Here’s today’s Modest Proposal, as reported in the Guardian:
Greece must consider a fire sale of land, historic buildings and art worksto cut its debts, two rightwing German politicians said today in a newspaper interview that is bound to exacerbate tensions between Athens and Berlin. The Acropolis and the Parthenon could also fall under the hammer, along with temptingly idyllic Aegean islands still under state ownership, in a rush to keep bankruptcy at bay.”
It’s an interesting idea.
It’s also kind of funny that it comes from two right wing German politicians.
Now, I’m not saying that Greece didn’t make a mess of things but for German politicians to throw stones is a bit rich.
People in glass houses and all of that – or, to be less subtle about this: People who, not so long ago, celebrated a Kristall Nacht, before setting fire to the rest of Europe, should, perhaps, not be the first ones to suggest other countries have a fire sale.
I suppose we should be grateful that, this time round, these right wing politicians are prepared to pay money for these islands, instead of invading them, like they did in 1941.
Anyway, politicians of a country that gassed God knows how many million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and psychiatric patients, and that, after the war, received a hand-out of millions and millions of American dollars through the Marshall plan, should, quite frankly, shut the fuck up if another European country runs into a spot of financial bother.
(Ghosts of Nazis whispering eni meany miney moe - or something…)
People love their superstitions. Whether it’s drinking blood before the altar of four-armed killer Goddesses or throwing salt over your shoulder at the dinner table, humankind has always embraced irrationality more fervently than Tiger Woods could ever hope to do with any of his mistresses.
This one is interesting though:
“A self-styled exorcist who believeswoodland carries evil spirits has been arrested for attacking 100 trees next to the Eiffel tower. The 38-year-old hammered nails into branches and trunks, and painted graffiti on them. The unnamed man told officers that he was “trying to rid the trees of demon forces” before being taken into custody, pending psychiatric reports.”
Scoff, if you must but I think the guy is onto something. After all, nobody has ever accused lawyers of being anything but base and materialistic and even they admit that possession is nine-tenths of the law.
What’s more, we all know that woodland can indeed harbour and unleash demon forces.
I mean, God knows the Iraqi people would have welcomed the exorcism of a certain Bush…
I mean, individually, sometimes, people can be charming, well-meaning and even intelligent. Place them in social groups, political parties, sport teams or work organisations and they, collectively, regress to the level of the stupidest, most mean-spirited, corrupt and aggressive persons among them.
Take the following bit of news, coming from New Zealand:
“Meals approved by Weight Watchersare going on sale at McDonald’s in New Zealand under a deal trumpeted as an enjoyable way to lose weight but that nutritionists criticise as a marketing ploy that doesn’t promote healthy eating. As part of the deal, which the company says is the first of its kind, McDonald’s will use the Weight Watchers logo on its menu boards and Weight Watchers will promote McDonald’s to dieters.”
We all know that McDonald’s is happy enough to deforest the planet and turn every child into a diabetic lard puppet, as long as they can make a few bucks on the way but what were Weight Watchers thinking…?
It’s like the RSPCA (or PETA) endorsing Hitler, because he was a vegetarian who loved dogs.
Ah well, people.
Like Jimmy Breslin wrote in his wonderful book, ‘I Want to Thank My Brain for remembering Me’:
“[It] takes absolutely nothing to go against public opinion because public opinion is wrong to hold and insane to herald because it is made of a choir of crickets.”
“The thing that hath been,it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
However, there are many, many people who, very sadly, don’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
Who don’t believe, for instance, that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
That God planted all those fossils to test our faith (or, alternatively, that our forefathers Walked with the Dinosaurs the way modern man Dances with the Stars.)
That means that at least 99% of humanity will go to Hell. Which puts our earthly moaning about overpopulation somewhat in perspective – though I doubt that the foremost complaint of those who end up Down There will be that some other damned soul is standing on his or her toe.
Still, it’s an ill wind and all of that, ’cause the fact that so many of us will go down, down, down, means that the price of real estate Up There will be sheer Heaven. It will be a buyer’s market, baby!
Anyway, today I read an article that proved it is just plain silly not to believe in the truth of God’s Word.
You remember Moses and all the miracles that clung to him like barnacles to the Ark? From burning bushes, through parting seas to manna falling from Heaven?
Well, that kind of stuff is still happening today:
“A student sparked a forest fire that caused £30 million in damages in a Croatian park after he set fire to a thorny bush that kept pricking him on his way to college. Jure Erceg, a religious studies student, was jailed for 15 months after a court in Erceg, Croatia, heard that he started the blaze on Velebit mountain in 2007 to seek revenge on the bush.”
Here we really need another Bible passage:
“When I was a child,I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
So, though we do recognize Jure Erceg’s good – nay holy – intentions, this is where we do separate the men from the boys. Or, in this case, the prophet from the student.
‘Cause when you want to do this Moses and the burning bush thing, a desert is a slightly better place to pick than one that’s in the middle of a 500 acres national park.
Also, to stick with death related matters, there was a woman whose life wassaved by her size-D breast implants, one of which caught the bullet of a semi-automatic assault rifle.
Then there were those two guys in Mozambique who were caught shagging a goat, whose owner now demands they do the honourable thing and staying in Africa and staying on (sex) topic, there was this school dorm in South Africa that was closed after areported outbreak of lesbianism.
So, Jesus, death and sex are doing just fine in the world’s Sunday papers, which hardly comes as a big surprise, but right now I can’t be bothered to comment on any of these stories.
Well, there was this one thought that sprang to my mind while I was reading a story about a guy who had seen the hand of God and wanted to shake it when he discovered that a picture of Jesus was the only thing to surviveafter his house burnt down.
The thought being that it was rather strange to bestow the epitaph of ‘Saviour’ on Someone who is quite happy to survive while everything around Him burns to a crisp.
Enough of that and enough of all these stories that take the sapiens out of homo sapiens. Time to put this (non)column to bed and to start cutting up the vegetables & herbs for what will, hopefully, become a glorious fish soup.
Okay, first a short excerpt from the transcript of an old BBC 4 ‘Point of View’ programme, titled ‘The Golf Ball Potato Crisp’, written and read by Clive James:
“Shakespeare was only one of [Montaigne's] many readerswho caught fire at that idea. Shakespeare knew Montaigne’s writings inside out. They helped set the standard for the way our greatest playwright separated what he knew from what he didn’t know. But not even Shakespeare had an opinion about the golf-ball potato crisp, because it had not yet arrived in the world.”
James, in his typical Janusian way of looking at stuff in both a goofy and an intellectual way, links golf balls, dead French philosophers, Global Warming, Shakespeare and potato harvest machines with the importance of scepticism and still manages to weave a tightly knit and very pleasant little aural carpet (waving his knitting gear with the assured ease of an old composer/director but with a wide and slightly wicked grin on his face.)
The point he ultimately makes is a valid one, I think. Not many human beings are like Montaigne and probably none of us asks that question ‘What do I know?’ often enough.
The whole Global Warming discussion is a very good example of this. How many politicians, journalists, pub sages, bloggers or internet newspaper commentators who bombard us with their varying versions of the ‘I-am-right-and-I-am-righteous’ truth actually know anything about the science? How many scientists do?
Me, I have no axes to grind here. I declare myself a floating agnostic: Sometimes, I seem to tend to lean slightly into this direction, sometimes slightly into the other but always with that rock solid certainty at the core of my being that informs me that I truly don’t know shit about the whole subject. Dylan sang about not needing to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. I’m more like an old-fashioned weathervane, perched on top of his stone tower of doubt, not knowing which way to turn.
Still, I do read the papers and I try to follow these issues – and I admit that has led me to some pretty firm conclusions, which I am quite happy to share with you.
Here goes:
1) On the one hand, I truly would love it if that soi-disant vast majority of climate change experts were wrong. Firstly, for the simple reason that I wouldn’t like the earth to warm up that much, and that fast. A Tibetan monk may be able to keep his cool about that but if, like me, you live in Holland, of which about half lies under the sea level as it stands, you’d prefer the oceans not to rise by much more. Secondly though, I have to admit that I would simply love it if that self-important majority was wrong, because I will always root for the maverick minority view. Pit the might of the Roman Catholic Church against Galileo Galilei and I will wear my ‘E pur si muove!’T-shirt proudly. (Come to think of it, scientist Freeman Dyson would make a most wonderful Galilei…)
2) On the other hand, it would almost be worth it for my country to become a latter day Atlantis (even though that might inconvenience our coffee shop owners and clients somewhat) for the simple reason that so many of the very loudmouth Global Warming deniers are such ugly little oiks. Know nothing types who broadly fall into two categories: Right wing dingbats and conspiracy theory freaks. (Okay, maybe that’s just one category, after all.) Again, I’m not saying everyone who seriously doubts the reality of (a man-made) Global Warming belongs to that sick tribe but too many do – and too many of them, if forced to choose between the sure destruction of the earth and giving up a few luxuries, would close their eyes and ears and go “NA-NA-NA-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU!!!!!”, while driving their 4WD SUVs through the gates of a Global Hell.
3) On the other hand, yet again, I would also prefer the majority of these doom-selling scientists to be wrong, because so many of their lay followers are such terrible, terrible people. Don’t get me wrong: I still donate some money each month to Greenpeace. I may not always agree with all their ideas and I do find a lot of their campaigning material too calculatingly sentimental but I do think it is important to have strong environmental organisations, if only as a counterweight to industrial lobby groups. However, there is a type of fanatic eco-church member that is utterly insufferable. They’re like the warped mirror images of Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin – but without the charm. If you would give them a pair of God Buttons that, if pushed, would decide whether Global Warming would be real or not, they would push the self-destruct button without a minute’s thought. This bunch would rather have all of us die than to live in a world where people could drive their cars, eat fast food and fly Ryan Air with no real consequences to the health of the planet. Obviously, as it is with their opponents, not all environmental activists are like that at all but there are still way too many of those loathsome hair shirt types around and people like that never ever deserve to be right.
Ah well, but what do I know, after all? I’m that weathervane, remember?
Which, perhaps, is not such a bad position to be in. There is something restful in admitting that you simply don’t know enough about stuff to get caught up in this really ugly (and, by now, frankly rather boring and repetitive) debate.
Plus, if those sea levels would indeed happen to rise, any time soon, the top of a church tower would not be the worst place to find yourself when you’re in Holland.
Chances are that all of you who read this are pretty unhappy. That’s what the following article seems to suggest anyway.
So, unless you are of a certain, very particular age, you’d better start taking those happy pills now:
“Seventy-four year-olds are the mostcontented people in the population, according to new research. Fewer responsibilities, financial worries and more time to yourself leads to contentment previously unknown in earlier life.”
Mind you, they do have a point – though I’d have to say that there are enough people out there who are so tedious, dull-witted and pain-in-the neckerish that I doubt they would enjoy ‘more time to themselves’. I mean, think about it: everybody has met his or her share of party bores. So, imagine how it must be to live on the inside of those skulls…
Anyway, I’m not quite sureabout those ‘fewer financial worries’, to be honest. Certainly, most of the baby boomers seem to have done alright for themselves but there are still enough pensioners eating catfood and spending many a miserable winter day being cold to the bone, ’cause they can’t afford the cost of heating their homes properly.
Still, there’s something to say for that ‘fewer responsibilities’ argument. That, plus the fact that they will never, ever have to deal with – or even see – their former colleagues again.
As the following article shows, happiness is not having to go through the daily, soul-vacuuming ritual of the office tea ceremony:
“A report shows that women make morethan three times as many cups of tea as men in the workplace. Two-thirds of men told a study they invented bogus reasons for not making hot drinks, while one in four sneaked off to make one just for themselves. The study of 3,000 workers by Cafedirect revealed that men also moan more about having to make drinks for their colleagues. Recruitment consultants – the UK’s biggest tea drinkers – generally spend almost as long moaning about tea (four minutes) as making it (five minutes).”
Remember Dick Cheney, or Charlie Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer? Or, let’s say, that guy who blew up the FBI building, or the ones shooting abortion doctors? Or the good little demagogues of FOX news (and all their disciples)? Or the millions of children and grown-ups, whose fast food eating habits make them look like drowning victims, whose grotesquely bloated bodies have been fished out of the water after a week? Pretty, no?
No.
Anyway, I remember once making a joke about someone being so stupid he would drown in the shallow end of the gene pool.
That was before I realized how shallow people really can get?
“Americans are the most attractivelooking people in the world, according to a new survey.The United States, home to George Clooney and Jessica Simpson, came top in a poll of more than 5,000 globe-trotting Britons.In second place was Brazil while Spain, which boasts Hollywood actress Penelope Cruz as one of its natives, was third.”
I’d say that if a few film stars can raise a whole nation to most-attractiveness, then these opinions held by 5000 tourists make either Britain or the whole tourist species the most moronic on earth – but why spend more time and thought on these imbeciles?
It’s time to make lunch for my lady. See you tomorrow.
Again, I’m not in the mood to read any newspapers. It’s almost 17.30 when I write this. I spent the last three-and-a-half hours shopping for food, cutting up innocent vegetables and doing quite cruel things to a bit of lamb. In about an hour it will be time to heat up the oven, so that yet another dinner for six can be served around 19.30.
Which leaves me an hour to shower, dress up and write my daily column.Which is doable - just about.
Anyway, yesterday I went to the pub, to watch the speed skating in Vancouver. ‘Rychlobrusleni’, they call that here in the Czech republic. Not a word you will use a lot here but still a rather nice & strange mouthful of a word.
During the breaks I read a little book, called Fup, by Jim Dodge, which was weird and wonderful – and it also gave me something I can use as a Quote Of The Day:
“I ain’t got an ounce of pimp in me.”
I wonder how many people can truly claim that.
Ah yes, before I go to take that shower, there’s this. There are many disturbing and also disgusting things in the world.
Like egg cream, for instance…
… but there are even worse things than that, out there.
I’ve mentioned this before but I’m an agnostic. I think it’s silly to claim to know whether any God(s) exist(s) or not. You can’t prove either of those propositions, so I’d say the agnostic viewpoint is the only reasonable one.
Not that humans are very good at being reasonable – which is why we have people who are sure that God hates homosexuals, that He approves of blowing up people and, of course, people who get very cross if others even suggest that there might be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Richard Dawkins’s philosophy.
Me, I have no problem believing certain things. I’ve never been to Estonia, for instance but I believe the map doesn’t lie. I also never did lunch with Paris Hilton but I totally believe that would be a dreadful experience. I just don’t see the need to spend any time believing (or disbelieving) in God(s.)
Anyway, I was thinking of religion because of two newspaper articles that were both on the front page of today’s Guardian. To wit:
Now, it’s hard not to conclude that, if there is a God, He, She or It doesn’t give much of a Goddamn about what happens here below. According to the Bible God watches every sparrow fall – and perhaps the Good Book knows what it’s talking about: Watching seems to be all that God does. Intervention, as in “Let’s save that poor little bird from breaking its neck”, isn’t really His thing.
Hence a train crash here, a £56m jackpot there – it’s all the same to the Supreme Upper Being, you would almost be forced to conclude. (Though you can’t go as far as to accuse God of sarcasm; He didn’t put those two winners on that Belgian train, after all.)
Ah well, enough of all that.
I did mention Estonia though, a bit earlier in this rambling post and that brings us back to things you can believe in, as the following news article in the Telegraph shows.
That is, for at least 588 years quite a lot of people have put their faith in the healing powers of a certain almond based product.
“A pharmacy in the Estonian capital promises a cure for broken hearts:an almond-based concoction that’s been around since medieval times. “Since the Middle Ages a special marzipan prescription has been prepared and sold here for the heart to relieve the pain of love,” said Ulle Noodapera, a pharmacist at the Raeapteek drug store which first opened for business in Tallinn’s old town square in 1422. It is believed to be Europe’s oldest pharmacy, and has been in operation for 588 years.”
Yes, a marzepan God would be One I could go for – especially if we can keep that quaint cannibalistic Christian ritual; the one with the ‘Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you’ bit.
