A tragedy in one act

Crime & Punishment, Current Affairs, Ethics, Hypocrisy, Law, Society

A tragedy in one act

Published by Tom

January 23, 2010

Edlington case is symptom of 'broken society', says David Cameron | UK news | guardian.co.uk

The local authority began this drama by apologising for its failings. This was both a political statement and an exoneration of every other human being who touched the lives of the young sadists' family. If the reliably incompetent state is responsible for their conduct, then no-one else is. Never mind that "the local community" is tough enough to run them out of town now. They were not tough enough to intervene in the horrors of the boys' upbringing. No, that was up to Social Services, as the council sadly confirms.

Enter David Cameron, stage right. Beneath the fresh, fabric softened woolliness of his lines is the muffled echo of a standard right-wing point. These boys were the inevitable products of welfarism. Bred merely to maximise state benefits, they were unwanted and unloved. No care was taken over their welfare or education nor even to screen them from their parents' vile lives. They grew up, poor creatures, looking on. And they learned, as children will, from their role models. Their outré, Tarantino-like violence is therefore really no surprise.

The left-wing characters in this drama have yet to make their entrances. But there are noises off. The BBC and Guardian accounts mention the horror movies and the pornography meaningfully, without yet seeking to blame them directly. One account (from the BBC) says;

"…the two brothers made their own horror movie…"

Ho hum. Perhaps the trendy QT, purveyor of amusing violence to the intelligentsia, will have a job for them on their release? Once the initial horror has abated, however, a dancing line of Guardianistas will take to the footlights for the finale. And the prescience of a slave in ancient Greece will be proved once again.

A great city was besieged and its inhabitants were called together to consider the best means of protecting it from the enemy. A bricklayer earnestly recommended bricks as affording the best material for an effective resistance. A carpenter, with equal enthusiasm, proposed timber… Upon which a currier stood up and said, "Sirs, I differ from you altogether; there is no material for resistance equal to a covering of hides; and nothing so good as leather.

The Tory solution will be less welfare. The Labour solution will be more. The Tories will tell us the social workers failed. Labour will tell us that if they were better paid, more expensively trained and more numerous, such horrors could be avoided. The puritans on both sides will blame the likes of Quentin Tarantino for de-sensitising children never sensitised in the first place. The right will seek to ban violent movies and the left (if intellectually consistent) will seek to set a minimum price for horror movie rentals so that only the rich (already lost to morality) can be exposed to their sickening influence.

Finally a chorus of legislators will tell us that new laws will prevent a recurrence. And the curtain will go down on the whole cast bowing before a backdrop of the gleaming city of our collective conscience. Encircled, of course, by a useless leather wall. The drama will have been satisfying though, and the political classes will conceal behind masks of impeccably concerned sadness, just how much they enjoyed their own performances.

3 responses to “A tragedy in one act”

Trooper Thompson

January 23, 2010

Very well said. Thank you. It’s a bit like a game of fallacious argument whack-a-mole, and you manage to clobber the majority.

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wonderfulforhisage

January 23, 2010

What would you suggest should be done TP?

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Tom Paine

January 24, 2010

First, accept that there is, always has been and always will be a small minority of evil people. Stop believing that this can be fixed, because all attempts to do so only mess up the lives of the majority who are essentially good. The evil just laugh.
Second, stop trying to “help” those who won’t look after their children to do so. The existence of “Social Services” only serves to negate family and community obligations. Let there be (as there always has been) a legal duty on every parent to look after the welfare of his or her child. If any don’t, then let any interested parties (family, neighbours, churches, charities) (a) file criminal charges and (b) apply to have neglected children made wards of court. No state agency should be able to take a child away. Only an independent court.
A significant proportion of Britain’s poorest children have been bred for benefits. It can be no surprise that a child, intuiting that, would be alienated. Therefore, abolish every kind of welfare benefit that increases with the number of children. The economically inactive would then be better off financially without children (just as is true for the employed). Lunatics apart, only those who were really prepared to make the sacrifices involved in caring for children would then have them. There is nothing wicked in deferring having children until you can afford it. We all did it. Of course, there would still be large, poor families but there’s no harm in growing up poor in a loving family.
I know many of the better-off cannot imagine the power of small incentives on people with small horizons, but I grew up among people who knew precisely how to manipulate the benefit system for small advantages. Such thinking warps the lives of millions. Sums of money too trivial to get most of us out of bed, can and do wreak horrors. The good news is they could wreak wonders too, if we would only stop imagining that we can plane mankind’s crooked timbers into a pleasing shape.
All aid for those in financial hardship should be discretionary; allocated by genuine (not state-sponsored) charities who can evaluate the circumstances of the individuals concerned (and who know that money given to the undeserving will be lost to the deserving). There would still be fraud, because there will always be evil, but there could be nothing approaching the systemic cultivation of evil that social security has achieved.
Would people give enough to charity? Yes they would, if it was clearly no-one else’s responsibility to look after their neighbours. All the misguided kindness dammed by the state to build empires for politicians would find a pure channel. Those pols who claim to be acting from kindness would get the chance to prove it by working for the charities. Since more than the entire income tax “take” now goes on providing state benefits, there would be plenty of money for kind people to give.
There is such a thing as society, but it is nothing to do with the state. Human kindness can more than counterbalance human evil, though it can never eliminate it.

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