Celebrity haiku

Stockwell tube station
Dan Cruickshank’s looking confused
That makes two of us

Note to passing non-Brits: You may not know the name now, but he'll crop up on BBC World soon enough.

(no subject)

A new dawn! A new Pope! If you can honestly call a 78 year-old man “new”. Seventy-eight? I wouldn’t even bother vacating St Peter’s Square. Just set up a tent and wait. Maybe that’s the idea—after the excitement provoked by the death of the last pontiff, they’re keen to repeat the show as soon as possible. After all, attendance at Catholic churches in this country has shot up the past few weeks. All that flying, all that travelling... turns out all the old boy had to do was buy the farm.

“I’m so happy,” said member of the crowd after member of the crowd. Why? Was there some doubt? Did they think the Cardinals might abandon their deliberations, turn up on the balcony and say “We’ve decided. It’s all off. Go home”?

Anyway, to commemorate the elevation of Benedict XVI to what the Romans affectionately call “Il Duce”, where he can say whatever crazy and terrible things he likes and no-one will even think of apologising for them until four hundred years after his death, I present a short passage. And also the following lines of text.

The Ayatollah Khomeini has written an authoritative guide to Natural Law according to Allah, with whom he is allegedly on intimate terms. In this tome, Khomeini says that a woman may not get a divorce just because her husband is in the habit of sodomizing camels: Allah does not permit divorce for such trivialities and, in fact, frowns on divorce in almost all cases. However, later on Khomeini allows that a woman may get a divorce if her husband is in the habit of sodomizing her brother.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Pontiff in the Vatican declares that divorce is against “Natural Law” in all cases. It appears quite clear that when the Vatican say “all cases” they mean “all cases”. We had a referendum about that in Ireland, and the Pope’s spokesentities made abundantly clear that a man could come home drunk every night, seduce and sexually abuse their children, give his wife syphilis, and commit any abomination in the pages of de Sade and the Catholic God was still against giving the poor woman a divorce. The Ayatollah begins to seem a relative liberal compared with the Pope.

Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law, 1987 (edited to within an inch of its life)

(no subject)

Iraqi deputies have demanded an official apology from Washington over the manhandling by US soldiers of a member of parliament at a Baghdad checkpoint.

"One US soldier appeared to be designated to my car in particular, as it carried the picture of Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr," al-Shaikh told his colleagues. "As though he was antagonised by the picture, the soldier began to utter some words in English which I did not understand. When I handed out my MP badge and showed it to him, he threw it at my face, opened the car door and pulled me out."

Al-Shaikh said he was roughed up by the US soldier despite his protestations.

"The soldier twisted my hands to the back in an effort to handcuff me. He began to beat me and squeezed me by putting his arm firmly around my neck. Then they pulled me off to a nearby room 10m away in their headquarters."

Al-Shaikh said the US soldier continued to beat him even after he told them that he was an elected MP.

The US military said it was investigating the incident and refused to comment.

At least three other deputies said they witnessed the mistreatment of al-Shaikh. "I saw the whole thing and adding insult to injury was when Iraqi soldiers drew their rifles at brother Fatah as he was being mistreated by the Americans," Ali Yushaa, an independent Shia MP, said.

Deputies took turns to speak for almost two hours about the many indignities that they and the Iraqi population suffer when coming in contact with US troops.

"According to the Geneva conventions, an occupying force must respect the occupied nation," Abd al-Khaliq Zanganah, a Kurdish MP said. "This offending soldier must be thrown out of our country."

When will these silly people learn that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply when the US say they don’t apply—i.e., ever? It’ll probably take the Bush administration a couple of days to come up with a rationale for why they don’t apply—maybe it’ll turn out that Iraq somehow isn’t a “nation”—but rest assured they’ll think of something.

This is a tiny incident, but of the kind that time and again forces us to ask, “What would Americans think if this kind of treatment were meted out to their own by other countries?” To which the reply is, of course, “I’m this far from calling in a fucking air strike. What was your question again?”

Monkey police

A US police department in Arizona intends to follow through on a proposal to train a capuchin monkey for high-risk police operations. A Special Weapons and Tactics (Swat) veteran from Phoenix, Sean Truelove, has researched the possibility of landing a $100,000 federal grant to fund a pilot programme to train one monkey.

“Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it ... it could change the way we do business,” he said.

Truelove told local newspapers that the idea came to him in a dream about 18 months ago. The test monkey could be trained to unlock doors and search buildings for police on command, he said.

The capuchin monkey is considered one of the smartest primates, known by many for its decades-long association with organ grinders. The monkeys weigh 1.3kg to 3.5kg and live for 15 to 20 years.

“Good guys do good, bad guys do evil, and we’re the good guys.”

All you need to know about current US foreign policy is encapsulated in that sentence. It’s the “philosophy” underlying their more troubling actions. It honestly doesn’t matter that America destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure so that its own corporations could get rich building a new one, or that they deliberately don’t count how many thousands of Iraqis have died in the chaos (in the stirring words of General Tommy Franks, “We don’t do bodycounts”), or that the US can (and do) derogate from any aspect of international law at will by claiming that it doesn’t apply in these circumstances they just thought of. They’re the good guys, and so whatever they do (to borrow a current favourite phrase from the esteemed strictlytrue) is refracted through that prism.

If another country, say, suddenly bombed a pharmaceutical factory in a country with which they were not engaged in hostilities, leading to thousands of deaths due to a consequent total lack of antibiotics in said country—would they get away with it? Would they escape even the harsh burden of having to apologise? No, they would be evildoers. Thus they would be doing evil, and would be ripe for retribution. (Maybe even with a bit of infrastructure-rebuilding on the side. You’re going to need a temp to deal with all this extra paperwork, Mr Cheney.)

Actually, Dick C is a perfect example of how those whose vision is not fogged with delirious visions of angels versus demons have their steely gaze fixed hard on the money. Still, it never hurts to invoke the angels and demons when someone notices what you’re up to. Then anyone who criticises is an evildoer—and we all know what happens to them.

So the US will not accept that its troops are “occupying” Iraq, as that’s what aggressors and bad guys do. They are helping rebuild a country (or at least helping US firms to do so). They are bringing peace and stability (and setting up strategic military bases of their own while they’re at it). They are lovely-fying Iraq. Anything but occupying it.

It may seem too fatuously obvious even to have to state the good guys vs evildoers bit, but I find it sometimes helps to remind myself that this is what’s going on inside their heads. It’s not arrogance. There’s no doublethink required. An atrocity can’t be an atrocity if we commit it, because we’re good guys.

With good guys like this, who needs etc.

Icon news

Fans of my icon will be as pleased as I was to note that, even I were minded to update it to the latest model of Pope, there is no need as it already looks strangely like him.