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I was watching a comedy (show or film, don't remember, probably British rather than American) where a comedy bigoted character said about immigrants (paraphrase) : they are lazy, they don't want to work and they come over here and take our jobs. He said this all in one sentence, oblivious to the irony (or something) of what he was saying, and even when a more level-headed character pointed out that they were either lazy OR job-stealing, but obviously not both, he didn't get it. So this was comedy, right? A few days later, today, I was watching a supposedly serious show about "benefit fraud" on a supposedly serious BBC channel. They featured a story about a woman who came from Ghana to the UK, illegally forged a new identity based on a stolen British passport with her photo substituted and a faked birth certificate and faked educational credentials. she then got a job with the NHS which she had for several years (I am guessing from the earnings cited below seven to ten years.) Most of the fraud involved here was pretty ham-fisted; her birth certificate said Lutterworth, which is in Leicestershire, but then said County of Surrey (hundreds of miles away.) (For Americans, this is sort of like saying Sacramento, Illinois, only even more impossible.) Also, some documents implied she had never left the UK after being born here, but her fake diplomas were from Ghana. And implausibly had a photo on them. The same photo as on her stolen passport. So, look here, I am not saying she is a hero, or not a fraudster, or not a criminal. I am not defending her. But this is how the BBC summed up the story. This woman was said to have earned £230,000 plus a £40,000 "bursary" (not sure what that is, but I am guessing some kind of grant for either work or education.) So they claimed her fraud had COST British taxpayers (which includes me) £270,000, or "over a quarter of a million". But wait a minute, this woman was also a British taxpayer. And she didn't COST the country £230K of that, since presumably they got at least nearly that much value from her in service to the NHS. Oh, but here's the real kicker, just as ignorant in its way as that "lazy and steal our jobs" line: the woman is now in prison for many years! So she is "paying back that debt to society." No, she is now costing the British taxpayers (including me) probably about 10 times as much per annum to support in a prison, doing nothing of worth, as she was paying in taxes while committing her crime. Is it just me, or is this FREAKING INSANE?
In his numinous and magical novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut introduced the idea of "granfalloons". These are random groupings of people who think, erroneously, that they have some shared destiny as a group, and for whom this delusion is a source of suffering and misguided action. Examples, famously, are given, thus:
Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Association of Oddfellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere. I think of this statement, which has become a sort of mantra to me over the nearly 40 years since I read Cat's Cradle, literally every time I pass through an airport, see a reference to immigration or international trade, and about the half the time I am watching, listening to or reading the news. Especially when I read about things like this.
Under the marvelous title Dien Bien Fool (oh, how I wanted to steal that) journalist and blogging pundit Christopher Albritton in his blog Back to Iraq 2.0 takes on the job of addressing GWB's latest piece of imbecility (or at least the latest I know about, as I don't keep up with him as I should). I mean, of course, the address a few days ago to a VFW where he very clumsily attempted to use the "killing fields" of Cambodia 1975 as a reason to pursue the endless folly of the coalition quagmire in Iraq.
"Really, it’s hard to know where to start", he says. But he ends up here:
And finally Vietnam. In one speech, Bush had managed to drag out the knuckleheaded, right-wing argument that if only we’d stayed in Vietnam a little longer, we’d have won that sucker. If only the media and Democrats hadn’t been so hell-bent on undermining the troops…
This is a tricky subject for Bush, considering he spent the Vietnam years partying and “protecting” the Gulf of Mexico from the Viet Cong in a champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard. It’s also tricky because war critics have spent the past four years comparing the quagmire or Iraq to the quagmire of Vietnam — which, I might remind you, we lost. After addressing the again wrong-headed analogy of the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, Chris also mentions "but the U.S. threw open its doors and took the “boat people” in. It has not done the same thing for Iraqis, instead forcing them to stay in a deadly cage or face the instability of life in Jordan and Syria." The "killing fields" reference was very effectively dealt with by David Cortright on the blog "God's Politics" (Sojourner).
This is classic, this is supremely stupid, this is adding insult to injury in a whole new level, this my friends, is irony writ large! After years of to-ing and fro-ing, trying desperately to find a fool-proof way to prosecute and convict the clearly "bad people" illegally incarcerated in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Bush Administration and the subservient Congress got a law of sorts to use in its endeavours, based primarily on an acceptable (to the Supreme Court, hopefully) definition of this new phenomenon the "illegal enemy combatant".
Armed with their pristine new law, the military prosecutors prepared documents for their first best case (and clone them for all the other cases waiting in the wings) and sallied into court only to be thrown out of court by their own hand-picked judge because, unbelievably, they failed to use the terminology of the law designed just for these cases. The defendant in the case was never called in the suit an illegal enemy combatant, but merely an enemy combatant. God may be on the side of the big batallions, but He occasionally likes to deliver a backhand slap to those with the tiny intellects, and the moral vision to match.
A good satire and all true. This is from Mathew Engel's column in the Guardian. (NB: as I revisited this piece in my laborious conversion to the new Blogger, I reread the piece - it is chilling how what was satire in 2003 has come to pass - and is not that funny.)
. . . if I have any such. (If you know the literary reference above, leave a comment to show off your erudition.) I have been too absorbed in my own petty personal concerns to blog for two days. But I just heard a snippet of Arnold S's great "political" "debate" on the BBC (radio) a few moments ago. Oh dear, oh dear. It is much worse even than I thought.
This article on the depressingly popular "Left Behind" series is not so much a book review as a history lesson and exegesis of a body of paranoid literature.
"The worldview. . . propounded in the books was first popularised by the Protestant theologian John Nelson Darby in the mid-19th century, and it is disturbing how it has become an underlying meta-narrative for American life: progress for the righteous, doom for the enemy. It has even found a role in US politics – with a large lobby of North American citizens who believe that the Middle East roadmap should be opposed because it conflicts with their interpretation of end-times prophecy."
'It was punishment without trial' by Jonathan Steele relates several stories of innocent Iraqis caught up in the blundering march of coalition "justice". In the absence of a plan, an authority or a clear understanding of the law, treatment of detainees is largely a matter of the good or ill will of random American officers. Even children are subject to the whims of the often misguided attempts at enforcing order.
This column in the Guardian analyses the effectiveness (or rather almost total lack of it) of the war on terror. I don't totally agree with the final analysis, though, as the writer believes that Bush is trying to win the war on terror as we would understand it - e.g., eliminate or greatly reduce acts of terrorism. An open goal for Osama? Hardly. This is pure 1984-style foreign policy - the war on terror need never end, is infinitely useful to the rulers, and if the personae keep changing, who cares? it's always the same war. Be expecting the two-minute hate to be instituted any day.
I just had a most annoying interface with the UK government. We are in the first week of the lightening-quick one-month Great National Debate On Genetic Modification of Crops. What a joke! They are holding six or seven public forums, not advertised. They have also a website with the "points" of the "debate" set out in a very condescending way. No points are actually made, no information is given, no knowledge is imparted. The language is so Doublespeak that poor Mr. Orwell has surely disinterred himself by now with all that spinning around in his grave. If one is of the subsection of society that does most of its business on the internet (as I am) one is meant to read all this drivel, and then, freshly "informed", register ones views through a multiple choice radio button form. The questions on the form are a lot better than the debating points, I'll give them that. But then that means there is even less of a connect between the "facts" upon which to "decide" and the views that you register. And of course, after reading all this weasel-sh**, one is not likely to believe that ones views, once registered, will make any difference anyway. Oh, it just makes me spit.
By the way, I am not going to put a link here, but if you are British and can convince me of it, and can't find the site on your own, e-mail me at the link above and I'll tell it to you.
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