A friend emails me: 'Bryan, I turned to your blog thinking YOU of all people would have commented on the extraordinary absence of comment on the craven sucking-up to Ahmadinejad and his cronies displayed by the clearly Stockholm-syndromed Iranian 15. What on earth is going on? These are Marines, for chrissakes. Surely one of them would have had the gumption to say 'fuck you very much for kidnapping me'. I think we should be told.'
I agree but was holding back until our sailors were safe. Their abject compliance is, indeed, a mystery. Would they, if Ahmadinejad had suggested it, have taken part in a special Iranian edition of Big Brother in which a TV audience could vote on who should be released? It would have been a smart move for President Anagram, appealing both to his own electorate and to the sense of fun of Britain's tele-proles. I leave to your imagination what would have happened to the 'winner'. One further point: why were they suddenly dressed in bad suits? Possibly, this was a clever attempt to make the shabby Anagram looked well turned out, but who knows?
Thursday, April 05, 2007
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
President 'Shabby Anagram'
ReplyDeleteI love it! At last, a better name for him than the usual jokes about dinner jackets.
I agree with everything you've said here, but having watched their return, I wonder who does the media management the best. The sailors looked less free on home soil than they did in Tehran.
Bryan: FYI, comments to the post below this one are inaccesible by clicking on "#," "comments," or the post title in the "Recent Posts" frame.
ReplyDeleteGuess after debrief yesterday we get a glimpse on their behaviour while in Iran - their reality was far from what we saw! Where is Baudiliard now to explain how for all of us they were together and supporting one another when actually they were not allowed to talk to each other, even when eating.
ReplyDeleteAnd clearly someone said something below that we should not see! Wonder what?
Hah! I would love to see you armchair grunts at the mercy of the Brit-loathing IRG for a couple of weeks. (Actually, I wouldn't.) They are the pros, and got the job done.
ReplyDeleteThe hysterical reactions of all these armchair pundits with their bruised egos seem to be the real casualties of 'Shabby Anagram'.
Welcome to the post-colonial real world that the services have to live in.
I must be one of those parochial Yanks. I thought we were the only ones who, from afar, blow ourselves up with rage because hostages failed to act with the resolve that we would have displayed had we been there.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
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