This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 25/05/15
We're All Foxed
Sunday's letters page in the Independent contained a contribution which jolted me back in my seat.
(It's here: the third letter down)
Written by Mr Peter Booker of Northumberland, it states:
"Sport? On one side a pack of 20 or 30 well-fed hounds, on the other a solitary fox, living on its wits in a hostile environment, trying to bring up a family and often going hungry. If the hounds win they get to tear apart a fox, and if they lose - nothing. For the fox, to lose is to die, to win - live until the next hunt. People get on horseback, in fancy dress, to ride across other people's land in the hope of seeing a fox torn to shreds. And they call it "sport"."
I was transfixed because in its entirety it offers the perfect illustration of what many of us know has gone wrong in our world in the last forty years. Just consider:
- A pack of well-fed animals who have been bred to do only one thing, namely to be unconscionably rapacious towards other creatures (and at the same time, as a result of inbreeding, being spectacularly dull of wit)
- Their prey are creatures living a paw-to-mouth existence, just managing (if they're lucky) to get by from day to day preventing their families from falling into starvation
- If the predators succeed in their alloted task, their lusts are sated by tearing something - someone - else's life to shreds
- If however they fail, there are no negative consequences for them, as they will continue to be indulged by their owners
- They are constantly egged on by a braying mob on their high horses - some of them with highly suspect dress-sense, others tugging their forelocks respectfully to those whom they have been taught from infancy are The Truly Great And Good - urging them ever more savagely and viciously into the fray against those deemed to be a threat to The Established Order™, or simply 'vermin', and
- They call it "politics".
I think that Mr Booker has delineated a near-perfect metaphor for the way in which our 'society' has been ordered (and ordered around) since about 1976, and I congratulate him on it.
