Цитаты из книги Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse

The question the kids of the future will be trying to answer is: “What caused all that suffering?” As a former lazy history student myself, I know that the trick here is to look for the point in the debate where someone says, “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” and then go back to the previous assertion. The things that historical events are a bit more complicated than are, in my experience, also the things that they basically are. Proper controversy is when one historian says “This is caused by Thing A,” and another says “Shut up, you! It was caused by Thing B.” But when one is saying “It was Thing A,” and the other says “It’s more complicated than that,” I reckon we pretty much have an answer.

The Russians have their answer: bare-chested aggression is what floats their boat. The merciless sturgeon-eyed tyrant. The Russians don’t want to vote for the kind of sap who wouldn’t rig the election if they didn’t. After centuries of dysfunctional relationships with their leaders, they’ve given up resisting: the fact is they’re attracted to a strong man, even when he slaps them about a bit. The British are fussier. Of late, the closest we’ve come to electing a genocidal maniac was probably Tony Blair. And, as psychopaths go, he was pretty low-key – he kept all the killing abroad, the sound principle on which the British empire was founded. Very much your iron-hand-in-a-velvet-glove type, rather than the kind of guy who likes to be photographed swimming amid bear carcasses. I like to think of him slipping silently into hotel rooms by night, dressed in black, seeing by the light of his teeth, to leave poisoned boxes of chocolates by opinion-formers’ bedsides.

A recent newspaper advertisement for Ryanair has a big picture of Robert Mugabe shaking his fist, under the headline: “Here’s EasyJet’s New Head of Punctuality”. This sends out a confused message. I’m no Zimbabwe expert but I’m fairly confident that the main charge levelled against Mugabe isn’t one of unpunctuality. It’s no more meaningful an insinuation than saying that Kim Jong-il is Virgin Atlantic’s new head of catering or that Mel Gibson has been taken on by Thomas Cook to handle its IT. And while Mugabe’s an evil man, there’s no reason to think that, had history panned out differently, he mightn’t have made quite an effective “head of punctuality” for an airline. If what people say about Mussolini and trains is to be believed, a bit of murderous megalomania doesn’t go amiss when it comes to getting transport services to pull their socks up.

Who can fail to have been impressed by the spectacle of President Obama’s inauguration? I’ll tell you who – the Queen. I bet she sat there watching it on an unpretentious four-by-three portable, while she sorted dog biscuits into separate Tupperware, muttering: “It’s bullshit, Philip! No carriages, no horses, no crown – it just looks like a bunch of businesspeople getting in and out of cars. It’s as if the Rotary Club’s taken over a whole country. And the new one’s not even the son of one of the previous ones, unlike last time. I thought they were coming round to our way of thinking at last.”