Glob-a-log

Human beings can be unspeakably vile, in their unthinking pursuit of egotistical goals & gratification.

Be they ‘bleeding heart liberal’:

I keep coming back to the middle-class drugs phenomena, however, because it’s something that genuinely bemuses me. Almost any middle-class drug consumption is, theoretically, oxymoronic. These are, after all, the bleeding heart liberals who recycle their tins, sign petitions against sweat-shops, buy organic wine and fair-trade coffee, and fulminate against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You never once, however, hear them excitedly boast about having got in a load of fair-trace, organic cocaine from a socialist lesbian commune in Colombia. And that’s because there aren’t any.

The illegal trade of Class A drugs rivals the black market for weapons, and the slave trade, as the most unethical on Earth. People working in the drugs industry get threatened, tortured, enslaved and killed, and the progression of the drug from one side of the world to another is marked out with a trail of misery, destruction, ecological degradation and death.

It’s about as friendly and right-on as the sex trade – and yet people who would look down on a shag with a crying 16-year-old Estonian prostitute will happily call their dealer in front of everyone on a Friday night. I’m amazed the middle-classes still turn a blind eye to the reality of the drugs in their pocket.

Or ‘greed head’ conservative:

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama’s football stadium.

And things seem to get progressively worse. Remember who said this?

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

That was the 34th president of the USA, actually: David ‘Ike’ Eisenhower. Can you imagine any politician today who would think (or dare) to say anything like that – let alone our current, and 43th president?

The only quotation that seems to go well with the younger Bush is what some journalist recently wrote about Protestants in general:

Catholics and Jews recycle their guilt as humour. Protestants became Protestants so they didn’t have to do guilt; they do blame instead. They have smiling anger and cruise missiles instead of a sense of humour.

Enough about politicians though. It’s always easy to point up and cry foul. While we should look at ourselves.

Collectively, we’ve become decadent, and so desperate for the next big wave of cheap emotion that we lose sight of all common sense and common decency:

This is also the week when Madeleine McCann was to have started her first school. In her enforced absence, its head teacher has decreed the tot’s very own shrine: an empty desk, peg and locker, together with a burning candle, thus ensuring that dozens of other four-year-olds who never knew Madeleine nevertheless will be reminded daily that there really are bogeymen who steal innocents from their beds, their mummies and their daddies.

This degree of immersion of children in our baser obsessions is recent — almost certainly inspired by the tons of Cellophane-wrapped, rotting foliage outside Kensington Palace a decade ago, when mass mourning first became a family day out.

Whatever, you wonder, is the adult justification? What are they thinking, as they urge a hurry-up with that picnic, there’s another dead kiddie to gawp over? They cannot even pretend it to be a lesson in self-protection; would “being careful” have helped Sarah? Or Rhys? Or Madeleine?

No. They may dress it up with fancy words — “tribute” is a favourite — but the cruder truth is that ersatz grief is now the new pornography; like the worst of hard-core, it is stimulus by proxy, voyeuristically piggy-backing upon that which might otherwise be deemed personal and private, for no better reason than frisson and the quickening of an otherwise jaded pulse. The only difference is that with old pornography at least we do our best to keep it away from children.

Individually, we’ve seen and will be seeing more and more of these types of stories:

A man was arrested Monday after assaulting a neighbor who refused to participate in a gymnastic exercise event organized by the neighborhood association, police said.

Katsuya Mori, 34, a company employee of Kanda, stands accused of inflicting bodily injury and damaging property.

The incident occurred on Aug. 1 this year. Mori visited a 35-year-old self-employed man’s home in Kanda when he was drunk, and hit him, investigators said. Mori then hurled a concrete chunk at the victim’s 5-year-old daughter and threatened to kill her.

At the time, Mori criticized the neighbor for refusing to participate in a radio gymnastic exercise session for summer vacation organized by the neighborhood association. Mori serves as vice president of the organization.

We point at terrorists and claim they are a threat to our civilisation, our ‘way of life’. They are not. They are a nuisance at most. What really threatens us – is us.

We do more harm to our own souls, our own communities and the world at large than any mad Bin Laden & assorted psychopaths can ever hope to achieve.

Let’s end today’s sermon with a parable, coming to us through yet another news clip:

A lifeguard rescued a 2ft (0.61m) sand shark that was being hit by frightened swimmers on Coney Island beach. Marisu Mironescu, 39, said that he saw about 75 to 100 people circling the shark.

“They were holding on to it and some people were hitting him, smacking his face,” he said.

He has been a lifeguard for 22 years but had never before dealt with a shark.

He grabbed the largely harmless fish and took it by backstroke out to sea.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 02:57 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.