Competition No 3771
Set by George Cowley on 3 March
John Gray, in the satirical spirit of Swift, defended the use of torture in liberal democracies. We asked for more defences of unacceptable practices.
Report by Ms de Meaner
And we got defences for dictatorship, incest and blackmail or bribery. Fantastic. I was unsure what to make of David Silverman's defence of his daughter, who incurred the wrath of a friend when she tried to scrawl graffiti all over his living-room wall ("My host could simply replace the damaged goods with a couple of trips to Laura Ashley and Habitat. The delay caused to my child's long-term cognitive development, however, might be irretrievable"). It was funny, but somehow felt like the entry to another competition entirely. Perhaps I may set it in the weeks to come, so don't delete it yet, David.
Hon menshes to Tony Black, for his defence of capital punishment ("Since death comes to us all sooner or later, there is clearly no logical reason why it shouldn't come sooner rather than later"), and Adrian Fry, for exterminating kids ("What stops us killing children?"). £30 to the three winners, and additional Tesco vouchers to the top dog: Bill Greenwell.
We should face the 21st century with moral attitudes as advanced and innovative as our technology, leaving ignorance and prejudice as degraded relics of a superstitious past. If we let ancient taboos govern our behaviour, we stifle our own progress. A society still shadowed by primitive tribal codes and archaic laws can never offer its citizens the creative scope for full self-actualisation. We inhabit a world in which sexual freedom has been enlarged, in which contraception and legal abortion provide a safeguard against unwanted births; also one in which traditional family structures and values have been radically challenged.
It is time, therefore, to cease being frightened of the word "incest" as though it were an evil and dangerous perversion. Why continue, against all reason, to make it a stigmatised exception to the consenting-adults rule? Why add to human misery, and to the social cost of policing personal relationships? The potential genetic consequences can now be dealt with, and neither guilt and shame nor legal penalties can suppress desire. So let the desire of close blood relations be as acceptable as other forms - and we may yet see the pejorative expression "motherfucker" disappear as an all-purpose insult.
Basil Ransome-Davies
On hearing an eminently reasonable proposal described as blackmail, the villain's reply was always the same: "Blackmail's an ugly word!" As in B-movies, so in life. Bribery, too, has had a bad press.
Is is not time we lost this fiscal squeamishness and recognised that, whenever money passes from A to B, an equivalent benefit is expected to travel in the other direction? One man's bribe is another man's quid pro quo; this man's blackmail is that man's financial incentive. What could be more absurd than for a political party to accept a million pounds from a man involved in Formula One racing, then to exempt his sport from the ban on tobacco sponsorship, and afterwards to hand him his money back? Let us not pretend that anyone coughs up out of pure altruism. We just need to get the thing better organised and make sure we give good value.
I propose that all political parties and all public bodies should set out their tariffs. How much for this favour? How much for that? What's the going rate for a knighthood? What will an OBE set me back? And so on. No engine runs smoothly without lubrication.
Keith Norman
A dictatorship that hides its light under the bushel of democracy is not worth its reputation. Where is the elegance, the pathos, in the creation of "phantom voters" by such masters of the genre as Robert Mugabe? Where is the poetry in the benevolence adduced in his own favour by Saddam Hussein? What is the point of the shy defensiveness of Mr Milosevic? Where is the heroism in dimpled Floridan chads, in the folksy, bagel-crunching repartee of George W Bush? Tyranny is an essentially aesthetic mode of private ownership, a quality as numinous as it is luminous. It makes no bones about itself. This is something Attila and Tamburlaine understood; in our time, it was recognised by Hoxha, by Kim Il Sung, by Amin. Not for them the apology or the apologist: only the saintly declaration of absolute rule, the gorgeous insistence that power ran through one bloodstream, pumped itself through the essential ventricles of a single individual. There is something colossally foul about making claims to "legitimate" rule. Our human spirits will only ever be uplifted by those dictators who, impaling their standards through their many enemies, defy the odds and transmute their grandeur into something truly beautiful.
Bill Greenwell
No 3774 Set by Margaret Rogers
Since 1997, Richard Olivier has been running management courses based on Shakespeare's plays. Senior civil servants recently attended a "Henry V inspirational leadership" course. What lessons could Bush, Blair, Chirac et al learn from the Bard at the moment? Let's eavesdrop on the course tutor.
Max 200 words by 4 April (to appear in issue dated 14 April). E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
