John OFarrell - Global Village Idiot: Dubya, Dunces, and One Last Word Before You Vote

GLOBAL VILLAGE IDIOT

Dubya, Dumb Jokes, and One Last Word Before You Vote

John OFarrell

Copyright 2001, 2003 by John OFarrell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Originally published in 2001 by Doubleday in Great Britain in a slightly different form.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

OFarrell, John.

Global village idiot / John OFarrell.

p. cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4705-0

1. Great BritainSocial life and customs1945 2. Great BritainPolitics and government1997 3. United StatesPolitics and government2001I. Title.

DA589.4.O38 2003
941.0859dc21 2003049207

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

GLOBAL VILLAGE IDIOT

My mother grew up during World War II and doesnt like to waste anything. So when she had a new hip joint fitted recently she asked the doctor if she could take the old bone home for her dog. I suppose I should just be grateful that she didnt boil it up to make a delicious stock. What sort of soup is this, Mother? Its Moms hipbone and country vegetable. I told my friends this story and we all had a good chuckle. But then I overheard one of them telling someone else and as more laughter echoed around the pub I thought, Hang on, what gives you the right to laugh at my family? And so it is with poking fun at your own country and its government. Its all very well for Americans to satirize the Bush administration, but that doesnt give every liberal limey the right to start sniping at the U.S. president.

Thus it is with some trepidation and a sense of humility that I offer this collection of essays to you from the other side of the Atlantic. I love the United States and its people whom I know have a great sense of humour, so please do not think that any criticism of your president or Republican Party policies is an attack on you as a patriotic American (unless you yourself happen to be reading this, Dubya, whichlets face itis unlikely given the absence of pictures). It is because the United States has historically been a beacon of free expression and democracy that I worry about the direction in which its government is now leading the free world. You did a great job throwing off the hereditary monarchy of George III. It just seems strange that you adopted the hereditary presidency of George II.

I also have great respect for the American traditions of free speech as enshrined in the First Amendment, and I was sort of hoping that this right might extend to non-U.S. citizens who aspire to noble American values (i.e., making a quick buck by selling a load of jokes that have been printed in British newspapers once already). My country is said to have a special relationship with America, which is very important to us here in Britain, if only as an excellent way to annoy the French. So I hope you understand that any jokes at your countrys expense from this particular Brit are very much in the spirit of a critical friend. Okay, maybe one of those friends who stole your girlfriend and still owes you money and never calls you except to ask unreasonable favours, but a friend nonetheless. With a degree of distance from the United States and the American media it could even be that a British eye on topical events might offer a fresh perspective. Some things seem normal just because things have always been that way where we happen to live. When Vlad the Impaler was prince of Wallachia, many of his subjects were shocked at the radical suggestions of visitors from abroad. What, stop impaling people altogether?!! Surely you mean gradually introduce some form of licensed impaling after hearing evidence from the Guild of Impalers?

In fact most of these pieces are not about American politics at all. Instead I have sought to cover as wide a range of topics as possible, from human cloning to the Miss World competition to soft-core pornography. (Come to think of it, these are all the same subject, arent they?) I have tried to avoid banging on and on about the issues that really bug me because I thought it might get a bit boring for people to keep reading about car alarms and the uncooperative nature of my printer. Most of the essays are about three pages eachthe idea being that you can sit down and read one piece a day, or possibly two, depending on whether you had All-Bran or boiled eggs for breakfast. Or perhaps you are travelling and keep being interrupted by a fellow passenger chatting to you, or maybe youre distracted by those bits of molten engine casing dropping off the wing, and in these situations it can be hard to concentrate on some major literary classic. But like the novels of Jackie Collins you can read this book in any random order and it will make no difference whatsoever to how much you enjoy it.

This collection begins with George W. Bush well on the way to getting his new job, and ends soon after Saddam Hussein loses his. Where there is some topical or peculiarly British reference that might need further clarification Ive inserted an asterisk to denote that there will be an explanatory footnote at the bottom of the page. I have left in the dates that the pieces first appeared although most of them are about issues that are very much still with us. This is only one persons reaction to the great events and profound moral issues that are shaping the new milennium millenium century. But as America heads toward the next presidential election I hope there may be a few things here worth remembering before you vote. Most importantly I hope this collection raises the occasional smile in a time when there seems to be less and less to laugh about. As the old saying goes, You either laugh or you cry. Or you think of Dubya being elected to a second term and you do both.

JOFLondon, 2003

P.S. My apologies are offered for any factual inaccuracies discovered subsequent to publication, but all details have been thoroughly researched by spending five minutes on the Internet and then giving up. For example, to check the story of nurses giving sex education in schools, I called up the search engine and entered the words nurses and sex. And then I was thrown out of my local library.

Yup, youve got the hang of that pretty quickly.

Scientists have discovered that not only do dolphins have their own language, but they even have a fully developed sense of humour with complex riddles and jokes. Zoologists have just spent months decoding the following dolphin gag: Why did the pilot whale swim inshore? Because the tide was going out! Okay, I know, I know. It loses something in translation. Its often not much better when comedy travels from one country to another (although it can work the other way; I co-wrote a sitcom that bombed on the BBC and was a huge hit in Belgium. Boy, was that a great comfort!).

These essays were originally written for publication in Britain and so there may be times in this collection where certain words or expressions might confuse the American reader, phrases like world powers such as Britain or Tony Blair has persuaded George Bush. Perhaps I should also quickly explain a little bit about Britains political parties. Much like the United States, Britain has a two-party system to ensure that the voters are guaranteed a genuine choice of rather similar policies. Tony Blairs Labour Party has been more radical and left-wing in the past, but annoyingly this tended to coincide with the periods when it didnt get elected. The Conservative Party is more right-wing; indeed it is currently disappearing so far off the scale that Darth Vader has just cancelled his membership. But the big difference that you have to understand about Britain is that it all comes down to social class. Britain has never really recovered from the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the French came over and rather rudely installed themselves as the despotic rulers of all England. And to this day the Conservative upper classes still drink wine and have cottages in France, whereas the Saxon serfs still drink beer and use unprintable Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The Labour Party was established to be Robin Hood, to steal from the rich and give to the poor, although somewhere along the way Robin seems to have got himself a nice big castle and pulled up the drawbridge. That is one concept I imagine does not need translating.