I blame the scapegoats (22 page)

Of
course, with the soldiers now carrying the latest in communications
technology, terrorists will not be their only enemy. They're also going to have
to watch their backs for teenage boys mugging them for their million-pound
digital equipment which they could flog down the pub for a tenner. The computer
packs are specially designed to be light and highly mobile; it's just a shame
that carrying all those enormous manuals is going to slow them down so much.
Hostilities will be delayed for months as combatants search through the weapons
manual looking for the section on 'firing'. Yet the whole point of all this
increased communications software is supposed to be speed. Soon NATO forces
will be able to blow up their own armoured personnel carriers far more quickly
than they have been able to do in the past. The ground forces will be in
constant communication with reconnaissance aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles
and attack helicopters, right up until the moment the computer crashes and then
all the aircraft crash as well.

But of course the test of all this technology
will be the first time that this soldier is on the battlefield face to face
with an enemy gunman. A split second can make the difference between life or
death as he activates his computerized weaponry. But it doesn't take out the
enemy; instead a little reminder wizard appears on screen: 'Click here to
register your Microsoft Anti-terrorist software for great technical support,
free upgrades and special offers on other Microsoft products.' The soldier
frantically clicks the 'register later' icon as enemy bullets fly past his
head. Grenades are now exploding on either side of him, as a smiling little
animated Mr Bomb character bounces up and down on the screen saying, 'Are you
sure you want to register later?'

That's
if the technology works at all, of course. It's one thing to have your printer
refusing to respond when you were hoping to catch the last post. But I'd say
you'd get even more annoyed with modern technology when you are being
surrounded by Taliban gunmen and the computerized missile launcher says, 'Error
in weapon configuration - refer to helpline.' It's at times like this that you
wish you'd sent that guarantee card back to Hewlett Packard.

With
our armed forces increasingly dependent on computer software, it won't be germ
warfare we are worried about but virus warfare. 'Oh look, I've got an e-mail
from someone called Osama - I'll just open that attachment and see what it is!'
says the soldier brightly as the entire NATO communications goes down. Or maybe
the enemy will be closer to home. I can't help worrying that the boys who left
school to become squaddies tended not to be the same boys who were really
brilliant with computers. The nervous brainy kids were forced to avoid all the
tough boys by going along to computer soc. every lunchtime and will have spent
the last fifteen years working their way up through the software industry,
patiently planning their revenge. So when the tattooed meat-head of a squaddie
is stuck in an Iraqi battlefield and has to rely on his computer equipment to
save his life, he'll suddenly find his software freezing as a voice from the
past pops up on the monitor: 'Hello Slugger. Timothy Johnson here, from Form
4B. You probably won't remember that every day for five years you broke my
glasses and threw my violin case on top of the bus shelter. Well, now you are
really going to wish you hadn't. Click here to leave a farewell message on
Enemies Reunited.'

27
July 2002

There
was a major scandal in Wall Street this week when a rogue US corporation was
found
not
to have been fiddling
the books. 'We can't imagine how this has been allowed to happen,' said the
shamefaced auditors. The chief financial officer immediate resigned in disgrace
as it was revealed that the firm's profits were exactly what he'd claimed they
were, with no trace of false accounting or the artificial inflation of share
prices. However, it's thought the chance of this happening in other US
corporations remains very slim.

The
only thing that is surprising about the wave of financial scandals engulfing
America is that everyone is so surprised. Well, who'd have thought it - the
most aggressive capitalists making inexplicably huge profits turn out to have
been cheating! You stop regulating big business and the directors take
advantage to make themselves huge illicit fortunes! And we'd all thought
they'd made those extra billions by doing a paper round every morning before
work.

The most common method of fraud has been to inflate
share prices by artificially exaggerating company profits. Suspicions should
have been raised when the revenue for the last financial year was given by an
eight-year-old boy who excitedly announced the official figure to be a billion,
trillion, gillion, quillion, zillion! Or when the figure at the end of the
annual report had two zeros scrawled on the end in red felt-tip pen.

For a country
obsessed by crime, the Americans are having to learn that criminals come in a
variety of guises. Police officers are now making up for lost time as public
opinion turns against the new hate figures in US society. America's isolated
Accountant community, for many years shunned due to their strange stripy suits
and incomprehensible language, are now being openly persecuted. 'We're not all
fraudsters . . .' implored a spokesman for the accountants. 'In fact, only
three point four per cent in the last fiscal quarter rising in line with
projected forecasts . . .' he went on, but already he seemed to be losing the
journalists' attention. Secret video footage has just been released showing
traffic cops dragging an innocent auditor out of his car and beating him up.
'Thought you could offset projected profit shortfall by excluding capital
outlay, huh, you four-eyed geek?' (punch!). 'Trying to overstate company
revenues by hiding loan repayments eh? God, you pin-stripe punks make me sick
. . .' (kick!).

In the nearby financial district, auditors
reacted angrily, not rioting exactly, but the nearest equivalent for
accountants. Desks were left untidy, computer keyboards were left uncovered by
polythene dust sheets, calculators left switched on, caps left off fountain
pens . . . Witnesses said they had not seen such untidy scenes since the great
double-entry ledger protests of '68.

Now
Crimewatch
ratings
look set to plummet. The only reconstruction so far showed a man sitting at
his desk for a long time in front of a computer. 'Does this jog any memories?'
said the presenter, as millions of viewers rang in to say they had a vague
memory of witnessing a similar scene.

As the stock markets crashed, millions of
ordinary citizens lost their pensions and savings and George W. Bush announced
that he would take tough action to deal with whoever had done so much damage to
American interests. US bombers were despatched to mete out the usual
punishment, but then were swiftly called back when it was explained to the
President that the perpetrators worked in Wall Street and bombing New York
might not go down too well right now.

So then his advisers sat him down and very
slowly explained the nature of modern corporate fraud from start to finish,
finally declaring, 'So you see, Mr President, that's why billions of dollars
have now disappeared.'

'I
understand. So did anyone see the getaway car?' 'No, it wasn't stolen, sir. It
was fraud.'

'So these are counterfeit dollars we're
looking for. Do we have the numbers?'

'Sir,
it's not real money; these are just figures in a computer.'

'Geez, they shouldn't have left the money in
the computer - that's always the first thing these guys steal.'

The
reason that this crisis is so damaging to the President is that this sort of
unfettered capitalism is exactly what the current American administration is
all about. Not only is he the champion of unregulated business, but Enron and
their like also paid for his election campaign. Maybe it was Enron's auditors
who counted up the ballot papers which handed him victory after getting fewer
votes than his opponent. Bush has promised to be tough on these super-rich
fraudsters, so we can expect them to go to prison for the rest of their day.
Because something tells me that America's billionaires will receive less
punishment than an ordinary US citizen would. Of course, wiping out the
pensions and savings for millions of ordinary people is a crime that deserves
the sack. But once they're unemployed, let's just hope they don't make any
false claims for minor social-security payments, because then they'd really be
in trouble.

3
August 2002

Yesterday
cinemas around the country began showing a new horror fdm. In its final
terrifying scene a pretty girl awakes in bed to find herself covered in a
plague of filthy rats. Yes, it's the latest new release from those well-known
purveyors of extreme horror action- the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign.

No
one can accuse them of being at all sensationalist about this. All they are saying
in this new advert is that if you drop litter you'll wake up with rats crawling
all over your face - it's a very reasonable and moderate statement. 'We don't
want to alarm you, but you drop one apple core and huge mutant rodents with
razor-sharp teeth will swarm out of the sewers to gnaw through your skull and
suck out your brains while you sleep.' And the cinema-goers all shrug and spill
another kilo of popcorn all over the floor.

Apparently
the making of this commercial was a rather tense affair for the casting agency
concerned. 'So what's the part?' said the rats as they turned up for
rehearsals. 'Are we the adorably furry pets that comfort the kiddies in the
children's hospital? Or is it a
Stuart Little
type
thing, cute rat with voice-over from Billy Crystal?'

'Er, no, no . . . it's pretty
straightforward. We just wanted you looking a bit dirty, nibbling a discarded
hot-dog.'

An awkward hush fell over the thespian rats.
'So we're playing vermin again, are we?' they said tersely.

'Well, that is sort
of what the advert's about.'

'I see. It's just that as members of the rat
community we do get a bit fed up of being typecast. I mean, we rats do do other
things apart from breed in the sewers and scamper round spreading diseases, you
know.' And the rats stormed off to their trailers to ring their agents, but
then were distracted by some rotting burgers on the way.

This
advert is required because so many people are discarding fast-food cartons that
the rats are coming out of the sewers to feed on leftover McDonald's. So if the
warfarin doesn't kill them then there's always heart disease. Apparently rats
love the meat from fast-food outlets; now it seems they're cannibals as well.
Rats are back as public enemy number one. Britain can no longer be a soft touch
for rats. Politicians are suggesting that rats be confined to secure detention
centres while their claims to be genuine rodents are processed. Others say our
hostility is based on myth and ignorance.

There are now officially 60 million rats in
the UK, and that's just the ones that bothered to return their census forms.
Every year 200 of this number pass on Weil's disease to humans; so, as always,
it's just a small minority who give all the others a bad name. In fact, British
rats would have done well to fire their PR company years ago. When fleas gave
everyone the bubonic plague, their spin doctor put out a story saying it was
all the rats' fault and the brand 'rat' never really recovered. In any case the
creatures involved were the Black Rat
(Rattus rattus
-
it was late on Friday afternoon at the rodent naming office), which was later
displaced by the Brown Rat
(Rattus norvegicus
-
named after the first Stranglers album). But still all these years later it is
presumed that the only good rat is a dead rat. Britain's domestic cat community
has been censured for failing to do their bit to keep down the vermin
population. At a press conference this week a spokesman for the cats seemed
unmoved by the criticism. 'Yeah, what of it?' he shrugged before going back to
sleep.

Meanwhile,
increasingly cruel ways are being used to poison, trap and eradicate rats and
nobody cares. Where are the fifty-something women who never had kids, weeping
outside the Ministry? Where are the balaclava-clad hard men of the Animal
Liberation Front, ready to burn down the warfarin factory? The British public
have studied this issue very carefully and have concluded that any way you look
at it, rats are just not as cute as dolphins and baby seals. Cruelty against
fluffy doe-eyed animals is one thing - but smelly disgusting rats, well, sorry,
you had it coming to you, I'm afraid.