i am a citizen of the modern absurd state

I am a citizen of the modern absurd state. It is a place in which you can be summarily executed for vaguely resembling an Ethiopian while acting above suspicion.

I can be arrested for wearing a t-shirt praising the prime minister while in front of the parliament buildings while fifty people next to me dressed obscenely as Americans go scot-free.

My family have lived continuously in Britain and its sovereign predecessors from the Domesday Book and before. Yet I can be deported for having a different sense of linguistic tone than the chief constable.

Look it up. You can be deported if you quote Ghandi approvingly in what he has to say about violent terrorism. Technically he justifies it. You might even say he glorifies it.

Where will I be deported to? Would it be to places my ancestors did not live in but died in? Vimy Ridge? Rourkes Drift? The Plains of Abraham? Some of them burned Washington.

Would I be deported to the country where, by an accident of war-time lust I was born, considered by some to be the most peaceful country on earth and where I was tortured by the police for eight hours to near death before being rescued by nuns? It is a country that has legislation that would probably reject me.

I want this absurdity to end. Are we at war or not? If so, why? That is the basis of this. The prime minister won’t tell us exactly. It is his secret. Are we? And if not, why not, with all this gathering danger?

If we are in an ideological struggle with those who hate freedom. Let us implement what is necessary to defeat it. Let us go on a war footing. Let us deport citizens who hate freedom or even dislike it a little to countries that absolutely loath it. Let us put the heads of those with dodgy ideologies such as those that link terrorists treacherously to the wars we are fighting that they say they are part of, a link the prime minister says is absurd and perhaps soon to be illegal, let us put those heads on pikes.

If we are not at war let us stop doing things where absurd explanations become plausible. For example that the Prime minister is not fighting terrorism but actually sticking it to political opponents by creating conditions in which his declining popularity is bolstered by Churchillian myth and his opponent’s views succour thought crimes.

I read the biographies of the successful terrorists and the bunglers. They were the ones who cunningly avoided all the intense security work of a decade. Yet they were espousing terrorism in mosques, fighting with moderate Imams, visiting training schools in Pakistan and selling inflammatory texts on the street every week. But security never heard of them. One was a concocted criminal. Most were citizens. Thank God the next potential lot can be stripped of that. That will get the buggers next time!

The profiles seem to me like the classic profiles of patsies and bozos that become provocateurs or informers. How did we miss the chance? It is such an absurd place now that we live in that it is equally plausible we didn’t miss the chance. We took it to fight the real war. Like it is plausible that Brazilians are killed to reassure the public on immigration. Just like it is plausible that here were no weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq war was planned way before any inspectors were mildly restrained. It is plausible that only the ugliest Imams are deported. Also plausible that for two decades the terrorists were kept around and enabled in case they became handy in overthrowing Arab Socialist states. Is the war on Terrorism a war on Gallaway and those who vote for him? Plausible. It is a paradise for bloggers, a hell for democrats.

War or Not. Let’s get off the pot. And while we are at it let us fight the speed control cameras. They are causing all sorts of deaths. Deport those who slow down and glorify slowing!

As for me, I intend to quote Ghandi by the parliament buildings.

I read the obituaries of those who died on July 7. Like many I wept. There was not one that I wouldn’t have liked as a neighbour or friend. They did not die for ideology.

They were ordinary people slaughtered by criminals. By madmen. Let us not make their death absurd.