I blame the scapegoats (35 page)

'Well, um, look, I know it sounds outlandish,
but they kill us because, well, they like to eat our flesh . . .'

At
which point the other cows and sheep fall about laughing and shake their heads
in pity at this demented individual who has to bring politics into everything.
'Yeah, sure thing, Trotsky. And I suppose they like to rip off our skins and
wear them on their own bodies as well?'

But
of course the reality gets worse than that. The biggest growth area in the
British meat market is for halal meat; that is, meat from sheep and chickens
that have been ritually slaughtered by having their throats cut until they
bleed to death. This is not a pleasant sight and a visit to the halal abattoir
is not recommended for the infants school trip. But now a government-funded
committee is expected to conclude that traditional Islamic methods of
slaughter are inhumane. The timing of this judgement could not be better,
because clearly Britain's Muslims are nowhere near alienated enough at the
moment.

'Okay, so the UK has supported Israel, bombed
Iraq, elected BNP councillors - how about outlawing halal meat as well?'

'Hmm, yes, that'll go
down well at the mosque.'

This moral conundrum goes right to the heart
of what it means to live in a multicultural society. There are many things that
British WASPs do not understand about other religious traditions. Like where in
the Koran does it state that Muslims must have ornate gold tissue-box holders
in the back of the Datsun? Or, when the Jewish scriptures sensibly forbade the
eating of pork or prawns, why didn't God add the codicil 'until you invent the
fridge'? But this impending report from the Farm Animals Welfare Council looks
set to cause well-meaning
Guardian
readers
to implode with liberal angst.

'So you are against
the traditions of Islam, are you?'

'No, of course not,
the kids learn all about Eid at school. . .'

'Oh, so you're in
favour of cruelty to animals then?'

'Er no, we're against
fox hunting . . .'

'But it's okay if
it's done by Muslims?'

'Urn, yes, I mean no, look I must dash, I
promised the kids chicken curry for tea. Free range, obviously . . .'

Until
now I've always wondered who those wet people were that always answered 'Don't
know' to every survey. 'Are you part of the twenty per cent of the population
that always answers "Don't know" to everything?' 'Er, dunno.' 'Do you
think some people are perhaps too lacking in confidence to offer any opinions
on current affairs?' 'Er, dunno . . .' Suddenly this seems like rather an attractive
camp to be in. Whoever has to make the final decision on this one will cause
enormous offence to one group or other. Of all the topics guaranteed to get
the British public writing angry letters, the most potent are religion and
cruelty to animals; so maybe this is all an elaborate scam designed to save the
Post Office.

There are examples where opposing moralities
clash when I would not be so hesitant. If a child was likely to die because its
parents were

Jehovah's
Witnesses and were refusing a blood transfusion on religious grounds, I'd
argue, as sensitively as possible, that the state should step in and overrule
that particular religious doctrine (oh, and tell the parents to get back to the
Planet Quargon). But halal meat is more blurred, partly because however the
creature is slaughtered we're still talking about the moment of death, when
surely it is the farm animal's quality of life up to that point which is the
bigger issue. We cannot call ourselves a multi-faith society and then only
tolerate the aspects of other religions that match our Western liberal values.
Halal slaughter sounds horrible and cruel, and when you think about it almost
enough to make you have the vegetable biriyani. But many animals are in fact
stunned before the blood is drained away to produce what Muslims maintain is
the most hygienic meat available. If we are to be genuinely tolerant and
inclusive, we have to be extremely certain before we go dictating our
mix-and-match morality to other cultures about what they eat or how they prepare
their food. I believe we should let sleeping dogs lie. Even in Korean
restaurants.

20
May 2003

The
problem of fathers who don't spend enough time with their families is an issue
throughout the animal kingdom. The worker bee, for example, spends all his time
out with his mates supping pollen, while the poor queen bee is stuck inside
producing around 100,000 eggs a week. No doubt when she was younger she had all
these plans about travelling and starting a career, but then one day she had an
egg, and then three seconds later she had another one, and suddenly she found
herself trapped in the hive, feeling fat and fed up and stuffing her face with
royal jelly all day.

After
billions of years of evolution, however,
Homo sapiens
has
finally reached the stage where the male is occasionally prepared to get more
involved in the care of the little ones. Some of the more advanced men relish
this opportunity, but for most it is something they do reluctantly and as
infrequently as possible. This sub-species is known as the Sunday Dad. He
spends time with his kids once a week and, according to my wife, even then he
has an ulterior motive. 'Typical male!' she says. 'He's only looking after them
to get out of clearing up after lunch.'

You
see these Sunday Dads looking lost in public parks, pushing the baby's buggy
with only one hand to give the impression that it's not actually theirs, that
they're simply looking after it for someone. Just as less socially aware dog
owners pretend not to notice when the Great Dane on the end of their lead
leaves a pile of dog mess that can be seen by passing aircraft, the Sunday Dad
will try to make out that those noisy children clutching his leg and shouting
'Daddy!' are nothing to do with him. Sometimes his determination to ignore his
kids reaches heroic proportions. He may be sitting in a ball pit, with his
offspring screaming and throwing brightly coloured plastic balls at his head,
but he will still give the impression that this is a perfectly normal place for
an adult to go and read the Sunday papers. Wherever he is with his children,
his mind is somewhere else.

Of
course what he's really afraid of is embarrassment. His affected detachment is
his way of appearing cool. For if he was to throw himself fully into playing
with his kids, the rest of the world might see that he's not actually very good
at it. When it came to learning how to deal with the children his wife somehow
seemed to have a head start on him. This made it easier to take a back seat,
and so the gap in their childcare skills grew even wider. At a dinner table he
always sat wherever it would be impossible for him to get out when the children
needed seeing to. During the night he pretended to be asleep when his wife went
to the crying baby for the fourth time. And now he might try to justify all
this to himself by imagining that he works very hard; but deep down he knows
that it's easier to be rushing about looking important than sitting in a
freezing cold playground being bored out of your head pushing a swing for the
four thousandth time.

It is often the case that the more successful
a man is at work, the less use he is in the home. He gets so wrapped up in his
job, he forgets to give a second thought to what his wife and children are up
to. When Neil Armstrong touched down on the moon, he said to Mission Control,
'The Eagle has landed! Oh and Houston, will you call my wife and tell her I
won't be home for dinner tonight.' The career highflier who works long hours
is also used to getting his own way and having everyone do as he says. But this
cuts no ice with his two-year-old and so the Sunday Dad gets a bit of a shock
when his toddler lies down on the floor, kicking and screaming and shouting
'No!' to every suggestion or demand. Maybe his secretary should try that
sometimes.

As they get older the kids soon learn that
Dad doesn't really have the faintest idea what they're not allowed, and so
he'll find himself coming back from the shops and then getting all defensive
with his wife: 'Well, how was I to know that the kids aren't allowed flamethrowers?'
The only other shopping that the Sunday Dad has to do with the kids is choosing
a present for Mummy's birthday. Every year he will suddenly realize that he has
left it too late and that the only place still open is the petrol station.
That's when he can be spotted dragging the kids around the Texaco mini-mart
trying to decide if Mummy would prefer a packet of barbecue briquettes, some
Castrol GTX or a polythene-wrapped copy of
Penthouse.

Sunday Dads are physically absent six days of
the week and mentally absent for all seven. But rather than try to change their
worker bee husbands, perhaps their wives ought to look at the example of
another insect - the praying mantis. The female of this species has learned to
tackle the problem of the absent male head on. She chooses the father of her
children, mates with him just the once and then eats him. Apparently this
approach goes quite a long way in tempering the resentment than can build up in
a marriage. My wife, however, still feels it does not go far enough. 'Typical
male,' she said. 'He's not there when it's time to clear up after dinner
either.'

22
May 2003

Millions
of men in Britain are getting private e-mail messages suggesting they might
want to have their penises enlarged. 'How did they know?' they are thinking.
'Who told them? Was it Janice in accounts after last year's Christmas party?
That's not fair, I was drunk and it was cold on that fire escape . . .' Of
course part of them suspects this is just another bit of 'spam', the
unsolicited junk e-mail that is swamping the net, but they're not going to
shout about it just in case. Perpetrators of these scams must depend on this
sort of embarrassment. If the operation went horribly wrong, you're not going
to go on BBC's
Watchdog
and
say, 'Okay, it used to be small but at least it worked. But now, Kate, just bok
at what a botch job they made of it. . .' And so unscrupulous businesses have
continued to bombard our electronic in-boxes with offers of Viagra, free
passwords to internet porn sites and the offer of tickets for the new Cliff
Richard musical.

Spam is the small-ads section of the global
village newspaper. And yesterday Yahoo predicted that soon it will overtake the
number of normal e-mails flying around cyberspace. Just as the small ads of a
local rag reveal what its readership is really thinking about (Answer: Sex and
Money), so the mosl common junk e-mail messages offer hard-core pornography and
confidential money transfers out of Nigeria. It's hard to know which is more
depressing, the baseness of human nature that this reveals or the stupidity of
all the greedy people who fall for these scams. 'Wow, what a fantastic offer! I
transfer $200 to this overseas bank account and they pay off all my credit card
debts! I can't see how this could possibly go wrong!' If I want to spend
hundreds of pounds for absolutely nothing in return, I'll stick to holistic
healing, thank you very much.

Of course the problem of unsolicited mail is
nothing new. When the Penny Post started in 1840, masked highwaymen would hold
up the mail coach and go through all the letters to see what goodies they might
steal. 'Ha-harrr! What do we have here, Black Bess? Hmm, offers to apply for a
new type of credit card and forty-seven Boden catalogues. Damn!' And now, in
the twenty-first century, electronic mail involves so many hours' sorting
through all the junk that frankly you'd be better off popping that letter into
a pillar box. Computer programmes have been designed to randomly mix letters
and numbers which are then combined with Internet Service Providers. For example,
there's bound to be a
[email protected]
;
in fact, I think this was the very first e-mail account ever set up. And then
Bill just sat at his computer for a few weeks feeling vaguely disappointed
every time he checked his e-mails.

It's
estimated that spam currently costs businesses
£9
billion a year, although I can never quite understand how
they work these figures out. The presumption is that if people weren't wasting
their time deleting e-mails, they'd be hard at work increasing company profits.
In fact, they'd only be wasting their time with some other mindless computer
diversion, like playing Minesweeper or entering their own name on Google and
then being slightly indignant that there are lots of other David Smiths around
the world.

However,
not content with being at war with drugs and terrorism, America has now
declared war on spam as well. Last month the state of Virginia (home of AOL)
outlawed the sending of unsolicited e-mails, making it a Class 6 felony
carrying a five-year prison term (or ten years for anyone who on hearing the
word 'spam' starts to recite the Monty Python sketch). The new law also gives
the state the right to seize the assets of these companies, which is how the
Governor explained all those boxes of Viagra that his secretary found in the
filing cabinet. There remains the slight problem that the internet is no
respecter of national borders or regional laws, but if those Russian gangsters
did ever decide to move to Virginia and go public about their business practices
they could be in serious trouble. Opponents claim that this law is in breach of
America's sacred First Amendment, 'Congress shall make no law abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to send out
thousands of e-mails an hour offering live web-cams of group sex featuring
pre-op transsexuals.' But other US states and EU governments look set to follow
and then they will tell all the computer users of the world about their new
legal rights and these new protections. And we'll see this historic message in
our in-box and think, 'Well, that looks dodgy, I'm deleting that one for
starters . . .'