Number one with a bullet

Kurds do it, Maccabees do it

Let’s do it, let’s shoot in the air.

One would have thought that any society au fait with the physics of suicide bombing would have figured it out long ago: what goes up must come down. Certainly, unshakeable faith in divine providence goes a long way, but prefacing every prediction with ‘God willing” tends to deny certain realities about the effects on cranial bone of rapidly falling AK-47 bullets. Being faithful is one thing. Being a blithering idiot is quite another.

An idiots there were aplenty in Ramallah this week, as the helicopter bearing Yasser Arafat’s body descended over his compound into a hail of hysterically aimed small-arms fire. If God’s will was being imposed anywhere in that dusty armpit of the globe, it was all focused on that terribly brave pilot.

So why do these ballistically challenged young men insist on unloading their Kalashnikovs into the sky? Sociologists have been unforthcoming so far, perhaps because their research budgets don’t extend to hardy flak jackets and helmets; but it seems that an entirely new form of human expression is developing.

So far socio-linguists seem to agree that 100 rounds from an AK-47 aimed at 85 degrees express abject grief, while 150 rounds from an Uzi directed at the vertical indicate joy. This will have been a great consolation to the families of the scores of Kuwaitis shot to pieces after the liberation of their country by the Americans in 1990: the Kuwaiti army, realising it couldn’t very well go through an entire war without firing a single shot, threw itself and its stockpiles of ammunition into celebrating the victory.

But there are more questions than answers. If dad lets rip with his Glock at the ceiling of the lounge is he celebrating the outcome of a dog race, or asking the missus to bring him another grape juice? If she rolls a phosphorous grenade back through the door, is she reaffirming her love for him, or hinting that it’s time to reupholster the settee?

What a relief to live in the West, where assault rifles are used only for hunting salmon. How gratifying to have ardent defenders of intellectual independence like Michael Moore and John Pilger telling us what to think. But most of all, how pleasant to be able to watch sport and not fear random death from above.

And the Irish fans, packed parka to parka in the hypothermic stands at Lansdowne Road on Saturday, clearly appreciated all those liberties as they cheered and stamped and whooped at the drama unfolding below them. Old men declared they had never seen the like of it in 40 years. Children hid behind their fathers’ trouserlegs and gaped. But the footage from Dublin was indisputable: it was a real sunbeam.

About 4m wide, it lay across the try-line for at least 15 minutes, nine minutes longer than the last recorded sunbeam, spotted in Belfast in the summer of 1934.

But 90 minutes of prostrate ball-grubbing later such sentimental pleasures were in tatters, at least for South Africans; the sunbeam gone the same way as Springbok delusions of grandeur. With two minutes on the clock and the deficit five points even the robotic Hugh Bladen had ceased with the curious and utterly pointless incantation of players’ surnames that he seems compelled to perform in lieu of actual commentary.

A sudden penalty awarded to the visitors. All eyes on the far touchline, willing a one-metre flag-raising. Bladen re-inflating his vocal bagpipes for one final drone.

And then Kobus Wiese saying, ‘So, You, does Juan Smit kick for touch or go for the posts?” and silence falling as the virgin imbecility sinks home. The seconds crashing by like plummeting chandeliers, and amid the growing certainty that Bladen is about to go Tora-Bora, drilling Wiese stone dead, high-arc trajectories be damned.

But in the end all is clapping and shaken hands and thumped backs. Over Dublin, rounds of applause. Very far away, applauding rounds resound —