I blame the scapegoats (29 page)

The
younger children at the party will at least have had the consolation of all
the presents that were left in their stockings, but even that looks set to
change. This will be the last year in which children get free presents from
Santa. As from next December, the government is planning to introduce a system
of loans whereby children will eventually have to pay back all the money spent
on toys and games that generations of kids have always taken for granted. It is
estimated that by the time the average British child goes to secondary school
he or she will owe Father Christmas approximately £10,000. The government has
defended these so called 'Santa Loans', pointing out that they will be at a low
rate of interest and there will be exemptions for children from poorer
families. Children in the capital will be particularly badly hit following a
ruling that Santa's sleigh will not be exempt from the congestion charge, which
transport groups say will inevitably be passed on to the kids, or 'customers'
as they are now known. Last year a misguided attempt to get Santa off his
sleigh and onto public transport backfired when he spent the whole of Christmas
Eve stuck in a tunnel on the London Underground with a load of drunken office
workers in nylon Santa hats. Many of them were later sued for having unofficial
Santa merchandise.

Labour
left-wingers do not know where to turn, particularly since Naomi Klein's recent
expose on the appalling working conditions endured by the elves in Santa's
sweatshop. A press spokesman for the Father Christmas Corporation denied that
any elves were being paid three cents an hour to work fourteen hours a day in
dangerous conditions, but this is probably because he no longer employs any
elves - production was recently shifted from the North Pole to subcontractors
in Indonesia.

The
traditions of Christmas have always changed to reflect the spirit of the age,
but suddenly it seems that so much that we took for granted has gone out of the
window. So this will in fact be the last year that there will be any Santa, any
presents, any days off work or indeed any peace for all mankind. But hey, Happy
Christmas anyway.

28
December 2002

In
the United States it is the custom to include in your Christmas card an annual
update on all the things that your family have been up to during the previous
twelve months. Needless to say, this practice has become the excuse for highly
selective reporting, thinly veiled boasting and general one-upmanship between
friends and relations.

Colleagues of ex-President Bush were
particularly irked by the round robin they received from George Snr and Barbara
this Christmas: 'Young George W. is getting on just fine in his new job of
President of the United States (thanks for the help, Jeb!). He is looking
forward to starting World War Three in the new year and Dad has been helping
him find Iraq on the old family atlas. Coincidentally, this is also the time
that he'll be beginning his campaign for re-election, and as Dubya says:
"I will not be impedemented!" '

Yes,
believe it or not, we are now more than halfway through the American electoral
cycle, which is of course a far more important factor in the timing of any war
than Iraqi winters or UN resolutions. You can understand why George W. Bush
wants a military victory a year before his presidential election, but why do
British troops need to be involved in his crude bid for electoral popularity? Apart
from all the death and suffering that British squaddies would inflict upon the
already oppressed Iraqi people, the troops themselves would be at great risk of
being killed, injured, or entertained by Jim Davidson. So wouldn't it be safer
and far more honest if our boys were simply deployed in key marginal states
across the pond to go canvassing for the US Republican Party?

Instead
of helping George W. Bush get re-elected by joining a war in the Gulf, Her
Majesty's armed forces would be parachuted into New Hampshire, where they could
give out glossy leaflets saying 'Re-elect Bush and Cheney 2004!' Dubya would
still be grateful to Tony Blair, but no horrific war crimes would be committed
and British servicemen would all come back safe and sound, except for the
unfortunate few who got lost in downtown Detroit.

Obviously, getting the SAS to do a little
light political canvassing on a Saturday morning might involve a small amount
of retraining. On their first attempt, the elite forces would probably try to make
contact with the voters by abseiling down from the roof and smashing through
the upstairs windows, before detonating stun grenades and smoke canisters. The
residents, lying quivering on the floor with a British army boot pressed down
on their head and an SA80 assault rifle pointing at their temple, would then
be asked a couple of politely worded questions about their current voting
intentions. And when they stammered that they would probably be voting for
Ralph Nader, they'd be shot through the back 127 times. So the SAS's usual
approach is probably going to need toning down a bit, though in its favour no
one would accuse these particular Republican canvassers of being soft on gun
control.

Other British servicemen could be brought in
as well. Instead of blowing up Baghdad, the RAF could just blow up thousands of
red, white and blue balloons. Chieftain tanks could be converted to fire
tickertape and streamers, and the band of the Royal Marines could learn to
trumpet their way through such US election classics as 'Simply The Best' and
'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet'.

Of course we would all prefer it if the
delivery of US Republican Party leaflets could be done by the whole of the
United Nations working together. But if the UN fails to take this historic
opportunity to make itself relevant to the post-9/11 global scenario and it
falls to US and British forces to get George Bush re-elected on our own, then
we will not shirk from our moral duty to mobilize our troops to give out little
lapel buttons with pictures of George W. to key voters in swing states.

Between
you and me, there is another reason why this is by far the best solution.
During the last Gulf War, there were so many military cock-ups and disasters
that you can be sure that the same thing would happen if the US and British
armies were in charge of Bush's re-election campaign. The 1991 conflict saw
allied troops killed by friendly fire, Patriot missiles repeatedly failing to
knock out Scuds, and SAS troops being dropped in the wrong place with the wrong
equipment. Bringing all this inexpertise to bear on Bush's election campaign is
the only chance that the Democrats have.

So call up the reservists, send our boys over
the Atlantic with their jamming rifles and their crashing Royal Navy destroyers
and, God speed, with our help Dubya will be cast out of the White House in
2004. Some have said that it is not the job of the British army to bring about
'regime change' in a sovereign country. But in Bush's case I'm sure we can make
an exception.

11
January 2003

Anthropologists
are hailing a major new breakthrough that occurred this week in Spain. Sadly,
it was not a British holidaymaker attempting a few words of Spanish; that may
yet be hundreds of generations away. This was a discovery concerning another
primitive human subspecies known as
Homo heidelbergensis
who
died out after several million years of evolution having only just learned how
to pronounce their own name. The unearthing of an axe head in a primitive
burial chamber has proved the existence of intelligence and abstract thinking
300,000 years earlier than was previously thought. An organized burial chamber
with tools for an imagined after-life suggests that these early cave-dwellers
had some sort of religion. Many of them may have been awoken early on a
Saturday morning by smiley Neanderthals calling round to the cave to ask them
if they'd heard the good news about the Sun God. 'Molten rocks will fall from
the sky and the seas will freeze over,' preached the zealots, and the cavemen
sighed, 'No change there then . . .'

While the excavation of the site in Spain
continues, archaeologists can only guess as to how the prehistoric funeral
service might have been conducted. 'What can I say about Ug?' says the priest.
'He liked the simple things in life. Which is probably just as well. And he certainly
didn't suffer fools gladly!' he adds, and there's a brave, affection nod from
Ug's brother whose arm was ripped off and eaten during a particularly lean bit
of the last ice age. Cremation may have been an option, although this would
have involved a slight delay while they waited around for someone to invent
fire. But however primitive this society, we now know that some sort of social
order and culture did at least exist - setting the earliest hominids apart from
the rest of the animal kingdom. (Although intelligent social behaviour has been
observed in other primates such as chimpanzees, many scientists now believe
that the chimps were put up to behaving like this by PG Tips.)

Of
course the evolution of
Homo erectus
was
a slow and painful process. Indeed, we still haven't reached the stage at which
we are sophisticated enough not to want to giggle when we hear the name
Homo
erectus.
Neither did it progress in a straight line -
it was greatly affected by external factors such as the coming of the ice age,
when all the cavemen went outside during their lunch hour to throw snowballs at
one another.* But no other species has developed religion, art, abstract
thought, science or little tear-off strips to prevent static in the tumble
drier. This journey now has its first milestone in central Spain, where
thousands of sub-humans migrated because of its warmer climate and lack of any
extradition agreement.

Primates
had begun using the first tools several hundred thousand years earlier - a
crucial moment of human history, memorably recreated at the beginning of
Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey.
What
did that apeman do with his new club? Did he use it to break open fruit for his
family or was his first instinct to smash in the skull of his fellow man?
Perhaps another apeman bowled a pine cone at him and that's how cricket got
started. A million years later and we are no closer to knowing the answers to
these questions or indeed to understanding what the hell is going on in
2001:
A Space Odyssey.
Thanks to an earlier film,
One
Million Years B.C.,
starring Raquel
Welch, many people are still under the misapprehension that primitive man inhabited
the Earth at the same as the dinosaurs. In fact, the film is

*This week had seen the first heavy
snowfall in London for over a decade and hundreds of grown adults spontaneously
ran out of their workplaces and started throw ing snow balls at each other,
with only a minority of the cabinet hiding lumps of brick inside theirs.

full
of wild anachronisms: dinosaurs occurred much earlier and fur Wonderbras came
much, much later.

What
is also not generally understood is that there were various branches of hominids
in competition with each other. Neanderthals were not our direct ancestors but
another branch of the genus that were in all probability wiped out by us,
Homo
sapiens.
Ugly battles must have taken place between
grunting troglodytes with thick necks and protruding foreheads - a bit like
when Millwall fans turn up at Chelsea. The remains discovered this week in
Spain are also of a subspecies that was killed off and now we are presented
with the depressing conclusion that our particular branch of mankind may not
have triumphed because we were the only highly intelligent branch of the
family, as we'd arrogantly presumed, but because we were the most vicious and
brutal. We know that early
Homo sapiens
looked
like a chimp and was dangerous and aggressive. And when you look at President
Bush, you can see how far we have come. On the same day that this prehistoric
discovery was announced, the respected World Watch Institute in Washington
declared that we only have one generation to save the planet. A million years
getting to this point and we are going to blow it all away in less than a
century. This week the anthropologists were excitedly debating when the first
intelligent humans appeared. But somehow when you look around you can't help
thinking that we're still waiting.

18
January 2003

Football
teams are under all sorts of pressure these days. Peterborough United were
recently told they could no longer use the nickname 'Posh' because that now
belongs to Posh Spice. Next thing you know George Michael will object to Fulham
calling themselves 'the Cottagers'.