Meteorologists oft-times speak about the greater cycles of global weather, recurring patterns sometimes aeons apart, sometimes separated by only a few years. This planet has seen ice ages, separated by thousands and thousands of years, and 15-year drought or rainy cycles. But then, all nature is governed by hermetic clocks, like the cicadas that come out in their countless millions exactly on time every seven years in eastern parts of America. And we don’t even need reminding of how regularly the seasons come and go, the responses of migratory species. Why do lemmings save up the years and then, obeying some mystical signal, rush to throw themselves off the nearest precipice?
Which brings me to the subject of this week’s sermon. (My distaff bloodstock is stitched with Anglican clergy, which is why I tend to preach.) Apart from the delicious prospect of thousands of politicians tossing themselves into oblivion, there is the matter of the arcane cycles that control the emergence, breeding and distribution of particular orders of politicians; from the true statesmen of the past to the selection of utterly vile bodies that currently hold sway all over the world.
Wherever you look these days, you will find monsters in charge. The Middle East is as well a place to start as anywhere. What a selection of corrupt, murderous and signally ugly people. Israel’s bloated Ariel Sharon, Palestine’s Yasser Arafat — the former blinded by political avarice; the latter, a counterfeiter with his hands deep in the till. Move a little north-east and what do you find? Saddam Hussein, need anyone say more. Iran’s theo-cracy and the ayatollahs. Would you trust any one of them as a babysitter?
Let’s go north-westward and meet up with the French president who, but for the constitutional immunity of his position, would be serving quite a hefty jail term for fraud and corruption. Across the channel to the artificial morality of New Labour and Tony Bliar — as his name is so aptly spelled on protester’s placards. Is there any single political leader of such polished hypocrisy as Blair? His cheesy smile makes the skin crawl.
Even George W Bush looks quite good next to Blair. At least Bush makes no bones about being a serial warmonger. But Dubya’s out in the open. Like a polecat in the headlights he’s easy to run down but so rubbery he just bounces away when the fenders hit him. Blair, though, has the genuine rodent touch of the New Left. You can see he’s been in the larder by the little greasy droppings of his species, the ”human rights”, ”equitable solutions” and ”multicultural enablements”. Before him the awful Margaret Thatcher, before her ”Old” Labour’s lumpen Harold Wilson. What a sordid array.
Where next for another power-maddened despot? Poor old Russia, the home of Chekov, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy. For 70 terrible years all human endeavour was subdued, beaten, starved, suffocated by the obscenities of communism in full swing: the gulags, the grim harvests of the Stalinist purges. All dissent stifled, all human individuality crushed, art and literature, music, subject to bureaucratic stranglehold. You would think this deeply savaged people had had enough and that, in 1989, the terror at last had began to subside. Instead, fate continued to despise the Russians and gave them, as their new leader, a remaindered torturer from the KGB, Colonel Alexander Putin. In four years he’s put television under state control, passed a law forbidding comment on politicians during election times, put the press in terror of its very existence. The abominations of Putin’s brutality in Chechnya puts him in exactly the same league as the Beslan terrorists.
What of the rest of Eastern Europe. Nicolae Caeusescu? Slobodan Milosevic? South America and the many likes of Augusto Pinochet?
And if you ever want proof that the world is in the middle of a global cycle of brute politicians, take a horrified glance at Africa where the leaders compete with each other in the bizarre game of who can out-butcher the other. Apartheid’s 46 years as a rogue regime showed that the colonialists had, at least, some staying power. Even Rhodesia beats the Idi Amins and Robert Mugabes when it comes to keeping the police and armies on one’s side. Taking the bronze medal in this crude competition would be the Congo’s Mobuto Sese-Seko. Yesterday it was Rwanda, today the Democratic Republic of Congo or Darfur where they kill off children at a rate far less than untreated HIV/Aids kills off South Africans. Two jumbo jet-loads go down every day. The African National Congress should adjust its slogan to ”a better death for all”.
Think of the Far East and the stupendously criminal heydays of Mao, of Pol Pot, of Kim’s North Korea, Osama bin Laden of the Taliban. It never stops.
So far as politicians go, we are in the season of the beasts. It can only be some hidden devil’s blueprint that is being played out, for it sure as hell hasn’t got anything to do with evolution. If it had, we’d have to dig up Darwin so he could rewrite his line to read the survival of the shittiest.