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An overgrown, retarded child 25 May 2002 Imagine you're twelve years old. You're at a big party with hundred or so other twelve year olds. Like any group of children they're a mixture. Some tall, some short, some fat some thin, some intelligent, some less so, some shy, some noisy, some honest, some. You get the picture. A group of kids, just as you'd expect, except for one, who's the same age as the rest of you but he's much bigger, the size of an adult and with an adult's strength. Only instead of an adult's mind, he has the mind of a child, and not just a child, but a retarded child. Let's call him Sam. And let's assume that the party is taking place on an island, with no adults around. Think Lord of the Flies. You can include the conch if you want and the various games, but whereas all the children in LotF were much of a muchness, there's a greater variety on our island. And LotF didn't have Sam. Sam's big, as I said, and not very bright. A lot of the weaker kids are afraid of Sam. It's not that he means to hurt them, but he's got this thing, Sam does, this belief that everything will be fine as long as people do what he says, and as long as they don't complain when he does the things he wants to do. And you'd better be in his gang, because if you aren't, he's going to make life tough for you. So lots of kids want to be in his gang. But not everyone does. There's a few, who don't like what Sam does or says. Sam's got a way of dealing with them. It's very simple. They're wrong. And because they're wrong, they're evil. So what Sam has to do is beat them up now and then. The trouble is, sometimes when he beats up on them, they hit him back. And that makes Sam really mad. Because anyone who hits him is really evil. After all, he's the good guy, so anyone who doesn't like him must be the bad guy and deserves everything they get. As I said, there's a whole range of twelve year olds. Some of them are pretty big for their age, although nothing like as big as Sam, unless they band together. And some of the big kids have learned to think. They're not quite so naïve as Sam. They know that Sam's got a good heart buried somewhere deep inside him. And they also know that Sam's too full of himself to ever stop and think about who is or what he's doing. They know one thing Sam doesn't have is self-consciousness, or self-doubt, or any awareness whatsoever that maybe, just maybe, he's got it wrong and that if he just sat down and listened to the other kids, he might learn a few things. At times the group of kids who are more mature for their years, who recognise that beating up on someone you don't like isn't the best way to get them to like you, who can see that the way the kids are tearing up the island - particularly Sam, because he's so big - there's not going to be much of it left shortly. Any way, at times this group of kids try to break up the fights between Sam and the others. Sometimes they succeed. And because they're not fools, they know that there's good and bad in every kid and that when one hits anothers for no good reason, he's done something wrong. And they themselves aren't perfect. There're a few things they get up to that they're not exactly proud of. But the difference between those kids and Sam is that they know they have to grow up. And they're trying. Honest they are. While Sam. Sam thinks because he's got an adult body he's got an adult mind, and as an adult, he's always right and everyone else who doesn't agree with him is wrong and. We came in here. Let's stop the metaphor machine before it breaks down. No prizes for guessing who Sam is, although I forgot to mention his little brother Izzy, who thinks he has a God-given right to beat the shit out of anyone who comes near him. (I have another metaphor, but I'll save that for another day.) I wouldn't care about Sam if he weren't so dangerous. And he's doubly dangerous because of his size and his lack of introspection, his inability to see the world in anything but his own terms. It doesn't occur to him - or rather them, to George and Dick and John and Condoleezza and Paul and Don. It doesn't occur to them that they might be wrong. It doesn't occur to them that "terrorists" do not pick up arms or blow themselves and dozens or thousands of others to bits because they are evil, but because they have a different view of the world, one in which it is the Americans who are evil. Simple acknowledgement of that fact might lead the intelligent and intellectually honest world leader to stop using the word evil in the first place, but intellectual honesty is rare in most world leaders, whichever country they represent. I could go on, and at some future point no doubt will. Before I stop, however, allow me to point out what should be obvious. My contempt for the United States is restricted to its political, commercial and media élite, which not only has contempt for the rest of the world, but which both allows and encourages the average US citizen to remain ignorant of the realities of the world outside their borders. The average US citizen (average, I repeat, among which I don't include militiamen or evangelical "Christians") is a more open, generous, hospitable individual than most Brits I know and it's not coincidence that my second family were all born and bred in Los Angeles. I just wish they governed that nation, instead of the greedy, ignorant yahoos now in charge. Back to Opinion |
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