Nice Girls Finish Furious
Please will somebody come up with a politician we can trust.
I am a nice person. I buy fairly traded chocolate and fish-friendly soap. I fill my lavatory cistern with weights to make its flush ecologically tiny and fumble around my flat in semi-darkness and pullovers to keep my power use low. I consider future generations, recycle where possible and am kindly disposed towards trees - because I'm nice, right?
Then I go outside and I'm flattened by a wall of rain and debris from the latest globally warmed storm, but I stay nice - as I flail past on a vicious updraft, I try not to frighten children, or collide with fragile plants. Here I am, boycotting Shell because of the Ogoni and boycotting Texaco because of Ecuador - this is fairly easy because I don't drive - but fossil fuels are still burned and alternatives are still ignored and industry still bemoans the cost of cutting emissions, even while its workforce can't work because of flooded roads and toppled lorries. Meanwhile George W and Saint Tony do all they can to encourage environmental disaster and corporate fundraising - but, nevertheless, I stay nice.
Dragged from rooftop to rooftop by climatic anomalies, I realise that my disagreement with the forces of truth and light means an anti-personnel device of some description will inevitably end up heading my way, just as soon as the Freedom-Loving Militia of Righteousness has dealt with Malaysia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Indonesia, Libya and Tipton - email me if I've skipped one - along with a variety of people standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and looking foreign.
And I've heard the rumours that former booze-hound Bush may be getting tired and emotional all over again. This is, of course, tricky to tell: indicators of any relapse including incoherence, obsessional thinking and raging paranoia. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that a vast nuclear arsenal is at the complete disposal of a jittery lush with a persecution complex, but that would explain the administration's enthusiasm for national missile defence - a horrifyingly expensive and utterly impractical series of schemes which would be the military equivalent of the dome, if it weren't also insanely dangerous. This kind of concern could pray on my mind and make me tetchy, but I won't let it, because I'm nice.
Gently lashed by television aerials, I try to concentrate on pleasant things closer to home, like one of my favourite phrases: "That which is made by man can by man be prevented." This was written by William Beveridge in 1944 and intended to imply that if we're capable of cocking-up - say - treating our sick, or transporting our public, or growing safe food for ourselves, or teaching our children, then we should also be capable of fixing what we've got wrong. After all, the same doctor who can't treat your public cancer for 12 years can see you next Tuesday, if you pay him privately.
But, as I drift rather too quickly towards the pavement, I try to be sanguine; perhaps Tony's got it right, perhaps private companies with their cutting-edge management and stunning efficiency should take over every aspect of Britain's public services. But then I remember Barings bank and the Allied Irish bank, Elf Oil, Enron and Andersen and their inability to do anything other than crash and burn; and I realise that the future of our country is now almost entirely in the hands of people who couldn't find their last deposits with both hands - people who can't run a railway without killing passengers and who, no doubt, will be unable to run a postal service that actually delivers mail.
Still, while the lucky emigrate and our birth rate plummets, more anti-immigration legislation threatens and parents would rather inoculate their children with dog sputum than anything the government recommends - so there will, quite reasonably, soon be far fewer Britons to be miserable here.
Although, after they've booted the surplus Scottish MPs out of Westminster, far too many of them will be politicians and - as a Scot - I have to put up with our own pack of rent-scamming incompetents in Holyrood. Eventually, we'll all wander a semi-deserted island, peppered with missile platforms, shattered utilities and scurrying packs of nicely suited lunatics, hopelessly waving brown envelopes with nobody left to bribe.
A prospect which could - if I weren't so bloody nice - make me incandescently furious constantly and I do get these headaches and I do shout sometimes in queues - and why can't I walk down the street without being blown over? - and for God's sake isn't there somebody out there who knows how to run a country? Somebody I could vote for and not learn to detest? Sorry, shouting again, must be the weather - must keep nice, stay nice.
comment@guardian.co.uk
Then I go outside and I'm flattened by a wall of rain and debris from the latest globally warmed storm, but I stay nice - as I flail past on a vicious updraft, I try not to frighten children, or collide with fragile plants. Here I am, boycotting Shell because of the Ogoni and boycotting Texaco because of Ecuador - this is fairly easy because I don't drive - but fossil fuels are still burned and alternatives are still ignored and industry still bemoans the cost of cutting emissions, even while its workforce can't work because of flooded roads and toppled lorries. Meanwhile George W and Saint Tony do all they can to encourage environmental disaster and corporate fundraising - but, nevertheless, I stay nice.
Dragged from rooftop to rooftop by climatic anomalies, I realise that my disagreement with the forces of truth and light means an anti-personnel device of some description will inevitably end up heading my way, just as soon as the Freedom-Loving Militia of Righteousness has dealt with Malaysia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Indonesia, Libya and Tipton - email me if I've skipped one - along with a variety of people standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and looking foreign.
And I've heard the rumours that former booze-hound Bush may be getting tired and emotional all over again. This is, of course, tricky to tell: indicators of any relapse including incoherence, obsessional thinking and raging paranoia. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that a vast nuclear arsenal is at the complete disposal of a jittery lush with a persecution complex, but that would explain the administration's enthusiasm for national missile defence - a horrifyingly expensive and utterly impractical series of schemes which would be the military equivalent of the dome, if it weren't also insanely dangerous. This kind of concern could pray on my mind and make me tetchy, but I won't let it, because I'm nice.
Gently lashed by television aerials, I try to concentrate on pleasant things closer to home, like one of my favourite phrases: "That which is made by man can by man be prevented." This was written by William Beveridge in 1944 and intended to imply that if we're capable of cocking-up - say - treating our sick, or transporting our public, or growing safe food for ourselves, or teaching our children, then we should also be capable of fixing what we've got wrong. After all, the same doctor who can't treat your public cancer for 12 years can see you next Tuesday, if you pay him privately.
But, as I drift rather too quickly towards the pavement, I try to be sanguine; perhaps Tony's got it right, perhaps private companies with their cutting-edge management and stunning efficiency should take over every aspect of Britain's public services. But then I remember Barings bank and the Allied Irish bank, Elf Oil, Enron and Andersen and their inability to do anything other than crash and burn; and I realise that the future of our country is now almost entirely in the hands of people who couldn't find their last deposits with both hands - people who can't run a railway without killing passengers and who, no doubt, will be unable to run a postal service that actually delivers mail.
Still, while the lucky emigrate and our birth rate plummets, more anti-immigration legislation threatens and parents would rather inoculate their children with dog sputum than anything the government recommends - so there will, quite reasonably, soon be far fewer Britons to be miserable here.
Although, after they've booted the surplus Scottish MPs out of Westminster, far too many of them will be politicians and - as a Scot - I have to put up with our own pack of rent-scamming incompetents in Holyrood. Eventually, we'll all wander a semi-deserted island, peppered with missile platforms, shattered utilities and scurrying packs of nicely suited lunatics, hopelessly waving brown envelopes with nobody left to bribe.
A prospect which could - if I weren't so bloody nice - make me incandescently furious constantly and I do get these headaches and I do shout sometimes in queues - and why can't I walk down the street without being blown over? - and for God's sake isn't there somebody out there who knows how to run a country? Somebody I could vote for and not learn to detest? Sorry, shouting again, must be the weather - must keep nice, stay nice.
comment@guardian.co.uk
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