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Parking Problems in the Promised Land

It has taken longer than anyone thought possible but finally, the realities of the current government are starting to take shape. Unemployment has gone up, nepotism has settled in, investment has moved on, nobody’s being educated properly, and our major trading partner is about to go to war with the wrong country.

As with all huge corporations, the government has become its own reason for being - a self-defining, self-justifying, enclosed empire, with the resources to keep reality at bay. Sign language doesn’t help, neither does shouting in a voice that causes whales to get a headache, as any criticism is simply repelled with weapons of mass hypocrisy, once referred to in Paris as “Bony’s” greatest hits.

Worse than that, the government has lost its nerve, if it ever had it, about attending to the one problem it needs to tackle in order to improve the paucity of overseas investment - the tonnage of non-performing loans. Yet, nobody will commit to any action being compromised by the knowledge of who lent what to whom.

There’s a Spanish saying that if you want to steal successfully, steal in the millions. The government can’t prosecute; it’s always far too embarrassing. Steal a few thousand and your neighbor's bike and the judge will send you down for ten years, while shaking his head at blatant flaws in your plan. This also explains why whenever a politician insists he has done absolutely nothing wrong, it means he didn’t think he’d get found out.

*Once the placated and the promoted had been neatly slotted, the shuffle was announced and a phalanx of cabinet spin doctors rushed to justify the wisdom of the choices, the talent of the ministers, and the benefits they will bring to the people, while manhandling the Hubble space telescope into such a position they could work out exactly much office space they will need.

This is crucial. For any tensions created by amendments to the government positions are nothing compared to the Carthaginian scrap for desk sizes, soft furnishings, and a parking space. Its every new minister’s baptism of fire; a defining moment where character will be tested, revealed, and closely observed.

* It’s the peculiar genius of Americans Mystery Country to seem both familiar and incomprehensible, at the same time. We tried calling the Education Department to ascertain how those vital reforms were proceeding and the reaction was of a type now classified as Gov Dept Typical: incredibly good-natured and friendly, but essentially useless. As all our questions were forgotten, all the answers were wrong, pure fiction, or simply orphaned.

An undersecretary, found wandering along endless corridors in a fruitless search for the Education Minister, was summoned to the phone and said, “So sorry,” but there are ‘no plans’ for reform ‘on my desk’. This may well be true. They could be on the sideboard, or in the filing cabinet, or stashed behind the coffee percolator. My own hunch is that they’re rolled up in the umbrella-stand.

*A former driver at government house, now working in the archeological section at the local University has made the startling claim that the ruling party must be direct descendents from the Promised Land, as they all showed remarkable adeptness for making them rather than keeping them.

*The Democrats were indignant when the reform bill most of them hadn’t even read was already halfway across town. They demanded an explanation, instead of which they got a rude noise from the back of the class. But in all likelihood, the Democrats would have emulated them had they been given the chance. Their pique was at being pre-empted rather than being confounded.

The opposition’s only current hope is that the government will be the authors of their own undoing by simply overdoing it.

*With the military reshuffle list now resembling a telephone directory written by a drugged dyslexic, Napoleon Bonaparte’s words are as pertinent to this day as there were to his time.

“ To do great things it is not enough to be a man of five feet ten inches. If strength and bravery made the general every soldier might claim the command. The general who does great things is he who also possesses civil qualities. The soldier knows no law but force, sees nothing but, and measures everything by it.. The civilian, meanwhile, only looks to the general welfare. The characteristic of the soldier is to be despotic; that of the civilian is to submit everything to discussion, truth, and reason. The superiority unquestionably belongs to the civilian.”

*A colleague is taking bets on the following: within a year Saddam “Keano” Hussein will be removed and Iraq will have a new government. Within two years, Iran will. Within five years, so will Syria. Within 10 years, “Saudi” Arabia will have ceased to exist in its present form. All this, he insists, is “excellent news for Muslims” and at five to one not bad for the punters either.

By Roger Beaumont

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