp cheddar that was at its peak.  It was beyond compare, if I do say so myself, which I do.  So, there.  You can keep your Tristan and Isolde.  When ham and cheddar come together in bubbly, hot goodness with a bit of English mustard as the minister, there is not a happier marriage.  It just doesn't enjoy a very tranquil nuptial bed.  Down half a dozen of those suckers and you're guaranteed some truly bizarre dreams.

Mine was that my wife, having ridden out the disastrous decline of theatre in Seattle, somehow managed to become producer and director  for a new play for a new theatre company determined to buck the trend.  Being a writer, my place was on the sidelines helping out wherever I could.  My wife, with her typical zeal, threw herself into putting the show together as if it were her own child-- a child that she was supremely jealous of in that scary stage mother as portrayed by Ethel Merman as Rose Lee  sort of way.  As the production met inevitable and steadily mounting obstacles, this dream started to take on all the traits of a well-crafted nightmare.  My sweetie became more and more driven as she went from characteristic enthusiasm to resolve to single-mindedness to fanaticism.  By the fourth week of rehearsals she was screaming at me that I hadn't cooked the eggs for the play as I'd promised and I kept yelling back that she hadn't told me how she wanted the eggs done; boiled?  Fried?  What?  The fact that I hadn't the slightest idea of what the eggs were for did not occur to me.

The dream ended with the theatre company facing grim disaster as the funds ran out and my wife, with a bizarre gleam in her eye, telling me that she knew how to save the show.  She drove me out to a printing shop in a small deserted town in the middle of the night.  The shop was closed and dark, but to my surprise the door was open.  I thought we'd come to collect some posters, but instead my wife made a beeline for safe, which was mysteriously unlocked, and started throwing bundles of bank notes into a sack.  Why an American print shop had a safe full of English ten and twenty pound notes, I have no idea.  All I knew was that we were, in fact, robbing the place, and while my wife was shovelling money out of the safe, I was throwing it back in-- very delicately so as to not leave any fingerprints. 

It was as I was experiencing the strangely familiar conviction that I hadn't the slightest idea of what was going on that I woke up.  I told my wife about this bizarre experience and got merely an indulgent smile and a "yes, dear," which is worrying on many levels.

Odd thing is, rather than making me want to swear off cheese for life, it actually made me a bit peckish for a bit of Welsh rarebit-- and no, I am not making a reference to the classic early American comic strip Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend.  Not much of one, anyway.  Much as I enjoy the bizarre surrealism of Rarebit and the early cartoons and films based on the strip (the one with the bizarre Ur-Godzilla of an ever-growing pet that eats the city is a classic), I actually am very fond of the dish and find it the perfect late-night snack when mated with a glass of pale ale.

It also revived in me the idea for a dinner party I'd come up with some years back where the guests would enjoy a menu of all those nightmare-inducing foods that would have made Windsor McCay proud.  I was thinking of starting with some oysters on the half shell, followed by onion soup, then lobster washed down with champagne, sherry trifle, the aforementioned rarebit (perhaps with an anchovy or two on top) for savoury, followed by Stilton and a solid glass of tawny port. 

Prizes will be given for the first dinner guest to dream both the devils and the chafing dish.

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Wednesday

12 April 2006

Spot the Real Bully

The ideal Britain:  every citizen a surveillance camera!

This is the creepiest thing I have ever seen.  It's from a poster for the government anti-bullying campaign Bullywatch that believes that the way to handle bullies is for people to become automatons under the control of the state.  According to the official site, bystanders  who witness bullying are told to,

• Always stay safe do not intervene in physical bullying or incidents on the street.
• Call 999 in an emergency.
• Telephone your local Police Community Safety Unit and report any bullying you witness.
• Speak to your local community warden or police officer about the incidence you have witnessed.
• Keep a note of the date, time and detail of the bullying you have witnessed.

In other words, the way to handle bullying is not to give the bully a clout on the earhole, but to turn state informer.  I assume that this is supposed make us feel safe and secure, but frankly, it scares the living daylights out of me.  The thought that the government's vision of the model polity is an army of narks rooting out thoughtcrime among the young is nothing less than chilling. 

By the way, the above orders advice is from the "adults" section of the Bullywatch site.  In the "young people" section the prospective bully victim is told,

Adults have a duty to assist you - they are the adults and you are the child/young person.

One hopes that the "child/young person" hasn't read point one from the "adult" section-- and one especially hopes any prospective bully hasn't either.

According to Spy Blog, the proper way to handle bullying is to go to the Bullywatch web site, where you are asked to surrender a great deal of personal information, which ends up in a national database,  and then describe the nature of the bull via a drop menu which asks,

Was the person being bullied physically injured?

• No
• Yes, slightly
• Yes, bruised
• Yes, cut
• Yes, beaten up
•  Yes, stabbed

Stabbed?!  Let's hope that the prospective bully victim cited above really doesn't see that one after the "do not intervene" advice or many a parent is going to wonder why little Bobby won't unlock the bathroom door.  I thought that this was a gag when I read it, but here it is in all its Orwellian glory.

Not surprisingly, this is a Ken Livingstone initiative-- the same Ken Livingstone who only the other day compared the murder of between 400 and 2600 people in Tiananmen square to the 1990 poll tax riots and when pressed, later pointed out that Britain was guilty of the Peterloo Massacre, but conveniently ignored the fact that only eleven people died at Peterloo and that this particular event occurred in 1819!  The irony of Mr. Livingstone taking a stand against bullying is not lost on some commentators.  Given the mayor's penchant for asking reporters if they're German war criminals and telling a pair of Jewish developers that they should "go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs," the Groaniad has suggested that Mr. Livingstone should be turned in to his own organisation.

News of this product of a strange little corner of the Village came to us via Guy Herbert at Samizdata, who points out that this campaign has less to do with bullying than something else,

One has to conclude that isn't really the point. The point is to get members of the public to adopt official attitudes, and engrain them by providing a mechanism to rehearse, to act out, concern. It is for to prove you are a compliant member of society by watching others carefully and reporting deviant behaviour. The state will deal with the problem, however minor, however fleeting, however apparently amenable to personal decision.

I don't think that this is a deliberate, explicit project. I think it is a natural outcome of the cultural assumptions of those who commission such ads. We are not just supposed to love the surveillance camera, but to identify with it. The ideal citizen is a passive tool that reports back as requested; that fits in with the total bureaucracy's demand for record.

If this were an isolated bit of welfare state lunacy I'd dismiss Mr. Herbert's views as a load of paranoid venting, but that isn't so easy to do in today's Britain.  In the last ten years we have seen our ancient liberties stripped away one by one until we now live in a land that my father would scarcely recognise as the one he fought to protect from the Nazis.  The population has been disarmed in the face of a rising wave of violent criminals; the threat of terrorism has been countered not by wartime measures aimed at our enemies, but new laws aimed at the general public; the right to silence, a jury trial, and protection from double jeopardy have been tossed into the hazard; we now have our own version of the FBI with powers that its model could only dream of; our local police are rapidly being formed into a national gendarmerie; there are surveillance cameras everywhere; our cars are going to be tracked night and day by satellite; ID cards to show we are allowed to breathe are only a matter of time; and instead of being a nation of free men with the God-given right to speak our minds, we must watch every word we say and every thought we think least we be hauled in on a latter day charge of heresy.   Meanwhile,  terror-mongers take half a decade to prosecute-- if at all, rapists are let off with warnings, and if we see some young thug pounding on a smaller boy we are not only told to sit on our hands, but we must council the victim to not even dare show the bottle to fight back while we go off to file a report with the local Commissar.  In this context, the idea of a government receptive to hammering another nail into the coffin of liberty doesn't seem so implausible.

I'd be happy if this were the result of some sinister plot, but as Mr. Herbert points out, it has more to do with attitudes than unambiguous evil.  It's what happens in a country ruled by a self-segregating, anti-democratic elite that has neither a stake in the nation's past and traditions, nor any real bond with their fellow men, except to see them as lesser beings to be cared for rather than brothers to be heeded.  And that is much scarier.

Be seeing you.

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Thursday

13 April 2006

Waiter, the Bill… and the Smelling Salts

I never go to the race track.  I dislike gambling, the Sun always gets in my eyes, the crowd always presses, and the drinks are overpriced.  Look at this year’s Kentucky Derby; not content with eight dollar beers, they’re serving a mint julep that goes for $1,000 a round.  Small measures, too, I’ll wager.  Even if it is made with arctic ice and Moroccan mint, and comes served in a gold-plated cup with a silver straw, I suspect that there’s a bit of a markup involved here.

There are some people who think that I have expensive tastes in food.  That is not true.  It’s just that some of the foods I enjoy happen to be expensive.  Is it my fault you can’t raise lobsters like they were chickens?  Or chickens like they were lobsters, for that matter?  Tried that once and the little feathered buggers drowned.

There are also those who think that I’m a habitude of pricey restaurants where you pay very large sums for very small portions.  This I admit to, but I only go when someone else is paying, such as during the days of the dotcom bubble when I finished a job for Microsoft and got to eat at Seattle’s Dahlia Lounge on Bill Gates’ nickel (I’ll have the Sasquatch paw grilled over Moon rocks, please). 

But even though I confess to preferring T-bones to hotdogs and champagne and Guinness to Mad Dog and Ever Clear, I do draw the line at mint juleps that cost more than my rent. 

Still, there seem to be some people in this world for whom price is no object—or who get so smashed in the bar that they don’t pay a blind bit of attention to the damages.  Take that infamous dinner at Petrus in London back in 2001 when six bankers managed to run up a bill of £44,007, not including the tip.  At 15 percent, the waiter probably took the rest of the year off.  Not surprisingly, five of the diners got sacked once the meal vouchers were turned in, but it did make the Guinness Book of World Records.

What happened to the sixth diner I have yet to discover, but I suspect that you’ll probably find him down at Selfridge’s department store in Oxford Street ordering the McDonald burger.  This is not, as the name misleads, a quarter-pounder with cheese affair with a side of fries and a happy meal toy.  It is, in fact named after the Selfridge’s chef Scott McDonald, who has invented the world’s most expensive sandwich.  Weighing in at 21 ounces, the McDonald is made with aged sourdough bread, Wagyu beef flown in fresh from Japan, lobe fois gras, and black truffle mayonnaise.  Have one of those for lunch and it’ll set you back £85—plus VAT, most likely.

The truffles are a nice touch.  Good thing Chef McDonald opted for the more economical black truffles.  The Italian white variety would have set him back £1,300 a pound. 

Personally, I detest fast food, so I’d rather forget the burgers and go for something a bit more pretentious sophisticated.  Caviar is always a nice little dish to serve; just to show that one has arrived.  But be careful what sort you put on the table or you’ll be leaving for the poorhouse with a lot less fanfare.  I’d recommend steering clear of Almas Beluga caviar.  It’s reputed to have a taste with is “eloquent and exquisite,” but retailing at £14,705 a pound, it is not surprising that it is shipped in solid gold 24K tins.  At that price, I think I’ll take their word as to how good it tastes.

Mind you, food isn’t everything.  There is ambience as well.  But how much is that worth?  A heck of a lot, if you wish to dine at the Eagle in Gstaad, Switzerland.  This private dining club is actually fairly reasonable when it comes to the ala carte, with an entrée costing only about £35, but the price for the privilege of eating that entrée is a £25,000 membership fee.  True, you do get to rub shoulders with the Jet Set and may bump into Sir Roger Moore or William F. Buckley, but on the whole I’d prefer to trouser the money and pass up the fois gras at the Eagle for a ploughman’s at the Eagle and Child.

After a good meal and a bankruptcy, what could be nicer than a cup of coffee?  How about one prepared from beans that have been passed through the digestive tract of a Filipino civet?  Sounds disgusting, and by all reports, it tastes disgusting, but it costs $150 a pound, so it must be the café du jour for those with more money than sense.

Personally, I think that all this profligate gourmandary is a bit shabby, so I’ll have none of it.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must fetch that bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite (a snip at £105,000 a bottle).  We’re having a party tonight and I promised to make sangria. 

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Friday

14 April 2006

Happy Easter

Happy Easter from Ephemeral Isle

Back on Tuesday.

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Tuesday

18 April 2006

He Gets No Respect

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the most frustrating job in the world.  Day after day he demonstrates that he is a raving lunatic backed up by a load of genocidal fanatics, yet no one takes him seriously.  You claim to talk to an imam whose been living in a well for twelve hundred years and people nod politely.  You say that when you address UN delegates you’re surrounded by a halo of light and can hypnotise people with your eyes and you’re still allowed to handle sharp objects.  You say repeatedly that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and people say it’s just colourful rhetoric—even when your own government breezily calls Israel a “one-bomb state.”  Even when mullahs issue fatwas approving the use of nuclear weapons.  Even when Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani says that Israeli nuclear retaliation would be worth it.  Even when you reassure the international community by saying that Israel will be wiped out by “one storm.”

Sometimes it must not be worth coming into work in the morning.  I mean, what does the head of a theocratic police state bent on world domination have to do to get a little respect these days?  Go around saying that if you’re not allowed to build nuclear weapons, you’ll build nuclear weapons?  Nope.  Did that.  Didn’t work.  How about building longer and longer range missiles and claim you’ve developed MIRVed warheads?  Uh uh.  Deny the Holocaust even happened?  Ditto.  Threaten the United States with 40,000 suicide bombers?  Give millions of dollars openly to Hamas when even the EU finally admitted that they were too crazy to be trusted?  Act like best buddies with Syria?  Cozy up to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and revive memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis?  Freshen up the “Death to America” chants with the less pithy “Britain’s demise is on our agenda?”  Forget it.

Corporal Klinger had it easier.  Okay, then; up the ante.  Carry on secret nuclear research outside of the gaze of the UN inspectors that will give you the bomb years before the “intelligence” community said you would.  Bury your “peaceful” nuclear programme in secret underground bunkers. Make it clear that when you get the bomb you’re not going to keep it to yourself, but share the technology with every Islamofascist with a Visa card.  Announce to the world that you have an invincible arsenal of super weapons from rocket torpedoes to invisible flying boats that nothing can stand against.  Now will the world sit up and notice what a sack of bats you have for brains?  Sorry, but the diplomatic corps will just say it’s nothing to get excited about and ask someone to pass the canapés.

It’s like Hitler and the Sudetenland all over again—only this time it’s with a loony President of a country that’s been ruled by theocratic wackjobs howling “jihad” for thirty years rather than a recently elected Nazi with no track record.  Even with the late Chancellor there were people highlighting passages in Mein Kampf and saying “Guys, you might want to read at this.  It doesn’t look good.”  But with Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs?  You not only get supposedly sane commentators saying that it’s no big deal if Iran gets nukes, but that it would be unfair to prevent it!  That’s like saying it would be unfair to not give a more than usually ill-behaved three-year old some Semtex and a box of detonators.  I can just see Ahmadinejad reading the papers and banging his head on his desk crying, “This is ridiculous!  I’m a power-hungry megalomaniac!  I’m one white cat away from being a Bond villain!  What!  Do!  I! Have! To!  Do?????!!!!!!!”

That’s why last week the Iranian President made one final, desperate bid to prove once and for all that he’s an out of control nut-case hell-bent on setting off World War IV.  With the entire press corps watching, Ahmadinejad staged a Bollywood production like something out of a fever dream to announce that Iran had successfully completed the nuclear fuel cycle.  Dancers in turbans and colourful native costumes brandished cylinders of enriched uranium and tried not to think about the shielding issues. Just in case the point was still elusive, they posed in front of Iranian flags embroidered with atoms and released white doves which were about as comforting a symbol of peace as Chamberlain holding aloft the Munich agreement.  With this bizarre backdrop, Ahmadinejad declared that Iran had "joined the club of nuclear countries."  Not only that, but there would be more to come as Iran’s P2 centrifuges came on line and quadrupled their processing capacity.  “We guarantee to have the Bomb in three years or the first city incineration is free!”

In case anyone missed the point, the President elaborated on this by saying,

 “Our enemies cannot do a damned thing,”

Followed by, 

“We won't hold talks with anyone about the right of the Iranian nation (to enrich uranium), and no one has the right to retreat, even one iota,''

And then,

”Our answer to those who are angry about Iran achieving the full nuclear fuel cycle is just one phrase. We say: ‘Be angry at us and die of this anger.’''

If anyone could witness that incredible combination of bad theatre and nuclear sabre-rattling and not coming away utterly convinced that Iran was being run by an escapee from a pecan pie factory, then they are either stone deaf—or the foreign minister of a major power.  How else to explain the response of the International Community?  The U.N. nuclear agency chief, Mohamed ElBaradei leaped into action and said that Iran was “ripe” for negotiation.  Meanwhile, Britain’s response to this was to say that Iran’s actions were, “Not helpful.”

Were they watching the same channel?

I’m beginning to suspect this is all part of a cunning plan that is elegant in its simplicity.  It’s become clear over the past few years that the West’s strategy to confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions is to do nothing and hope it all goes away—or to enter into round after round of negotiations with Tehran until they get the Bomb, and hope it all goes away.  This is, of course, absurd and no one who has studied history would possibly imagine that it would work.  It is therefore clear that this is not what the West is doing.  What they are really up to is playing Ahmadinejad’s own paranoia against him and just ignore his manic calls for atomic jihad as if he were trying to catch the attention of a French waiter.  No matter what the provocation, never rise to it.  Just say that he’s harmless, that he doesn’t mean what he says, he doesn’t have the bomb, doesn’t want it, and even if he does have it, he’ll never use it.  Keep this up long enough, the reasoning goes, and Ahmadinejad will become so frustrated that his head will suddenly explode— and hopefully the mullahs will be caught by the shrapnel.  Call it the Scanners Option.

Works for me.

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Wednesday

19 April 2006

Caged Guilt

Remnant of a more civilised age

When did zoos begin to resemble my old school teachers?  When I started going to zoos as a child, they were among my favourite places on Earth. The zoo was a place filled with creatures that were familiar, yet unfamiliar—and all the more exciting for the paradox.  I’d seen lions and tigers and giraffes in my picture books, but that was nothing compared to seeing them in the flesh.  It was one thing to see a crocodile in a photo.  It was another to see what to me was a dragon in all but name wallowing in a pool before me.  The zoo was where I could watch great polar bears batting bowling balls as if they were balloons before taking a dip in their private pools.  It was where I saw the penguins waddling off down the path for tea.  It was where I saw seals perform and watched gorillas play.  There was even one zoo, I faintly recall, where children were issued pink plastic keys in the shape of elephants that gave them the Olympian privilege of unlocking battered iron boxes by the animal cages and make a clown voice reveal interesting things about the creatures within.

But sometime in the 1970s things began to change.  The iron boxes, or their local equivalents, vanished.  The tight cages and austere pens were replaced with more sumptuous and humane habitats, but the residents of the new enclosures were not the same.  Many of the familiar animals that I’d come to see became scarcer and new ones took their place.  The new ones were strange to me, yet they weren’t exotic.  They looked like poorly bred horses and cattle rather than denizens of far off lands.  When I took a date to Regent’s Park in the 1980s, the seals were still performing, but a scolding voice made it clear that this was to give the animals exercise and we weren’t to regard it as entertainment for our benefit.

Since I became a father, I’ve spent a great deal of time at the local zoo.  In fact, there are times when my daughter and I visit once a week.  I know every inch of the paths by heart and am as familiar with every new building and renovation as if it were in my own neighbourhood.  I’ve also read every plaque and notice more times than a passenger does the timetable while trapped in an airport and what I’ve come to believe is that whoever writes zoo copy must have a very low opinion of me.  According to the mindset of whoever thinks up the blurbs for the Patas monkeys and the tapirs, Mr. Szondy must be the most profligate, wasteful, unthinking, uncaring, bigoted, anthropocentric, consumerist, and generally narrow-minded tosser ever to have gone about on his hind legs.  I am not, however, beyond redemption, as the zoo has taken upon itself as its mission to make me mend my evil ways.  This is so important a goal that anything so trivial as actually telling me about the animals must go by the board.

In the old days, if you were to read the display card by the gorillas it would tell you what the word “gorilla” means, where they are from, what they eat, something of their habits, and the names of the current lot in residence.  Today, all I get is a lecture about how endangered they are and why it’s all my fault.  But as far as the card goes, the hairy blighters might as well be from Birmingham, live in wigwams,  and eat choc ices.  Toucans?  Same thing; dreadfully endangered, because I don’t buy fair-trade coffee.  Actually, I don’t buy coffee at all, but guilt is a collective thing these days.  Grizzly bears?  I’ve hunted them to the brink.  Actually, the only grizzly bear I’ve seen in the wild was in Canada, where it was in the process of flipping a half-ton dumpster upside down with such ease and grace that I cancelled my hiking trip and spent the night in a hotel in Thunder Bay.  Lions?  They’re not endangered, but the zoo does assure me that if they ever become so, it will be laid at my door.

I think that’s why I prefer the petting zoo.  It’s more of a guilt-free zone, since even the most green-crazed zoo official would have a hard time pinning a present or future lamb, chicken, or bunny shortage on me. 

What I find truly amazing about this sort of mindset is that it doesn’t end at simply blaming me for the hard times of wildlife, but extends to rehabilitating the reputations of the worst of the lot.  I’m not only expected to feel guilty about African wild dogs being threatened, I’m supposed to feel sorry about it as well.  Why, I don’t know.  I’ve been to Africa and given the way wild dogs will rip through livestock just for the hell of it, I know many a herdsman who regard wild dog absence as a good thing.

It seems the more vicious, ill tempered, and destructive the animal is, the more it must be held as the victim of a frame-up. This attitude is so extreme that the local zoo has, I kid you not, a little court house where you can listen to a pre-recorded, and pre-concluded, trial to demonstrate that venomous spiders up to and including black widows are the baa lambs of the arachnids. The zoo keeps the secrets of wolves from me, but makes sure that I know that they never attack people.  Actually, they do, but not in North America—officially, that is, and that’s what counts.  In zoo-world, no rattlesnake, cobra, or gila monster may be put on display without a mandatory notice that it is a peace-loving creature that never hurt a fly.  Whether it eats flies or not is left to the imagination, as that sort of thing is regarded as too dull to relate.  Just don’t take this information to the logical conclusion and ask a docent if you should leave your leather gaiters home next time you’re in rattler country or you’ll make him cross. 

I think my favourite exhibit, though are the piranhas.  These nasty little carnivores are in no way under threat and, unless I’ve been inattentive, are still flesh eaters of so enthusiastic a strain that reducing cows to skeletons in record time is still part of their repertoire.  The zoos take on this?  If you can’t say anything nice, and guilt-inducing, say nothing.

Maybe that's why the local zoo refuses to stock wolverines.

I can understand some of the logic behind this approach—understand it, but deplore it.  It’s the same thinking that has a world population clock at the entrance to remind everyone how mankind is overrunning the planet like a swarm of locust—though the locust simile is avoided, as it reflects poorly on the locusts. 

But the thing that makes me furrow my brow is that the sort of finger wagging that zoos get up to can only be tolerated by an urban audience that has little real interaction with nature.  Only a city dweller could buy the line that all animals are furry Rousseauan noble savages, or that anyone who dissents is some sort of zoophobic bigot.  It is, I grant, unfair to pass moral judgments on animals that have no conscience and no sense of morality.  A snake bites, not because it is evil, but because it is a snake.  That is neither good nor bad in regard to the snake.  It is merely its nature.  But it bites.  As an ex-farm boy I can say that I don’t care if the wolf that just killed eight of my sheep is a vicious devil or an innocent following its instincts.  I’m still getting my rifle. 

Besides, I’m not so sure I can hold entirely to that neutrality argument.  In my time I have encountered a mad bull; a sneaky horse; a thieving, yet guilt-ridden Labrador; a sex-mad drake; a paranoid cockerel; umpteen selfish cats; two neurotic poodles; a bullying goldfish; and a homicidal hamster, which makes me suspect that man is not the only one to have been banished from Eden.

But then, man doesn't have a very good PR agent.

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Thursday

20 April 2006

A Vespa Going Sixty

What the...?  Huh?

I see that the Vespa scooter is sixty years old this month.  Prepare to see some nostalgic celebrations of la dolce vita followed by Baby Boomer dismay as they realise just how much water has flowed under the bridge since they were last buzzing about Brixton on a Vespa wearing wrap-around sunglasses and a wind-up cinecamera on a strap so they could convince girls they were doing second unit work on a Marcello Mastroianni flick.

Invented in April 1946 by Enrico Piaggio and Corradino D’Ascanio, 17 million Vespas have been sold.  For a post-war generation of young people, the machines were a symbol of freedom and sexual conquest—though many Americans would point out that the back seat of a Cadillac is a more practical emblem of the latter. 

My encounter with the Vespa dates back to my university days, when I somehow talked myself into believing that buying a secondhand Vespa would be a) sound economics, b) a way of getting to class easier, and c) an irresistible babe magnet.  This proved to be completely wrong on all three counts.  I never did have the 1970s equivalent of Audrey Hepburn, Ursula Andress gracing the pillion of my scooter,   which is a pity, as I had high hopes for “c”.  Girls in my day had keener survival instincts, it would seem.

I must confess that I did and still do like the looks of the Vespa.  It has a streamlined quality that speaks of simple, elegant design.  Mind you, mine was yellow rather than the silver colour that I’d have preferred, but you can’t have everything.  It was a Vespa, albeit the cheapest, bottom of the line model, and that was sufficient.  As I took delivery from the dealer, I could see myself breezing along cobbled roads waving at passers by with an insouciant “ciao” like Eddie Izzard, but without the gender confusion thing. 

The insouciance lasted all of twenty minutes before reality poked its ugly head under the tent.  While driving it home, the front tyre got caught in a street grating; sending me flying.  Five minutes later, with a pronounced limp, I was ignominiously pushing the machine back to the dealer for repairs.  The better part of a week's pay packet later, there was still a leak in the petrol tank that took me months to track down before I gave up and had it replaced for another small fortune. 

Umberto Eco said,

Thus the Vespa came to be linked in my eyes with transgression, sin, and even temptation—not the temptation to possess the object, but the subtle seduction of faraway places where the Vespa was the only means of transport. And it entered into my imagination not as an object of desire, but as a symbol of an unfulfilled desire.

Transgression, sin, and even temptation?  In my eyes the Vespa has been linked with that aggravating screw on the brake lever that kept working itself loose and it became largely a symbol of having half the motor strewn across my floor as I tried to figure out why the bloody thing wouldn’t go.

The Vespa was a fun machine to ride and the adverts showing happy couples humming along in the summer sun have a lot of truth to them.  On holiday, the Vespa cannot be beat, but as a form of practical transportation I quickly found that your average under-powered scooter leaves much to be desired.  For example, cobbled roads might be terribly romantic, but driving over them on a Vespa was like trying to roller skate on Brighton beach.  Also, I learned why all the fun-loving films featuring Vespas were shot on level roads.  It’s because going up hill was never a pleasant experience.  Hit a grade of more than five degrees and the motor would drop to a sullen growl as OAPs in Zimmer frames passed me by with an air of smug self-satisfaction.

Then there was driving on the motorway—or rather, not driving on the motorway.  My trusty metal steed my have been flash, but it had all the pick up of a Hoover, so taking the express route to my destinations was out of the question unless I wanted to become a hood ornament on a juggernaut.  Instead, I became very familiar with detours and side streets that often took me miles out of my way.  On the plus side, I got to see a lot of scenery; tree-lined boulevards, parklands, gasometers, stagnant canals, industrial wastelands, rubbish tips, etc.  And I got to see them again half an hour later when I discovered that my bag with all my lecture notes had worked itself loose somewhere near Abingdon. 

And then there is that little thing that the Vespa people tended to avoid in the adverts: Rain.  Nothing takes la dolce out of la vita faster than being caught in a freezing downpour on a scooter somewhere in the wilds of East Anglia.  Soaked to the skin, hair plastered down like a helmet, spectacles opaque with raindrops, and trousers sodden after being splashed by passing cars, I discovered that my least favourite sound in the world is the sputtering of a Vespa motor as rainwater seeps into the works with the promise of a long walk home followed by a bout of pneumonia.  It was enough to make me lose my faith in Gregory Peck.

Of course, such misadventures were softened by the camaraderie of the open road that motorists would share with me.  Many were the encouraging waves, cheery greetings, revved engines, blaring horns, obscene gestures, and blasphemous oaths that I received from the operator of larger, faster machines who saw me as some sort of mobile road obstruction.  My most vivid memory is going through an intersection, where a motorist deliberately blasted an air horn in ear.  I was so startled that I lost balance at 30 MPH and I was, again, sent flying and lacerated the palms of my hands so badly on hitting the tarmac that I never mounted the machine again without leather gloves—after I could get the shakes to stop, of course.

Apparently, the Vespa Company is moving with the times and is coming out with a hybrid scooter.  Why?  I have no idea.  The things get 70 MPG already.  Maybe the idea is to tailgate the car in front of you so you can power your machine off the fumes. Either that or it’s to attract the South Park and San Francisco crowd.

But whatever the future has in store for the Vespa, I will leave that for the younger generation to discover, for myself, I am content with my memories, titanium knee joint, and flashbacks that wake me in the middle of the night, screaming.

Ciao.

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Friday

21 April 2006

The Big Eight Oh

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II turns 80 today.

Happy Birthday, Ma'm.

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Age and the Dinosaur

It isn’t easy getting older.  As the years pass, I notice a general shift of my body southward, I move that much slower, the digestion becomes unforgiving, and the amount of earwax I generate could keep a small candle factory going.  Also, if you’re looking for work, things can get a bit discouraging.  Mind you, it’s easier as a writer than when I was an actor and had to face the fact that I was getting fewer calls to do Romeo and more for Polonius.  On the plus side, I was safely dead by Act IV, so I could get in a couple of pints down the pub before curtain call.  Still, being on the job hunt is no fun when you know that there are those twenty years your younger going for the same gigs no matter what the profession.

I had this brought roundly home a few months ago when I was trying to line up some contracts.  After a string of interviews that went nowhere, my wife was convinced that it was my age that was keeping me off the payroll and she suggested that I dye the Reed Richards grey out of my temples—an act of humiliation that in the end proved unnecessary.  Nevertheless, I am becoming conscious that even in the contract field I may be approaching my sell-by date and that’s the reason why I try to do more freelance work and other revenue streams against the day when even the outside work starts to dry up.

Of course, time can catch up in unexpected ways as well.  This morning I was watching the Panorama report “Must Have Own Teeth,” which looked at the scourge of ageism in Britain.

It was the usual BBC formula.  It started out with the boilerplate victim portrayal illustrated by a fictitious bit of pathos about a sixty-year old man trying without success to get a job in a bookshop, but being turned down because he’s too old as sad piano music tinkles in the background.  Then it was cut to a vigorous octogenarian ex-RAF pilot who still works as a top-flight pilot instructor for major airlines to show that being old doesn’t mean over the hill and that it’s unjust to ever imagine otherwise.

Having set the stage, the noticeably young presenter with a bad haircut used large signs to show the “ageist” practices of the top twenty companies in Britain, who rarely employed more than five percent of their workforce over age 50.

Then as night follows day came the usual round of lefty talking heads to gas on about what a horrible tragedy this is and that something must be done if justice is to be served.  In the interests of fairness, a token right-wing talking head opposing the lefties (extra points for choosing the obnoxious editor of the Sun) was trotted out saying that an employer shouldn’t have to employ old codgers if he doesn’t want them.

This being television, we now need something visual to hook things on, so cue the timeline of po-faced actors representing various victim groups standing in front of a timeline of anti-discrimination legislation demonstrating that anti-ageism is merely a logical progression.

Then the whole thing falls apart.  If this programme had been made ten years ago, the next step would have been to buttonhole government ministers and demand that they do something about this terrible problem, or to buttonhole shadow ministers and ask what’s wrong with the government’s policies if they are doing something about it. Default setting would be to plump for whichever boosted the nanny state and made anyone opposed look heartless.

Trouble is, this is 2006 and 80% of British legislation comes not from Westminster, but from Brussels. There are new anti-discrimination laws in the works, but they are not the result of party manifestos or Commons debate.  Labour put forward no bills and no Conservatives denounced them.  That’s because these are not democratically enacted laws, they are edicts from the EU that cannot be discussed or amended by the British government—only implemented.

So, Panorama finds itself in something of a bind.  The government is not responsible for the law, it can only impose it.  No opposition party can oppose the law, because Brussels is not accountable to Parliament.  And the EU doesn’t give a toss what its subject people think; only that they obey.

The result of this farce is that the Beeb is left with nothing to do.  It can’t push forward the debate, because there is none.  Only a fiat accompli that Britain can only comment on, not alter.  This leaves Panorama with nothing except talking about the need to censor “ageist” language (This is actually the most interesting bit, but for the Beed it's  a dead end, as Auntie is the chief architect of Newspeak in Britain and is hardly going to oppose it).  

Unfortunately, that leaves the programme a bit short, so the producers, in a desperate effort, try to fill the time with dressing an actor up in an absurd superhero costume and asking otherwise respectable individuals if they know who the governments “Champion of Age” is—including one alleged former champion, who had no idea what the interviewer was talking about.

Then it was back to the unsuccessful bookshop applicant and the sad piano music.

It looks as though greying job hunters aren’t the only ones being put out to pasture, if this Panorama instalment is any indication.  British journalism may be earmarked for the knacker’s yard as well.  The BBC has long had a reputation of acting as if it was a sort of appointed branch of government.  Sometimes, though more in the past, it has acted as a watchdog on the body politic and made sure that the ball of debate stayed in play.  At other times, it has clearly pushed its own agenda.  On some occasions it has even abused its privileges, as in the recent Butler affair.  But the one thing it has never faced until now is being irrelevant.  By that I don’t mean irrelevant as some American newspapers are due to falling readership and loss of credibility, but irrelevant in that it doesn’t matter what it says or what questions it raises, because those who make the real decisions will neither listen nor take heed.  “Must Have Own Teeth” dealt with a British issue.  It was made in Britain, the people who made it are British, the people the producers spoke to are British, and the people who will be affected are British.  But that means nothing, because those in power are not British.  They are unelected oligarchs in the EU who are answerable to no one.  That leaves the BBC with nothing to advocate and no one to advocate for or to.

It looks as though the workforce of Britain isn’t the only thing getting old.  The BBC is getting a bit long in the tooth as well.  It was a news service conceived to serve a sovereign British nation and the British Empire, but has lived so long that it is still trying to conduct advocacy journalism in a Britain which has become vassal state of a bureaucratic, Continental  empire whose faceless Solons couldn't give a monkey what we think.

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Monday

24 April 2006

Future Echo

Glasgow Matters gets off to a roaring start.

It’s been said that on 9/11 irony died.  It didn’t.  It’s just that people now fail to recognise it.

Take the case of Glasgow city council, which has closed the Orwellian circle begun with the plague of CCTV cameras by installing telescreens in public spaces.  According to the Scotsman,

Known as "Glasgow Matters", ten plasma screens, installed at a cost of £150,000, will broadcast a rolling service of local information, safety notices, national news, weather and sport, emergency bulletins and crime reduction information.

Key issues to be addressed by programmes will include drug awareness, fitness, anti-racism, violence, healthy eating, drink spiking and fire safety.

The city council also intends to broadcast footage of local regeneration projects to encourage civic pride among residents, as well as advertising local jobs.

No doubt in between all this uplifting material the council will also be giving us updates on our boys on the Malabar Front and highlights of the day’s two-minute hate. 

I try very hard not to cynical about this sort of thing, but when ubiquitous security cameras are supplemented by televisions sprouting in every airport, train station, shopping mall, waiting room, supermarket checkout, and now in public spaces I begin to wonder if  Orwell and Huxley weren’t on to something.

Then again, we might have a dollop of Clockwork Orange thrown in for piquancy, as Theodore Dalrymple claims in his recent City Journal article.  I don’t always agree with Dr. Dalrymple’s conclusions, but his articles are like a purgative that cleans away the comforting illusions and it is often hard to lightly dismiss him when he says things like,

The newspapers confirmed what I had long perceived before I left Britain: that the zeitgeist of the country is now one of sentimental moralizing combined with the utmost cynicism, where the government’s pretended concern for the public welfare coexists with the most elementary dereliction of duty.  There is an absence of any kind of idealism that is a necessary precondition of probity, so that bad faith prevails almost everywhere.  The government sees itself as an engineer of souls (to use the phrase so eloquently coined by Stalin with regard to writers who, of course, were expected to mould Homo Sovieticus by the power of their words).  Government thus concerns itself with what people think, feel, and say—as well as with trying to change their freely chosen habits—rather than with performing its one inescapable duty: that of preserving the peace and ensuring that citizens may go about their lawful business in confidence and safety.  It is more concerned that young men should not smoke cigarettes in prison or make silly jokes to policemen than that they should not attack and permanently maim their elders and betters.

Or consider his take on the recent case of an Oxford student who was hauled into court for asking a mounted policeman “do you realize your horse is gay?”

The degree to which political correctness has addled British consciousness, like a computer virus, and destroyed all our traditional attachment to liberty, is illustrated by the words of one of the student’s friends who witnessed the incident.  “[His] comments were . . . in jest,” he said. “It was very clear that they were not homophobic.”  In other words, the friend accepted the premise that certain remarks, well short of incitement to commit violence or any actual crime—words that merely expressed an unpopular or intolerant point of view—would have constituted reasonable grounds for arrest.  One consequence of the liberal intelligentsia’s long march through the institutions is the acceptance of the category of Thoughtcrime.

For the past couple of years I’ve tried keeping track of this creeping tide of Ingsoc (or is it NICE?) in these columns and I’d normally repeat the worst offences here, but they’ve become so numerous that it becomes pointless to keep reiterating them whenever I revisit the subject, which is a pity.  Maybe I should come up with some sort of a javascript insert that produces an interactive timeline, because if I don’t keep the evidence front and centre I’m afraid that I’ll get lumped with the tinfoil-cap brigade— and I’m, in no mood to be identified with either the “Capitalism is a Fascist conspiracy” camp or the Private Frazer “we’re dooooomed!” faction. 

That isn’t easy when a news item that I’m commenting on, such as the Glasgow piece, can be shrugged off as being no big deal.  I agree that it’s no big deal—indeed it is close to farcical, but it is indicative.  A panopticon society with giant screens belching out official propaganda is not a very healthy combination.  CCTV was no big deal either.  Neither was the introduction of speed cameras, the proposal by the government to track all motor cars by GPS, ID cards, taking and retaining DNA samples from people who hadn’t been charged with a crime, hate crime legislation in its various forms and layers, the banning of words because they didn’t conform to political orthodoxy, Bullywatch, and on, and on, and on.  Each one of these things can be justified (or at least an argument can be made for them), and none by itself is particularly ominous (though ID cards come damn close), but taken together they form a very, very nasty pattern.

Is this the sign of some conspiracy?  No, of course not.  Are the intentions sinister?  No, though I would categorise most as vile.  It isn’t a conscious attempt to build a tyranny.  It’s more of a blind backing into one that will surprise even its architects.  It’s what happens, as Dr. Dalrymple notes, when men fall back on moods to justify their actions rather than absolute morality.  Unbound by any solid code, even those with the best of motives will follow an easy path to do good—a path that is easy, because it always conforms with what one wants to do rather than what one should do.  It’s a conformity that is easy to maintain, because the good is a shifting standard defined by a shifting mood.  And that is a very poor bulwark against evil—especially evil born of good intentions.  As G. K. Chesterton observed,

We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right.  What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.  In these current fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty allowing us a religion.  These people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious, and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood.  But the mood would exist even without the creed.  They say they want a religion to be social, when they would be social without any religion.  They say they want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without any religion.  They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion.  They say they want a religion like this because they are like this already.  They say they want it, when they mean that they could do with out it.

It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood.  It is very different when some of the saints preached social reconciliation to fierce and raging factions who could hardly bear the sight of each other’s faces.  It was a very different thing when charity was preached to pagans who really did not believe in it; just as it is a very different thing now, when chastity is preached to new pagans who do not believe in it.  It is in those cases that we get the real grapple of religion; and it is in those cases that we get the peculiar and solitary triumph of the Catholic faith...One word that tells us what we do not know outweighs a thousand words that tell us what we do know.  And the thing is all the more striking if we not only did not know it but could not believe it.

Chesterton was speaking in the context of religion, but the same applies to the public sphere.  By following mood rather than morality it is easy to regard your fellow men as children to be looked after and scolded and it is always possible to justify one more reduction of liberty, one more diminution of privacy, and one more surrender to barbarism in the name of a tolerance that is, in essence if not in practice, indistinguishable from oppression and decadence. 

But you get to watch it on telly.

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Tuesday

25 April 2006

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Brian took comfort in the fact that most of his afternoons did not turn out quite like this.

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Wednesday

26 April 2006

Great Moments in Invention

On the other hand, Herschel did have a lot of trouble using phone boxes.

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Thursday

27 April 2006

American Idol

I never watch network television if I can help it, but one of the advantages of family life is that it exposes me to new experiences whether I want them or not.  Where I never turn on the set unless I’m looking for a specific programme, my wife likes to “see what’s on,” which means that I’m often transported into a strange, terrible world in which things like American Idol fester and grow.

I never could understand the attraction of American Idol, but it must have some appeal, otherwise level-headed (relatively) bloggers wouldn’t get so bubbly over it.   Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so few episodes and with so little attention that I still don’t get the pop-culture references to the show in other media.  I’ll grant that the programme has some superficial appeal with all its flashy sets and hyperkinetic presenters, but watching any instalment for more than five minutes reveals that it’s a rather slow-moving, over-produced version of Opportunity Knocks, but with an elimination formula that is so heartless that it looks like a game of Russian roulette with sequins. 

It’s understandable how the format evolved.  There’s still an audience for the old-fashioned variety shows that were once the staples of television programming—especially in Britain, where American Idol’s parent show, Pop Idol originated.  Variety shows, with their mix of song, dance, and comedy, were perhaps the purest form of straightforward performance entertainment possible and were ideal for television, because they were a bit like buses.  If you didn’t like the current act, there’d be another one along in a couple of minutes.  Problem was, variety shows were hellishly expensive from the word go and as star salaries rose the headliners priced themselves out of the market.  Worse, variety formats required real performers—that is, hosts with tons of charisma and quick wits, song and dance men, chanteuses, comedians as opposed to stand-up comics, acrobats, magicians, jugglers, live bands, and dance troupes.  Trying to assemble a cast like that was relatively easy up until the early ‘80s, but today it’s like putting out a call for tap-dancing woolly mammoths.  American Idol is a bargain basement alternative that relies on hungry (and inexpensive) newcomers performing anaemic programmes that are padded out with minor celebrity judges, “behind the scenes” clips, and lots and lots of neon to cover the cracks.

The newcomer bit is the most painfully evident part of the format, as the performers are not only experienced, but are distilled examples of the poor quality of entertainment we enjoy (more like endure) today.  For one thing, the people that American Idol features are not “performers,” but singers.  In the heyday of variety shows, performers were expected to know how to sing, dance, act (within reason), tell a joke, manage a prat fall, and adlib as required.  If they were anywhere above chorus line material, they were also expected to have enough of a stage presence to make a connection with their audience that could make a concert hall seem like an intimate club. Today, it seems that television requires nothing more than an ability to sing.

Not that the American Idol singers are anything to write home about.  The singers may be black, white, or Asian; short or tall, male or female, bearded or bald, but the one thing they all have in common is an utter inability to carry a tune in a bucket.  Apparently, conveying emotion in song these days involves making a strangled squawk and for some reason every singer seems compelled to screw the face up and hit the top of your register while belting out what they imagine to be a showstopper, but comes off more like a sound bite from the sort of Greatest Hits album you find advertised on late night television.

This utter inability to sing a quiet song or to make any sort of connection whatsoever with the audience is singularly depressing.  There’s an unspoken rule in drama that you should never remind your audience of a better play.  The same goes for singing.  Every time an American Idol contestant puts on a look as though he’s trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a bowling ball and starts howling at the ceiling lights, I am immediately reminded of how an Eartha Kitt or Bobby Darin could hold their own against a full orchestra with a cool little song no louder than a muted trumpet.  I won’t even bother to make a comparison with Frank Sinatra, as it’s unfair to bring a gun to a knife fight. 

And the appalling thing is that this the high-water mark of modern television variety!

No wonder Simon Cowell is so acerbic.

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Friday

28 April 2006

Shape of Seats to Come

Air travel as it no longer is.

Memories can be a painful thing.  So can being crammed into an airport shuttle bus with twelve complete strangers on a day when the air conditioning decided to pack it in. 

There was a time when air travel had a sense of occasion.  Yesteryear, it would have been the height of bohemianism for me to step out of the taxi at the departure terminal without my jacket neatly pressed and my tie knotted just so as I discreetly signalled for the nearest skycap to tend to my bags.  Today, my jacket is a rumpled, sweat-stained mess and my tie askew as I fight for my luggage as it’s unceremoniously dumped on a pavement singularly lacking in skycaps or even luggage trolleys. 

In days passed, I would have walked into a terminal that would be like a cathedral or great public space; filled with the hum of busy people going to and fro and yet strangely empty no matter what the time of day as smiling clerks at the desks of this or that airline processed tidy queues of waiting passengers.  Now I drag my two battered suitcases and laptop bag into a hall crammed with humanity formed into dense, intermingling conga lines of confused, angry impotence that inch glacially toward either sullen baggage processors or blank-faced automated ticket vendors.  On the edges of this human tide are knots of travellers drawn together or sitting apart on heaps of baggage, yet all united in the common misery of wondering if all this is really worth something as transitory as a boarding pass. 

Time was when, once the baggage was disposed of, whoever was seeing me off and I would then retire to either a tidy little coffee bar or, more likely, the overpriced restaurant for a meal and a couple of quick drinks to kill the time until boarding.  Today, I make my way alone, as only ticketed passengers are allowed past the draconian and humiliating security that requires me to not only surrender my shoes, but on more than one occasion to undo my trousers—providing me with the unique experience of wishing that I’d worn my Union Jack boxer shorts so that I could demand of the security guards, “Is this the underwear of a terrorist?”.

Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t have any company.  The dining facilities aren’t what they were.  Gone are the chop houses that offered a passable steak.  Just as well.  I’m not allowed to have an actual knife to cut it with any more and the toy ones don't do the job worth a monkey's.  Such restaurants have been replaced by foul fast-food kiosks that substitute the relaxing pre-flight meal with squatting on the floor of the departure “lounge” (there are never enough seats) with a cellophane-wrapped sandwich and a lukewarm latte.  To add insult to injury, my dining pleasure is made complete by ubiquitous televisions spouting a Headline News broadcast that I’ll see repeated at least three times before my flight boards.  The alternative to this is watching my fellow travellers, but I am in no mood to study new developments in obscene tee shirt slogans and gum-chewing techniques.  Rather than face this, I retire to the one place that promises something like a comfortable chair; the airport bar that is little more than a booze vending machine and has about as much charm.  They invariably offer doubles at a discount and given the circumstances, I invariably take them up on the offer.

Air travel today

Having a bit of a buzz on is the only way I’ll get on the plane—not because I have any fear of flying, but because I’m trying to dull my memories of old travel adverts highlighting Constellations and Stratocruisers with their luxurious leg room, smoking lounges, chefs presiding over proper galleys, bars, sleeper berths, and smiling cabin crews that actually took as much pride in being called stewards and stewardesses as their sea-going counterparts.  Such amenities still exist in attenuated form in First Class and Second (sorry, “Business”) Class, but in the Third Class (“Coach”) section where I am herded after a three-hour delay I am steeling myself for grimmer fare.  They don’t call it “Cattle Class” these days for nothing.  I am prepared for the tiny aluminium seats with legroom that wouldn’t fit an undersized Flemish gibbon.  I’m resigned to the LCD television in the seatback that is used to quell the chances of the passengers rising in revolt, as I am to the derisively small “snacks” and the box lunch prepared with the sort of attention that doesn’t even warrant the term “afterthought.”  I’m even ready for the stewardess who treats passengers as a burden to be endured, the prospect of being diverted to another airport where we will sit on the ground for four hours without water or toilet as at least three one-year olds aboard are on the verge of going ballistic, and even a missed connection that will be met by the Help Desk staff with a “tough, the next one leaves tomorrow afternoon” and will leave me stranded in Denver overnight where I will have to take a taxi fifty miles to the far side of town to find a hotel room.

The seat of pain

The future of air travel

What I am not prepared for is the discovery that I have inadvertently booked aboard a new Airbus plane and I shan’t have to worry about cramped seats, because there is, in fact, no place to sit.  That’s because there aren’t any seats. Instead, I am faced with a sort of rack with a bum-shelf that I’m expected to perch on.  Instead of a seat belt, there’s a metal harness that folds down to lock me in place.  I won’t have to worry about the quality of the food or drink, because there is none, nor will I have to brave the narrow confines of the coffin-like toilet for similar reasons.  In all, it’s less like an airliner than a fun fair ride and with about the same level of dignity.

It’s my own fault, really.  I’d forgotten that the modern airline slogan is not “Fly the friendly skies,” but “We really, really hate you.”

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