Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Time to shuffle the deck


With middle-eastern dictators dropping like flies at the moment it seems appropriate for everyone over there to calm down, pull up a chair and stick the kettle on. I'm put in mind of a 1976 film called "Logan's Run" starring Jenny Agutter and Michael York, set in some future fantasy world, citizens have every luxury and comfort, unlimited leisure and sex on tap but only live until they are 30 years old at which point an implanted device blows them up in a quasi-religious ritual called "carousel".

In the real world of the middle east it seems like the leaders of those countries get to live out this fantasy, living in opulence until their time runs out at which point they have to jump into the carousel where they face what must be an awful dilemma of hanging on long enough to extract billions of dollars into Swiss accounts but not too long to be strung up to the nearest lamppost by the mob and set on fire.

Like the petulant teenager I guess this is a necessary "phase" that these countries have to go through, luckily for us in Europe we (mostly) did all this hundreds of years ago and got a few steps ahead (mostly by exploiting all those behind us) anyway, hopefully there will no more bloodshed and the leaders of these countries will wake up and smell the coffee, get out while you can or the sandmen will hunt you down.

2 comments:

Chairman Bill said...

I'm thinking of starting a little dictatorship here in Old Sodbury.

Steve Borthwick said...

CB, absolutely! what could possibly go wrong...