Sometimes this world just seems too hard to understand. Too endlessly unjust. Too systematically, unceasingly unjust. Too endlessly rewarding of injustice.
Too hard to bear.
What would one want? For the unjust to suffer what they wreak on others? For Blair to have his children's limbs ripped off in front of his eyes? For Bush to watch his wife give birth to a deformed foetus, irradiated from single ghoulish eye to outsized toes with uranium shot from foreign tanks?
Of course not. But to see Blair given the first standing ovation Parliament has ever given a Prime Minister; to see the sycophantic press pack fall over themselves to write his ‘legacy’, his place in history next to Churchill and Lord Nelson; and to see him - this is what grates - in the role of ‘peacemaker’ in the Middle East, after all he has done to make war and wreak havoc there and all he has done to prolong and intensify the suffering of those who were only trying to lead their lives until he came along – that really grates.
And somehow, it grates even more, the thought that he might succeed. That through his bullying, duplicitous ways, backed up by US dollars or the threat of their withdrawal, backed up by the press pack who want only to shine in his glow, and backed up by British-made weapons hanging over the heads of anyone who dares to defy his line of ‘peace’ – he may just push through a compromise.
Why does that grate most of all? It shouldn’t: surely peace at any price is better than no peace. If a pushing, shoving, duplicitous and ambitious warmonger is the best way to ensure it – and I even wonder if it may be – then why complain.
The trouble is that then one wonders what on earth it’s really all about. Why on earth promote these gentle, caring, harm-free values if they only get you stamped on. Or shot up with uranium from a foreign tank.