The Brazilian government, in the person of Don Alhambra Goebbels-Von Ribbentrop, Prefect of Amazonia and Archbishop of Ipanema, was adamant that the past year’s inferno had merely been catastrophic, and not, as the environmental lobby claimed, apocalyptic.
As he absentmindedly picked a leech off the lapels of his faintly grubby cream linen suit and fed it to the parrot that crouched on his shoulder, he pointed to the newest aerial photographs.
Taken just that morning, they revealed some healthy foliage, a fat European starling and a very pretty picnic blanket.
Would he comment on the fact that these pictures were acquired by dangling a Box Brownie out of a helicopter 30 feet above the Park of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Rio? Of course not, he snapped. The same picture could have been taken anywhere in the Amazon basin.
Stubbing out his cigarillo in an attractive jaguar-paw ashtray, he shrugged as only Latin consumptives can, and declared the press conference closed before sweeping from the room with a muttered oath about Swedish do-gooders farting on about some crap shrubs in a goddamn stinking jungle full of goddamn stinking Indians and goddamn stinking British naturalists.
Don Von Ribbentrop’s existence may be questionable, but his attitudes are as concrete as the holiday haciendas of the arsonists who currently run that smoking ruin of a country. Indeed, during this week’s meeting with environmentalists, it was taken as a given that the rainforest was on fire. All that the rival parties were thrashing out was exactly how much of it has gone up in the past 12 months.
The Brazilians have been widely quoted as saying it was only an area the size of New Jersey. The green lobby probably has something a little more south-western in mind. Like Texas, or, say, two-thirds of Brazil.
These debates, like the operation of chainsaws, flame-throwers and slush funds, are best left to trained professionals. But what the observing layman could take away from the Brazilian stand-off was a strengthened conviction that almost everything is the size of New Jersey.
Why this should be the case is mysterious. Perhaps some of the Irish-Italian entrepreneurs who call the state home (for instance, those who manufacture personalised anti-flotation maritime footwear or finesse unscheduled ballistics-oriented coronary rest) have let it be known that nothing is bigger than Family, and anyone who goes outside New Jersey isn’t family. Therefore nothing is bigger than New Jersey, and anyone who says different is liable to get his toes more than somewhat tickled by a blowtorch.
But whatever the reason, it seems that the nondescript blob on the American East Coast has become to geography what the cowry shell was to international economics.
A glance at the Internet reveals that New Caledonia in the Pacific is the size of New Jersey, but gambling is eschewed in favour of hanging about on the rusting, 50-year-old runway in the hope that the Americans will come back in their Dakotas and hand out some more chocolates and Bibles.
Swaziland, too, is the size of New Jersey, but has not yet been visited by the Americans, or by the 13th century.
And far out in the frozen wastes of space, between Mars and Jupiter, spins 216 Kleopatra. For many months Nasa astronomers watched the massive asteroid, working out detailed computer models based on radar maps and complex algorithms. Her path was fixed, her composition guessed at, and finally her exact size decided upon. 216 Kleopatra, they agreed, was roughly the size of New Jersey. The Chintz State has permeated the icy deeps of the cosmos; but in space, no one can hear you play Perry Como records, so that’s all right.
(Aristocratic Swazi readers may be confused by words such as “space” and “asteroid”, given the Astronomer Royal’s findings that the universe is a large pumpkin, roughly the size of New Jersey, which is balanced on the back of a celestial dassie and illuminated by the beams of refined omnipotence that stream from the backside of King Mswati, Seducer of the Moon and Impregnator of the Thunder. These readers should investigate something called a “book”, which may be found in the palace dumpster, under a large number of flyers about something called “Aids Day”.)
Unlike the rainforest, New Jersey is here to stay.
Next year, when the Brazilians admit to torching two New Jerseys, we’ll be comforted by its familiarity. And one day, when the burning is over and the Amazon is a tidal estuary and New Caledonia is under water, at least we’ll always have the state. See that big dark reef with the rusty airfield sticking out of it? That’s the size of New Jersey.