Sending in the Idiots

Not sure if this is a mass-mailing initiative but this flier came through the door this morning:

Of course mistakes were made. For that we are truly sorry. It was never our intention. We had a plan, a strategy even. It was all about winning hearts and minds. Somewhere along the line mistakes were made. The consequences were indeed unfortunate but were, we can assure you, never part of our intentions.

Few would disagree that action was needed. The situation was dire and order needed to be restored. We thought that order would be welcomed, would be the key to winning hearts and minds. We would not wish to suggest that we saw this as a simple task, we always knew that it would be hard to achieve quickly. Yet order was what was needed before any hope of normality could be considered. We're certain that everyone was agreed on that point.

Looking back now there were things that we would have done differently. We thought long and hard about the best way to achieve order and win over hearts and minds. We had tried this before, many times. Our strategy always seems to be about winning hearts and minds. The problem always comes down to the matter of implementation. That's where it seems to have gone wrong in the past and we were keen that this time we wouldn't repeat the same errors.

We thought at first of setting up dialogue, of using open discussion to understand the root cause of the disorder and work towards a reasoned solution. We thought that, through this, we would come to understand them better and they would come to understand us. With understanding we were sure that common ground could be found and progress made towards instilling order. Unfortunately we couldn't speak their language and we had, mistakenly as it turned out, deported all of our translators. We were suspicious of them and their ability to talk the language of others. We had taken steps to remove them before we fully understood their usefulness in helping us win hearts and minds. We now recognise that this was a mistake.

It was suggested at this point that we set up observation posts on the borders to watch them and their disorder. We were going to observe what they were doing and try to understand what it was that they were so unhappy about. We thought that if we knew what it was that they wanted, we could package it up and airdrop it in. We could then return to our observation posts and see if this calmed them and if their hearts and minds were won over by our generosity. We began to construct our observation towers. We ordered several thousand pairs of binoculars and some telescopes also. Unfortunately they seem to have mistaken our towers for machines of war and took to burning them down when we were not looking or when we'd gone to fetch some more binoculars. We wished that we knew their words for observation towers so that we could have labelled them more clearly.

We felt that this was a setback and turned our minds to other tactics. For a while we decided to ignore them in the hope that, when they saw that we had no interest in them, they would calm down and return to living normal lives. We hoped that if we ignored them hard enough they might become united in their curiosity. Perhaps they would send us our translators back to try to find out why we were ignoring them. We would use that opportunity to laugh with them about how we were just doing it so that they would be calm again and that we really didn't want to ignore them, just understand them a bit more. We thought they might suddenly see the humour of the situation and we would all become friends and discuss it over coffee somewhere nice.

It was at this point, before we'd managed to initiate the ignoring, that some mistake was made. We still don't know how it happened and whether the fault lies with an individual or represents some systemic failure. We assure you that this matter is being thoroughly investigated and, if we find the answer, we will look to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again. Let us make this very clear, we still had many options to explore in trying to win hearts and minds. We were still confident of finding a way. If the ignoring didn't work we had considered inviting them over for holidays so that they could see that we were really quite nice. We'd thought of offering to help them build new homes, schools and hospitals to make up for those that had been destroyed in the disorder. We'd even thought of offering free tennis lessons or preferential trading terms. We had many options to consider.

There were some, in those days, who thought our approaches too circumspect, too soft. Some doubted whether such measures would ever bring about the order that we all agreed was needed. We considered, at this point, a more direct approach. We thought about sending in teachers and doctors. We thought about sending in some aid workers – even though we did not entirely understand what an aid worker was or what they actually did. These all seemed like measures that would support our strategy of winning hearts and minds. Unfortunately, without the first semblance of order these people felt a little reticent about being sent in, even with the offer of free tennis lessons becoming available in wave two of the plan. We considered, as an alternative, sending in peace-keepers as they seemed exactly the sort of person that was needed. Firm, yet intelligent people imbued with a desire to find, instil and protect peace.

Unfortunately, while we were considering these options, somewhere along the line the decision was made to send in the idiots. That’s when things started to go wrong. That’s when the fighting really started in earnest. The trouble with sending in the idiots is that they tend to take guns in with them and a certain outlook on life that doesn’t recognise the notion of winning hearts and minds. The idiots seemed enthusiastic, we will freely admit to that. However, they were inclined to exercise their enthusiasm with bullets and missiles and massive air superiority and this tended to inflame the disorder rather than quell it in any way.

We really are truly sorry for the way that this has turned out. The most disappointing aspect of this was the fact that this has happened before and we appear to have made the same mistake again. We always have a strategy of winning hearts and minds but somehow we always end up sending in the idiots.

The Self-preservation Society...

I’ve been away from here, lost or at least struggling to make any progress. At times the webcounter flat-lined and I thought, well, there you are, it’s over. But there were occasional blips so I thought I might return, for a bit anyway, so you know that I’m still out there somewhere.

In my absence from this place, and considering the flat-lining of the webcounter, I got to thinking about how many weblogs are currently owned by the dead. I imagined a scenario where LittleMissKittyBlogger had posted just the most adorable picture of her tabby kitten peering out of a pink shoe box on her blog, Kittens R Gr8t! It really is a good picture, one of the best she’s posted and she knows her readers are going to get a kick out of it. Kittens really are the best things, like ever, she thinks. She heads out into the world, maybe to pick up yet more kitten-based paraphernalia, and there she is involved in a major road traffic accident. Does she think, as that articulated truck crosses over the central reservation and ploughs into her car: ‘I can’t post this on Kittens R Gr8t! This is too hard, too real, I’m going to have to start a whole new blog to cover this’, before her life ends? And maybe this life ends as suddenly as a camera’s shutter click or maybe it is drawn out over a few days to the accompaniment of the beep, beep, beep of the monitor but, either way, she doesn’t get back to her beloved blog.

Meanwhile, back at Kittens R Gr8t! people are posting such enthusiastic comments about that last picture and about the blog as a whole. Even though no replies are posted, comments keep on coming. After a couple of days some of the regular readers start posting “where are you?” comments, some are even a little grumpy that they haven’t received reciprocal praise for their blogs and the pictures they posted in response to that last cute kitty picture. By week three, visitors numbers trail off substantially. One regular posts that she hopes that LittleMissKittyBlogger’s absence isn’t an indicator that something bad has happened to her dear little kitten.

Then the weeks pass into months and the months, years. How long will Kittens R Gr8t! remain out there, a testimony to one person’s infatuation with a certain type of small fluffy carnivore? It becomes an attenuated continuation of her existential status and, to her readers, she becomes, somewhat fittingly, like Schrödinger’s cat.

This brings me onto my real point, here, in my quest to discover why we write or, more particularly, why I attempted to write. Is there some hope that, in writing, we achieve some level of immortality; some belief that our thoughts can live on, as our bodies rot and decay? Perhaps. If Milton is to be believed, “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life”; and again he states, in his pamphlet opposing censorship: “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but, he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself; kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye; he slays an immortality rather than a life”.

Milton is not alone in harbouring such views, great thinkers before and since would recognise those sentiments. Plato saw books as “…the immortal sons deifying their sires” and Woody Allen, though hoping for a different outcome, recognised the association also when he said “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying”.

Our written words are more closely us than, perhaps, anything else. They are the outward expression of our inner self. A reason, then, to write? Is this what really drives us, some desire for immortality, some attempt at creating a fossil record of our life that declares, “I was here!”?

We know that we will fade so quickly from the memories of others. Even those who knew us well will find our image losing focus over time, the details gone, conversations difficult to recall. Life moves on. Yet, in the written word we have something less ephemeral, less prone to being obscured by time.

If this is our true reason to write, then it draws other associations. If we are only to be preserved after death in the words that we leave behind, then we must consider carefully which words we choose to leave. This observation, in itself, can be more paralysing than it is energising. It seems as if too much is at stake. Perhaps I should dismiss such self-consciousness and rather take heart from T. J. Crabber who, in one of the very few extant letters, wrote the following in an irate reply to his father, a Kentish corn-chandler, who was asking him to give up his work on the Chronicle and pleading for his return to the family business:

"...We must strive in our writing to become much bigger than that. As individuals we are cast as equals, that is to say we are bastards and vagabonds and misfits and fools. But in turning to writing we presume to cast off the bondage of our individuality and our smallness and take on, instead, the mantle of all humanity so that we must at once attend to the concerns of the race both severally and in whole. It is here that we find our purpose and our meaning. And though, like the defenders at Thermopylae, we stand there knowing that we shall fail in our endeavour, that it will consume us entirely and leave us for dead, we know also, like them, that we may find in this struggle our immortality too in the wonder of our words, if not our actions speak, in our fight for the truth and disregard for the odds against success, an abdication of any regard for the concept of success. What matters only is that we take a stand and dismiss our desperate clinging to our mortality and our individuality and our fears."

But then he spent the rest of his life writing about figs.

Anyhow, the point is made and I think there is something in it, even though it may only be part of the answer. There does seem to be something in the appeal of writing to preserve ones thoughts beyond the grave. Who would have heard of Shakespeare if he had decided to make pots rather than write poetry and plays? Who would have heard of Hemmingway if he had decided to devote his life to achieving excellence on his PlayStation 3? Though there is, of course, no consolation in death that your words survive, there can be some consolation in life that you have produced something with greater permanence than yourself that reflects something of your uniqueness and your being. Something more apposite than a headstone’s blunt summary.