INTERMISSION - 030314

I'm very aware that a lot of my recent stuff that I've posted here has been about telly. I suppose that this ought not to be completely unexpected because, on the whole, and despite the fact that there's seldom anything on worth watching, watching telly is pretty much what I do.

However, this does not mean that I have become oblivious towards other things which are happening in the world. Frustrated perhaps, at my own abilities to alter things, and, on occasions, more than a little bit sad about it all, and occasionally more than a little bit angry, too, but my own lack of ability to intervene or really make any sort of difference does sometimes mean that I bury my head in the sands of passive entertainment and wonder quite where the world is taking itself.

This is, perhaps, why I stopped listening to the Today programme as I drive into work in the mornings. The frustration and annoyance and sadness listening to half an hour of that would regularly engender could quite ruin my day.

Unfortunately, today I forgot to pack another audiobook and so I tuned in and, despite the amount of inconsequential Oscar ceremony flummery (something, you might be surprised to hear, I'm unlikely to comment very much upon), the news seemed to be very grave indeed.

Not least because one of our fellow nations seems to have decided that international borders are something which can be stepped across with no real concern in a manner which we have not really seen in practice since that Austrian painter got delusions of grandeur back in the nineteen-thirties, and all of which seem to be the repercussions of the meetings held in that very place, where the borders of Europe were agreed upon in the aftermath of his little skirmish.

If we don't learn from history, we really are doomed to re-enact it, it seems…

Meanwhile, in that embattled part of the world, as chaos begins to reign, "lawlessness" is beginning to break out and, in the absence of any centralised authority, people are coming together to form "militias" which means the beginnings of brutality and human self-interest and bullying in a way that I genuinely had come to believe, in these enlightened times where pretty much everything can be seen by everyone almost instantaneously, could no longer really happen or be got away with.

People, eh…?

Depressingly predictable as ever… and don't believe it can't happen here, you know. It only takes one misguided government, one unpopular policy change, one natural disaster, or one boundary dispute for things to escalate very swiftly out of control, and once any particular group has been chosen as being "the other" or the people with whom to place the blame, that lovely chap down the road with whom you exchange the occasional nod as he's pruning his roses could be coming after you and all you hold dear with his garden shears…

Some of those lovely old gentlemen that you see queuing up in the Post Office spent their youth bayonetting Germans, you know...

Now, the very thing that I believed might help prevent the madness in this modern world, that greatest opening up of the lines of communication and information that there has ever been, namely a free and open internet, has been coming under attack lately. There's an interesting propaganda battle going on if you read between the lines, which seems to be to attempt, by a subtle amount of creeping insinuation from governments and people in positions of power, that the very freedom which the internet offers is also going to bring everything down about our ears.

Or, as Douglas Adams once put it:

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

You see, because people are allowed to talk, it is implied that they are allowed to plot, and it is those plots which are, apparently, if we start to believe the stories which are allowed to get out, going to bring down the whole of civilisation as we know it. And the problem is always about control, is that it's often wrapped up in a nice pretty parcel, and bears a label with that oh-so-powerful disclaimer that "If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear…" that can cover a multitude of sins when it comes to stomping all over your hard-won civil liberties.

There is nothing to fear, of course, apart from that drip, drip of our fundamental freedoms being slowly taken away, and the controlling powers of an overzealous government deciding that it knows better what's good for us than we do ourselves. After all, you know how angry it can make you if someone thinks that they know better than you about whatever it is that you're doing, so extrapolate that across the whole of humanity, and look at how furious that could make us all get.

You have to rely upon the rationality and sanity of ordinary people to nip extremism in the bud and point out the ridiculousness of it before it gets out of hand, but, unfortunately, when you get to see the ranting and raving of ordinary people when their own particular view of the world gets threatened, it's hard not to believe that the battle of reason is already nearly lost and the barbarians are already storming the gates.

But it's not the barbarians outside that ought to really trouble us, but those already inside them, because, if we constantly just go around blindly believing everything we're told instead of stopping and thinking about things for a moment, we might just decend into lawlessness ourselves, and I really don't want to be behind the door when a boot smashes through it and an militia made up of my neighbours come to drag me away for no very good reason other than the fact that they don't like the look of me.

I can't do much, I know.

After all, I'm just one rather inconsequential and ageing person sitting here armed with nothing but a keyboard and a very small circle of friends, but this is what I can do - voice my concerns, spread the word, and hope that the madness will stop before it's far too late.