Is that a bomb you’re carrying or are you just pleased to see me?
Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels to ‘vex the world’. Pope’s target was ‘babbling blockheads’. Those were the days. Though constitutionally more modest, less certain of our genius and more sceptical as to our effect – for the times we live in bruise easily – we share those great satirists’ ambitions. If a writer can’t vex the world a little every day, why would he bother to get up in the morning?
But satire when it descends to populist jeering – that’s to say when it flatters the babbling blockheads rather than lambasts them – becomes a boorish, toothless and, on occasions, even a dangerous thing. There was a signal example of this last week in the wake of seventeen police cars swooping on a suspect bus travelling along the M6 in Staffordshire.
Let me remind you of what this was all about. A passenger on the bus saw smoke coming from another traveller’s bag. He didn’t scream. He didn’t try to jump out of the bus. He didn’t tweet a fond farewell to his loved ones. He dialled 999 on his mobile phone. Highly commendable. Isn’t this what mobile phones are for? That the police responded promptly to the call was highly commendable, too. We hear of 999 calls going unheeded. The operator could have said, ‘Oh, yeah, pull the other one. This is Staffordshire, mate. Nothing happens in Staffordshire.’
So far, then, so good. A highly suspicious bag – I don’t have to remind readers of this column that most bags don’t smoke – was spotted by an alert member of the public who did the sensible thing, and the police responded sensibly in their turn. Or did they? This is where the jeerers, of whom one of the most obdurate and vociferous has been Nick Ferrari, shock-jock for LBC – don’t ask me how I know this – saw their opportunity. Did it take seventeen police cars? they wanted to know. Was it necessary for some of those police cars to contain armed marksmen? (Where the point of an unarmed marksman would be I don’t know.) Weren’t thirteen fire engines twelve too many? Was it necessary to hold and body-search forty-eight bus passengers – forty-eight ‘innocent’ bus passengers, according to the Daily Mail? Did the police have to close the motorway, in the process stranding thousands of infuriated motorists who had Mock the Week to get home to. Cordons, cones, tents, decontamination units, for crying out loud! – all because, as it turned out, the smoking bag contained a fake cigarette.
The more primitive one’s sense of humour, the more the contrast between a small cause and a large effect will strike one as amusing. A minor mishap creating major mayhem has been the staple of feeble sitcoms ever since the genre was invented. And so Nick Ferrari roared with that bumptious, plain man’s outrage that early-morning shock-jocks are obliged to manufacture to ensure their listeners don’t nod off. It was a fake cigarette, for heaven’s sake. A fake cigarette!!
One of his callers reasonably reminded him that the police didn’t know that when they turned up at the scene. In the same spirit, I would remind the Daily Mail that the police didn’t know that all forty-eight passengers were innocent. The justification for having police is that we sometimes need suspiciousness investigated. But Ferrari wasn’t alone in finding the idea of precautionary zeal even more hilarious than the idea of mistaking a fake cigarette for a real bomb. All the police had to do was ask, the jeerers jeered.
Ask? Ask! It was hard to believe one’s ears. Did they mean a single bobby should have tailed the bus on his bicycle, flagged it down at the lights, boarded it with apologies all round, and asked the owner of the suspicious bag – nicely – if he was a terrorist and whether that was a bomb he was carrying? Yes, that was exactly what they did mean. And if it had turned out to be a bomb? But it wasn’t, for crying out loud. It was an electronic cigarette. And how were the police to know that? By asking!
How to explain this circle of moronic illogicality? I cannot. Perhaps some people lack a conditional tense or a suppositional gene. Perhaps they lack an imagination of disaster.
Myself – and I accept I speak as someone with a highly developed imagination of disaster: but then history is on my side – I don’t think seventeen police cars were too many. If anything, I’d have liked a dozen more, and a helicopter, if there wasn’t one there already, and a fleet of ambulances, and a marksman (ideally armed) on every roof in Staffordshire. Were terrorism only the figment of our fears, it could be argued that this was an overreaction, but where it is both a proven fact and a fervently declared ambition, there is no such thing as overreaction.
It’s sometimes said that when we go in like this, with cop-car sirens blaring and the emergency services at the ready, we hand victory to the terrorists. For this contention to be plausible, we have to imagine al-Qaeda operatives in Tora Bora tuning in to LBC and rubbing their hands at the thought of the M6 in Staffordshire being closed for half a day. ‘Victory, fellow mujahideen, is ours! Tomorrow, we will see how many lanes we can shut down on the A6144.’ But then I suppose global jihad has to start somewhere.
Yes, there are a few jumpy weeks ahead. Just getting people to the Games is going to be taxing, let alone getting them there safely. I’m staying home. Though even that might not be the end of it. Smoke issuing from my ears, if I happen to hear any more bilge about overreaction, might alert a neighbour who might alert the authorities who might choose to drop paras on my terrace. It’s the price you pay. Only a babbling blockhead would complain.
Damnation for dummies
Is it my imagination or has everyone now been released from prison? I know it’s Kenneth Clarke’s declared intention to stop putting everybody in, but I must have missed the announcement that he has decided to let everybody out.
It’s possible I overstate the case. Maybe it just feels as though every prison gate is swinging open because there’s been so much talk of previous prisoner release – the dying but not yet dead Megrahi, for one – and the as it were imaginative release of Raoul Moat, whom we’ve been pardoning not from a mere custodial sentence (which he is in no condition to serve) but from eternal damnation.
I’m suffering compassion fatigue, anyway, however you explain it, which is surprising given that of late I haven’t been feeling much compassion. I put it down to other people showing compassion on my behalf – not me personally, but me as citizen – and I would rather they didn’t. Compassion can be overweening and rapacious. Those who pride themselves on possessing it will invade and flatten your moral garden until all that flourishes there is the weed forgiveness. I do not find the fragrance of forgiveness lovely? Depends where it grows. In a society forever feuding, yes. But where exoneration is the custom of the country, no. I think it belittles the forgiven – for even a criminal has the right to drink deep the consequences of his crime – and I consider it a perversion, akin to kissing lepers, on the part of the forgiver.
I alluded to eternal damnation a paragraph ago. Shame we no longer go in for it. It was never really ours, of course, to dispense, but there was a time when the prospect of eternal damnation was a necessary adjunct to egregious crime. But then egregious crime is something else we no longer go in for – the concept of it, I mean, the idea that some actions are so terrible that God Himself cannot forgive them. So we go on getting the crimes – the brutality, the terror – we just refuse to feel them as egregious. Our minds have shrunk. Anything above a misdemeanour, an expression of unhappiness caused by social deprivation, psychological malfunction, Zionism or the Iraq war, will no longer fit. It isn’t only the idea of evil our heads reject, we refuse all gradations of wickedness – rottenness of soul, malignant spite, call them what you will: any of those examples of indurated vindictiveness from which, once upon a time, we believed we had a right to be protected.
The trouble with prisons, Kenneth Clarke has been telling us, is that they make no difference; we no sooner let offenders out than they offend again. I propose a simple solution to that problem – keep them in. Where the original offence was serious, the slightest suggestion that they will repeat it should be sufficient to extend their stay. Until when? Doomsday, if nece
ssary. Rehabilitation is a fine ideal, but it is secondary to our protection. The first justification of the prison wall is that it separates us from those who will harm us if they can. The second is that it enables society to honour the retribution we individually crave but cannot individually exact.
Retribution troubles modern sensibilities. Isn’t it just a bigger word for revenge? The letters pages of our newspapers have been running hot on the subject of revenge this week, the occasion for it being the rights and wrongs of releasing Megrahi a year ago, when he was supposed to be at death’s door. We didn’t believe a word of that in this column a year ago, and we don’t believe a word of it now. That he is alive today, Alex Salmond, Scotland’s gullible (or cynical) First Minister, ascribes to a change of scene. He was at death’s door in a Scottish prison because Scottish prisons are not cheering places, but now he is back home in sunny Libya he understandably feels a little better. Since a show of gratuitous compassion for a dying mass murderer was the reasoning, I don’t now see the argument for not releasing any homicide looking peaky and for whom a change of scene would work similar wonders. But then I speak in anger. The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.
Of those who would throttle the raven’s croaking, the most striking was a letter-writer to this paper, a sister of one of the Lockerbie victims, who with much dignity dismissed the relevance of Megrahi’s health today or yesterday and wished him well. Those were her exact words. ‘I wish him well.’ I have puzzled my head over this letter all week. Why would she wish Megrahi well? Assuming him to be guilty of murdering 270 people he didn’t know (and the letter-writer gives credence to the findings of the court set up to try him), why would anyone wish him well? I can see some might have theological objections to wishing him in hell, but ‘well’? The same ‘well’ one wishes a friend, a person one loves, a saver of lives, a creator of beauty? Are there to be no distinctions? Is there no evil so great that well-wishing is not the reward for it?
Behold Dante’s New Inferno, where there is no underworld, no ascending circles of sinfulness, just a flattened plain of minor miscreants to whom we extend warm greetings.
In so far as such wishing well constitutes forgiveness, I wonder what right any of us – even a close relative – has to forgive on someone else’s behalf. Who hurts me can be forgiven by me alone. Yes, violence is a crime against society too. Justice must be impersonal, administered by the courts, else it’s one unending vendetta. But so long as the cry for retribution goes inadequately heeded, we will live in a bitter and unjust world.
Mercy droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven? A sweet sentiment. For Shakespeare at full imaginative bore we go to Macbeth, where, in consideration of the ‘deep damnation’ of Duncan’s murder, pity is figured ‘like a naked newborn babe, / Striding the blast’, and ‘heaven’s cherubim, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air’ are conceived with the power to ‘blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind’.
This is pity for the done-to, not the doer, pity simultaneously vulnerable and armed, a great heavenly force of raging sorrow, acknowledging the enormity of human outrage and the holy duty we owe to fury. ‘Deep damnation’, reader. Sometimes you need a religious vocabulary. Deep damnation. And where you have deep damnation you don’t talk lightly of prisoner release, forgiveness, and wishing the murderer of 270 Duncans a comfortable retirement.
Remembering Odin Testostenhammur
Doping? Corruption? Let me tell you what I know. I was once a shot-putter. Or I could have been.
‘You’ve got the brawn for it, Jacobson,’ our sports teacher told me. ‘You’ve got the shoulders. You’ve got the swivel. You might even have the far-sightedness.’ The clear implication was that I had every attribute of a successful shot-putter bar one. ‘Would that be height, sir?’ I asked. He looked down at me, shook his head and walked away. Later, I learned he’d told my only serious shot-put rival that I would never be in contention for the medals because I was called Howard Jacobson.
My rival was called Odin Testostenhammur. You can see the advantage he enjoyed. Just to go out with Odin Testostenhammur written on your back was worth another metre.
I often wonder whether I’d have made it as a star of field and track had I changed my name. But had I made it as a shot-putter, who’s to say I wouldn’t have ended up ruining my body with the steroids they’d have slipped into my Lucozade. I meet Odin occasionally when I’m back in Manchester. He represented England in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, unless it was the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. He’s on the bottle now, lives on his own in a cold-water flat in Droylsden, and throws squash balls at his cat for a hobby. He is flabby, gaunt-eyed and cries a lot. So does his cat. Whereas I – well, I don’t.
The conclusion is inescapable. If you want a good life, don’t succeed at anything too early or too well. And don’t choose a profession that attracts money or attention. The minute people want to see you doing what you do, you’re finished.
I must have grasped this truth instinctively at an early age, because after shot-putting I went into table tennis. The sports teacher who talked me out of shot-putting thought I’d found my niche. ‘You’ve got the right build and temperament for ping-pong, Jacobson,’ he told me. ‘Short arms, strong wrists, obsessive personality.’ What he actually meant was that I had the right name.
He was not alone in deriding table tennis by calling it ping-pong. Table tennis, in the popular view, was a parlour game, not a sport. Some, who’d heard of my prowess, would challenge me to a match, convinced they were in with a shot because they’d scraped home against some five-year-old at Butlins. When I thrashed them to within an inch of their lives they’d laugh, not at their own ignominy, but because nothing in the world mattered less to them than being thrashed at ping-pong. A trouncing at tiddlywinks would have hurt them more. If anything, I was the real loser for being good at something no one minded being bad at.
Though I didn’t properly grasp it at the time, these were the tranquil years. Never again would I be so happy. No one envied me. No one burdened me with admiration. No one came to watch. When I won, no one congratulated me. When I lost, no one consoled me. No one bribed me to throw a match. No one offered me a backhander for inside information about other players on my team. And, most importantly of all, no one suggested doping. This, reader, I can swear with my hand on my heart: the game I played at the level I played it attracted not the slightest corruption. No sport was ever cleaner. And why? Because no one gave a damn.
Where there are no spectators, there is no sponsorship. Where there is no sponsorship, there is no money. Where there is no money, there are no officials with fingers in the pot. The lesson to be learned from this is simple. If we want honest sport, we have to stop watching it. At a stroke we could clean up football, athletics, cricket and whatever else is bent. All we have to do is stay away – don’t go to the grounds and don’t watch it on television – and, hey presto, the money disappears; sport is returned to its innocence and we wouldn’t have to look at Ronaldo in his diamond earrings and underpants.
That still leaves the problem of national glory, I grant you. But if we didn’t overvalue sport to the degree we do, countries wouldn’t want to associate themselves with it and might look elsewhere to bolster patriotism.
To science, maybe. Or literature. There must be substances out there that improve the performances of poets. Let the Americans and Russians fight over that – who writes the more sonnets. And at least there’d be no point in cheating.
Poets are not meant to be in competition. We don’t question the value of ‘Kubla Khan’ because of whatever it was that Coleridge took while he was writing it. We don’t say he unfairly beat Wordsworth and ask for his plaque to be removed from his cottage in Nether Stowey. Writers are pragmatic about this sort of thing: whatever it takes, take it.
Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another – humanity is one big cheat – but it matters particularly with sport which ceases to be its
elf the minute the outcome’s rigged. It is sometimes said, and I sometimes agree, that one answer is to call open season on doping and make performance-enhancing drugs available to everybody. That way no athlete enjoys an unfair advantage over another, though what we would then call what they do is a question for philosophers, as is why we would care who does it better. I see a future in not caring.
If athletics were to enjoy one-tenth the prestige table tennis enjoys – in the sense of being played for itself, for the beauty of the strokes and the silence of the arena, for what it is not for what it brings, for the freedom it enjoys from the world’s curiosity – the heat would all at once go out of it.
I don’t know what Lord Coe would do with himself, but I’m confident Nike would find him something.
Clowns
‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Nothing beats a biblical admonishment. ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’, the Gospel according to St Matthew. ‘The simple inherit folly: but the prudent are crowned with knowledge’, Proverbs. ‘For we are but of yesterday and know nothing’, the Book of Job. ‘You need to shut the fuck up’, Penn and Teller.
In this age of immoderate opinion unhampered by knowledge, we could do with a few more exhortations to quiet. ‘The rest is silence,’ said Hamlet finally. Even the wordiest of men know there’s a time to button it. Whereof one cannot speak, etc. In fact, that sentence doesn’t quite mean what it seems to mean and it wasn’t Jesus or Hamlet or even Penn and Teller who delivered it. It’s actually the concluding sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a work whose title alone scares me off. I find understanding Eric Cantona hard enough.
I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy, that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further. Page 14, paragraph 3, it always is. I can best describe the experience as believing you are talking to a sane man only to discover, in the opposite to a flash of light – an explosion of obscurity, let’s call it – that you have all along been talking to a blithering idiot, though I accept that the blithering idiot is probably me. Upset by my bemusement, a distinguished Oxford philosopher kindly began a correspondence with me in the hope of removing this recurring obstacle to my comprehension.
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