Ruse

The road trip continues. Newcastle: cold, grey, uninspiring. No wonder Billy Elliot wanted to get out of here... Fuck, even I'd take up ballet.

A while ago at work, somebody asked me what I was thinking about. This was at a time when I was in a particularly ironic mode of thought, and disenchanted by my perception that nobody at the office quite got me, I answered "Oh, just, basically whether a teleological theory of ethics is necessarily incompatible with the tenets of the world's major monotheistic religions." Childish, pretentious, contrived... But funny. At least for me.

At face value, this is in fact an absurd question, which only serves to make me even more despicable. It's as if I'm saying "I'm just wondering whether two plus one necessarily makes three." But in a foreign language. I really can be an absolute arsehole from time to time.

I thought of this absurd question again this morning as I watched a BBC interview with Jack Straw and Condoleezza Rice. Obviously, the two were asked about Iraq, and they replied with the kind of sound bytes and carefully-phrased policy quotations we have all come to expect.

They talked about Bush and the common desire to give people the gifts of freedom and democracy... So many questions ran through my mind, very few of them original. When the Iraq War broke out I was decidedly neutral, hesitating to climb aboard any of the vociferous bandwagons and placing a great deal of hope in the Bramerican leaders having some benign reason to start a war, a reason none of the public would find out until X years later when the information (I wanted to use the word intelligence but my fingers actively refused) was de-classified. How naive I seem to have been.

My (alcohol-ridden, slightly confused) thought pattern this morning ended with the conclusion that Dubya is the sum of the inconsistency I was allegedly pondering that day in the office... It went something like this:

Is Bush really a religious man? If so, how can he justify the inevitable violence and death toll of the war and its seemingly never-ending hangover? Is this therefore a case of "you can't make an omlette without cracking a few eggs"? This ends-justify-the-means explanation - should he choose to offer it (perhaps he already has?) - would make Bush a teleologist. But what type of teleologist would he be? Surely not any kind of conventional utilitarian - can he really suggest that this war is, globally speaking, utility-enhancing, without pissing a pint of oil down the inside of his trousers? Can you enforce democracy? Who decides that a nation should convert from one political system (albeit a brutal dictatorship) to another? Who decides those of the world's powers which can have nuclear capability and those which can't? What the fuck is the U.N. there for?

As I have said - these thoughts are by no means original: I and many others have been posing these questions for months, if not years. But the answers to all of these questions still leave an awful taste in my mouth and I think I have lost all faith in our lacklustre interpretation of democracy. It seems that no matter which political system we try to introduce, human greed and self-interest infect and eventually monopolise it. What was it that Milan Kundera wrote about the fathers of Communism tearing their eyes out if they saw how it was implemented?