Liars

As far as possible I attempt to assume an attitude of detached amusement over human folly when listening to the news. This helps to keep my blood pressure within the normal range. Once in a while cracks appear in the façade, however, and this morning, as I was listening to the World Service, a particularly alarming chasm opened up as I found myself shouting at the radio. Well, not the radio exactly, but at some especially egregious specimen from Mugabe's Zanu PF on the radio, who was drawing an utterly specious comparison between Zimbabwe's Election Commission's refusal to release any of the results of the presidential election and the protracted row over the Bush/Gore election, especially regarding the results in Florida. What was really upsetting was the certainty in my mind that he knew the comparison was ridiculous but that no one could really do anything about it.

It put me in mind of some twerp from an American right-wing think-tank I heard being questioned last year regarding his completely misplaced advice on the need to invade Iraq on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. His oily reply was that everybody (meaning all the 'informed experts', like himself) had believed the same thing so he could hardly be blamed for advising the president as he did. Again, there was something about the voice, a quality of being excessively pleased with itself, that betrayed the fact he knew how ridiculous what he saying was, but delighted in the fact that he had covered himself sufficiently to get away with it.

What was peculiarly irritating in both instances was the sense that these guys were dedicating whatever intelligence they possessed not to an earnest attempt to understand the world but to a determined policy of furthering their own small places in it. A world shrunk to the petty ambitions of placeholders. Now that is funny.