Since it became illegal in most European countries to imply that black people or Middle Eastern immigrants are capable of anything other than vibrancy, euphemism has become integral to law-enforcement in the West.
In briefings around Britain, bobbies are handed curiously grey identikits, bearing in tiny print at the bottom the legend, ‘Any similarity between persons of any identifiable race group, living or dead, is strictly coincidental. All racial profiling resulting from this picture is purely a result of the racism inherent in all whites.”
Indeed Islamist suicide bombers present the greatest threat to European spokesmen unable to call a spade anything but a cuddly friend who loves digging. ‘Islamist” might tick off new German voters, ‘suicide” has so much negative baggage, and ‘bombers” invariably reminds one of the vicious unprovoked attacks on Dresden and Hiroshima by British and American imperialism in the 1940s.
No, in the future it seems possible that we will start hearing about civilians on buses falling victim to ‘Persian pyrotechnics”.
Already England’s top police brass refer unflinchingly to ‘Caribbean gun crime”, transforming London’s slummier neighbourhoods into a perennial fiesta of sun, sand, reggae and tracer bullets.
Caribbean gun crime is reportedly one of Jamaica’s busiest exports. The island is lousy with weapons, and it even had a few before South Africa’s shipment of arms arrived this week. One only needs to look over modern reworkings of calypso classics to see how times have changed.
For instance there’s the evergreen Tally Me Bazooka (‘Ammo! Aaaaammo! Daylight come and me gotta reload / Six and seven and eight and whump! Daylight come and me gotta reload.”) and the old favourite Jamaica Farewell (‘Down the way where the nights are gay / and the sun shines daily off me 9-mil Glock—”).
Those weapons were, of course, headed for Haiti, after our government decided that what the island needed was more guns. Alas the hardware was waylaid by the tallymen of Jamaica, and president Jean-Bertrand Aristide grabbed his toothbrush and put the Atlantic, Guinea and Gabon between himself and his revolting populace.
Aristide’s plaintive and brief scratching at Pretoria’s door last week made one reflect on those unfortunate souls who are forced to set sail for our shores, and whether it would be cheaper to torpedo them in open water or just to lay mines on the high-water mark. But it should also have alerted shrewd sports administrators to the lucrative possibilities of harbouring asylum-seekers. After all our sport is symbolised by a quick buck, albeit a horned one.
It’s not as if we don’t already host disgraceful sportsmen. Just look at the Cats.
Losing English premier division managers could easily be lured into hiding somewhere adequate like Clifton if we played our cards right. Last week a report was published in this newspaper about managers receiving death threats, having half-bricks lobbed through their windows, and being beaten into comas.
But not all football fans are as restrained in expressing their devotion to their club, and if managers remain aloof (nothing infuriates a scouser like trying to belittle someone in a coma) the terraces can turn nasty.
You’ll never walk alone, sing Liverpool’s faithful to manager Gérard Houllier, but one can’t help wondering if they’re referring to Zimmer frame: walk alone, to the corner café for example, and you’ll never walk again.
Of course the richest pickings for our team of sports amnesty scouts would be North American. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s biceps used to be size of his head. Then he started taking steroids, making one wonder how a human brain could fit inside that streamlined tennis-ball of a cranium.
But then he did think that nobody would be suspicious if his body inflated like a parade float just before the Seoul Olympics, so perhaps the tennis-ball question answers itself.
Having settled Ben in a cozy Fancourt crib they could approach Cincinnati Reds slugger Pete Rose, excommunicated for gambling on baseball games, or perhaps that lead-pipe-wielding sugarplum fairy from hell, ice-skater Tonya Harding, who had rival Nancy Kerrigan’s kneecap tenderised in the name of fair play.
But it takes shame to make people run, so don’t expect any immediate arrivals. Without the slightest trace of irony, Rose is launching his umpteenth bid to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame, while Harding has decided to follow her heart and is making a name for herself as a prize-fighter.
Well, we’ll always have the Cats.