Giving the Axis of Evil Another Spin (1/5) by The Silver Fox

(1/5), (2/5), (3/5), (4/5), (5/5).

While most people doubtless saw their festive holidays rocked by the latest cataclysmic revelations on the annual bonanza of doom that is the Eastenders Christmas episode, one or two of us may have been more put off of our turkey sandwiches by the far more disturbing developments that developed so disturbingly in the real world. This - perhaps unusually - is not to criticise those who are more preoccupied with the fictional doings of RADA-trained Cockneys and their ilk; I've long since abandoned any hope of anything being different, after all (besides, from what I did glean from a brief glance, it was quite intense stuff, what with Bradley finding out about his moody, dough-faced girlfriend strumping his pater and all).

Rather, it was a way of ... I was placing global events in a more familiar context in order to ... Ah, fuck it: they're shit-witted, parochial scum whose apathy in the face of our world's Armageddon-bound hayride is as baffling as it is revolting.

And yet, are those of us who have followed the coverage of Benazir Bhutto's assassination likely to be any more informed for all our diligent efforts? As foreign correspondents of every stripe rushed from the carnage, hitting their speed-dials and yelling "hold the front page!" into their mobiles, so too were a battery of analysts, experts, spokesmen et al gearing up for a long, drawn-out shitfight. And what has the harvest been? According to those in the know, those who skip through the corridors of power with the same ease and familiarity as a playground hopscotch champ, somebody was definitely responsible for Ms Bhutto's death: move the fuck over, Monsieur Poirot.

Personally, I lost pretty much all faith in "experts" when I saw a cat on TV who was once described as "a leading xenobiologist." For those of you who aren't aware, xenobiology is the name given to the study of extraterrestrial life forms - or, to put it another way, something that nobody knows anything about (apologies to Roswell freaks out there, but I doubt this bloke I saw was present at the autopsy, and he didn't look the type of character that Uncle Sam would allow within probing distance of any silicon-based digestive systems they may have yanked out).

Given the ostensible lack of any empirical information, surely it's reasonable to assume that this "science" is largely a matter of speculation and extrapolation, isn't it? Thus, in order to be a "leading xenobiologist," one simply has to be plausible when one avers that the dominant life form on Jupiter is - likely as not - a race of highly-intelligent carnivores that look like enormous purple shoes and communicate through genital odours. What guarantees do we have then, that the pundits who have been raking through the minimal hard evidence of the matter, are any more informed?

Continued ......next page (2/5)

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