The 2011 genii

“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls
The cyclist will probably spit in your face!”
From Doonyadari by Bachchoo
The first line of V.S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River is, “The world is what it is”. A pretentious critic could easily pause at his/her reading of the novel and reflect that th

is opening sentence, like Charles Dickens’s first line of A Tale of Two Cities — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” — incorporates a whole world view. Naipaul’s statement is tantamount to a rejection of ideological or religious models for the world.
He is telling the reader that his vision of the world is literally what’s in view — what he sees. It’s not the ideologue’s vision of neat divisions: believers and infidels; exploited and the exploiters; Aryans and Jews etc. Neither is it the religious view which attributes apples falling to earth, floods in Pakistan and tsunamis in the Indian ocean to the will or indifference of a supreme being.
To me Naipaul’s sentence seems to mean we ought to take things as they actually are and not impose our wishes on them but struggle along with reality and the world’s meanness as we find it.
(End of pretentious critic’s analysis.)
Being asked to say what I don’t want happening or being in 2011 is going against the grain of my accepting the world being what it is.
I started reading newspapers at a very early age, because I would fetch them and spread them out on the veranda table for my grandfather and pretend I was him and leaf through them.
At that age I didn’t understand the difference between my expressed opinions and an editorial in a national newspaper. I marvelled at the pomposity of some character sitting in Mumbai or Delhi telling Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru what he should do. Even more wondrous was that some editorials ventured into telling the American government how to react to something the Soviet Union had done. It was much later that I realised that these editors were not vain fantasists but imbued with the traditional conviction that this was their job, that editors led the opinions of the masses. Fourth estate stuff.
Editorial wishes for 2011 would include pious ideas of universal peace and the abolition of poverty and deliberate murder. But in thinking about what one doesn’t want one inevitably begins to invent the means by which this abolition can take place and one thinks of what one does want. Wanting night abolished would mean wanting eternal day — though that particular is not on my list. I like sleeping and doing (some) other things in the dark.
Now the elegant and talented editors who commission and control this column want such a wish list from me, but even they must know that the good fairies come in twos and threes and the powers of the genii of the lamp, summoned by rubbing — at which I have some skill — are restricted.
So, like the boy who made his third wish the wish to have an infinite number of wishes, I will restrict myself to three, but cheat a bit:
In 2011, I wish that a new age of reason would begin: No mass murders through suicide bombings, no boo goo about a world beyond what is and, therefore, no compulsion to commit atrocities to no palpable end.
This doesn’t mean a suspension of the fight against exploitation, inequality and nasty or reductive capitalism — only against doing it in the name of great and lesser Satans. See things for what they are. The world is what it is.
And then the plea for this new rationality includes a stop-in-your-tracks signal for the global warming bandwagon which is making billions of dollars, pounds and euros out of faulty or incomplete science. We now have an international cartel of “scientists” and “sustainable industries” dedicated to grabbing the millions of dollars available from governments. The new alterative-power-source industry lobby, more pernicious and persistent than any petro-lobby, relies on falsifying or suppressing results and basing vast international statistical surveys on faulty fundamental premises: tell your computer that 2 + 2 is 32 and your entire science goes wonky.
The globe may be getting warmer. It’s very cold in London today and has been for the last two weeks. The north-east of the USA is deluged by unprecedented snow storms. Lots of cooling going on. I am aware that the warming-wallahs claim that cooling is part of warming, that cold means it’s hot and there are scientific precedents for that sort of paradoxical statement. It is still not scientifically clear that man-made carbon dioxide output is responsible for climate change. More and more scientific evidence emerges to indicate it is not. This doesn’t mean that carbon dioxide is good for you or that fumes from petrol should choke the cities, or that whales should be slaughtered for blubber. Just let’s determine what’s true and not be led by paid self-interested lobbies. Objective, sceptical science above lobby interest in 2011!
And then there’s the final request to the genii but this is very particular and personal. I would like the traffic and parking laws of Britain to be relaxed. For instance, there should be no random breathalysing of drivers. It should be restricted to those who commit an offence — driving through red lights etc. There is no evidence whatsoever that random breathalysing prevents accidents, though I admit it would be difficult to devise any experiment that gives us any significant result.
Then there’s the parking. Britain’s councils have a fascistic policy and have colonised every bit of space with red and white lines and specialist lanes, in what is nominally a free country, to hound the honest driver and impose draconian punishment on those whose tyres have crossed even by a centimetre, some fabricated pavement boundary or double white line. I have fallen into these cunning traps of the Diabolical Parking Satan several times this year and paid hundreds of pounds in fines for fear of being jailed, deported, extraordinarily rendered, water-boarded, subjected to the methods of the Rumsfeld Institute of Electrical Correction and heaven knows what else. No! Enough is enough! Death to parking regulations in 2011 and forever!