The young don’t
know this, but there used to be a fabled time, think the late 50s, the 60s and
the 70s, when most things people liked to do were simply… allowed! Imagine that! Only the kinkiest sorts of sex, overt racist
insults, and jokes about the Royal House were strictly forbidden.
Ever since, the
Anti-Pleasure Mob has made a mayor comeback, and we are pretty much looking at
a definite Triumph of the Nerds on two or three continents and in places that
used to vie with Sodom and Gomorrah in happy hedonism. Ah, Progress, Progress, whimsicality
is thy name! The stuff these Geeks in Office manage to prohibit! Smoking of
course, and innocent sipping from wine bottles in the street! Sugar for
children, pastries, cookies and French fries in the schoolyard. Being
overweight now carries heavy penalties in airfare and health insurance. Walking
your dog off a lease is a mayor offence that must be rigorously cracked down on
by the uniformed henchmen of the dorks. There are cases of senior citizens
being heavily fined for making a picture of their own grandchildren in a
bathing-suit…
Meanwhile a few
other minor offences, which do have an occasional doubtful side-effect, do not
perhaps receive the full priority which a man of taste and sophistication would
hope they’d get. Such as the idiotic ease with which psychos can acquire
automatic weapons, which results in massacres of the Breivik kind… Our forces
of order must be too busy rotting out intolerable Nicotine Crimes in public
places to give that their due attention… I congratulate them on their sense of
priorities.
Anyway: so as to
end this post with a twinkle instead of a lamentation, here is a snapshot I
took at Prague airport back in 1997. The place had just been liberated from the
Soviet regime, and was rife with mafia-style crime and leftover Bolshevik weaponry.
Hence the formal forbiddance of guns in the precinct. I guess that nowadays,
the prohibition sign for guns has been removed, and replaced by one which bans ice-cream
cones. Because, as long as a gun doesn’t smoke,
there ain’t no reason to object to its presence, right?
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