Once upon a time there was a wonderful land where the loveliest of rainbows was always in the sky. Even at night this loveliest of rainbows shed its gentle and healing light on the happy people who lived under it.
There were two kinds of happy people living in The Land of the Loveliest Rainbow: the Lucky Few and the Unlucky Many. And they couldn’t be more different. The Lucky Few lived in affluent comfort, draping themselves in extravagant designer suits with fabulously expensive Italian shoes on their pretty feet, gormandising mountains of sumptuous food, loads of super drinks and getting fatter by the minute. One of them even continually swanned around the world in a luxury private flying machine fitted with special long-range champagne tanks, so as to attend important meetings of other owners of luxury flying machines.
If you were one of the Unlucky Many, however, you lived under rotting cardboard and leaky old corrugated iron on the sides of noisy and smelly highways, breathing the toxic gasses of the gleaming motor cars of the Lucky Few passing by, dressing yourself in cast-offs and old plastic bags, eating sand and garbage-pickings, getting thinner by the minute, suffering and dying in squalid misery from all manner of unpleasant diseases and plagues.
But it didn’t matter who you were or what you had. Lucky Few or Unlucky Many, everyone in this happy land lived under the spell of the loveliest of rainbows. How many times do I have to tell you that, children? It didn’t matter how repulsively obese, smug, arrogant, vain, obscenely dishonest and fabulously rich, or how cold, thin or desperately sick you were, all you had to do was look up at the loveliest of rainbows to become instantly happy and content.
If you were one of the Unlucky Many it didn’t mean you had to be that way for ever. There were lots of ways to enrich yourself and become one of the Lucky Few and even happier. One of these ways was that several times a week the Lucky Few mounted a competition open to all people, regardless of who they were, and whereby they could make themselves whopping great fortunes simply by marking off some numbers on little pieces of paper and paying in money that would otherwise might have been squandered on food and clothing. This was the way the Lucky Few made it possible for everyone to share in the rainbow’s prodigality. It was also a way in which the Lucky Few could snatch back what scraps of banquet had fallen from their tables into the skeletal hands of the Unlucky Many grovelling around on the floor. Rainbows are very understanding phenomena.
It wouldn’t be at all fair, children, if I let you get the idea that things were one-sided in The Land of the Loveliest Rainbow. The Lucky Few made it their first priority to see that the prosperity, advantage and welfare they enjoyed got spread around in a satisfactorily democratic manner. Every which way you looked in The Land of the Loveliest Rainbow there were members of the Lucky Few standing on soapboxes, or on the television and the radio, telling everyone how open-minded and kindly disposed they were when it came to helping the Unlucky Many cast off their chains and snivel their way out of their grinding poverty. They used long and complicated words and phrases that you children might not understand. Out of their mouths crawled long glistening verbal worms like ‘equitable transformation initiatives” and ‘long-term poverty alleviation strategies” and ‘infrastructural empowerment agendas”.
Doing this made the Lucky Few so tired they had to go on long holidays to recover in health resorts like Monaco or Paris or the Italian Alps. They would have to force themselves to relax, lie in the sun, have beautiful female escorts or smooth-bodied teenage boys entertain their privates, drink special bubbly wine and eat buckets of fish-eggs to bring back their socialist strength and purpose.
Now I can see that a lot of you children are wondering why I’m telling you all this. The reason is quite simple. You only have to walk down the street these days to notice how much the people of The Land of the Loveliest Rainbow are mumbling and giving each other dark looks. If you stop and ask any one of them why he or she is so miserable you will find yourself drowned in gripes and grumbles. Some of them can’t afford enough food and others haven’t been able to pay the rent and others can’t find work. The list is endless.
So this story is to tell these folk to forget how bitter and ungrateful they are. It is to remind them that to put smiles back on their faces all they have to do is look over their shoulders.
I’d like to say that’s the moral of the story, but that wouldn’t be quite right. In the Land of the Loveliest Rainbow morals have long since been replaced by the moralistic.