There’s
a reason sport and politics shouldn’t mix. Take the Rugby World Cup
for instance. It seems that by loafing in front of a plasma TV to
watch thirty incredible hulks wrestle what looks like an alien’s
head over a white line, I’m able to conveniently forget about
innumerable worrying events cropping up all over the globe. Amazing!
In fact by navigating a path through various sporting tournaments
throughout the year, it’s almost possible for me to blank out that
some people still believe in stoning and nuclear power. My guess is
that if ornithologists actually peered into an ostrich’s hole in
the ground, they’d find a tiny plasma TV showing avian Olympics on
Sky.
Anyhow, there I was a few days ago, head stuck in
the sands of sport, cheering a try and forgetting entirely about the
March of Regress, when a slow motion camera showed that I’d been
cheering a referee’s mistake. The player had slid into touch just
before the ball crossed the line and the ref didn’t call for a
review when he should have.
“Christ,” some feller says beside me, “we
have the technology, use it!”
At
which point, inexplicably, sport and politics mixed in my mind. Even
before a conversion sailed between the giant H of the posts, I
realised we could eradicate the world’s problems by applying
technology to politics and in particular – politicians.
And we wouldn’t need to watch rugby ever again.
Now I sense here, heads of state spluttering in
rage:
President Sarkosy choking on his croissant as he
reads this column in the Élysèe Palace … Putin in the Kremlin
giving his Southern Star a contemptuous smack of the hand
…Interpreters in Beijing trying desperately to calm Hu Jintao as,
having got through the Clonakilty notes, they read these words aloud
to the communist central committee.
“Why apply technology to us?” I hear them wail
in a rake of languages: “Tis not our fault that people believe in
stoning and nuclear power.”
But
my point is this: these folk with the combed hair and fine dentistry
get up on their soapboxes at election time promising us the moon and
stars if we tighten the stringy belts on our trousers and then ten
years later nothing’s been done. In fact, things have only got
worse. Don’t tell me its all down to the intractable nature of the
planet’s predicament – a dearth of probity in politicians has
blighted civilisation since the Ancient Greeks first cast a vote. The
fact is, the kind of people who shin to the top of the greasy pole in
search of power are often interested in nothing more than telling us
one thing and doing another. Often as not they tell us the very
opposite of what they know to be true. By the time we kick them out,
the earth’s problems have snowballed.
Which
brings me back to the rugby. Now I’m not suggesting we send out
national politicians fifteen a side and watch them scrummage and maul
across a rugby pitch as an answer to our social and economic
problems. However symbolically apt it might seem to have opposing
parties wrestling in the mud and kicking each other in the teeth, and
however diverting as a spectacle, (let’s be honest, it would be
more absorbing to watch than any current political programme and you
might find out who was really
up to putting in 80 minutes for their country) it wouldn’t stop
rainforests being felled. No, I’m talking about the way that rugby
uses cutting-edge technology to establish the truth of whether the
alien’s head actually went over the line. In the past, we only had
the ref’s word for it. Now, we can go over it frame by frame in
slow motion from any number of angles and get a pretty good
approximation of the truth.
Why not do the same with our politicians? Where
would the difficulty be in say, strapping lie detectors to
those who hold high office? These contraptions needn’t be huge.
Nowadays they can be micro devices no bigger than a tiepin.
Politicians would be required to wear a fib detector at all times –
it could even be implanted under the skin. A noisy alarm would be set
off whenever the politician told a whopper. One can imagine
transcriptions from Hansard in the UK:
“My Right honourable gentlemen, beep beeeeeep beeeep”.
“On the contrary, if the Right Honourable beeeep beep.”
I know your Sarkozys and Putins and Jintaos might find all manner of
excuses for refusing to wear the contraption. But surely it’s the
same argument that they always give with regard to street
surveillance cameras in cities. As they say, if
you’ve nothing to hide, why would it bother you?
The
advantages for us all are obvious. A question that might have been
put to President Bush such as “Are prisoners being tortured in
Guatanomo Bay,” would be answered “No. Beeep beeeeeeep beeeeeep!”
Or
perhaps, aware that we could see their noses growing, our political
Pinocchios would never transgress in the first place. They might
start acting on world problems instead of filling fertilizer sacks
with cash confetti. All I’m saying is, the technology is there. We
should use it.
