Go forth

This is very sobering. Go and have a look before reading any further.

It’s difficult to think of a more stark way to demonstrate one side of the costs of the Iraq war/occupation/screw-up. If you’ve got sound on your computer, you’ll hear the gentle clicks that signify each death, like a manual typewriter putting a full-stop on the end of a person’s life. I’m a little disturbed that what this most reminds me of is the game Defcon, where similar points and expanding circles on a stylized map signify the impact of nuclear missiles.

Can you imagine, however, what this map would be like if it also included the deaths of Iraqi people? We’re talking estimates of between 600,000 and over a million so far. A proportion of these are ‘indirect’ (but no less important) deaths - if a hospital is destroyed, someone who might have lived will not now be able to get the necessary treatment, or if fresh water supplies are disrupted then diseases become prevalent.

Include these on the map, and that irregular tick of each death would become a cacophony: the sound of a swarm of insidious locusts. If you’ve ever seen time-lapse film of mould spores growing, I imagine that’s what the dots on the map would become like, growing and spreading until all the major cities and villages became clearly defined by the human cost of this war.

I don’t know what should be done about the situation in Iraq. I’m horrified by how people were mislead and lied to by the government as to the reasons for the war - that whole mess over the WMD claims. But the invasion cannot now be taken back. The Western world can’t just swoop in, oust a dictator and dismantle a corrupt government, and then disappear off again into the sunset expecting everything to revert to a happy ending - those are the actions of a superhero in a cheap child’s comic. Instead, this is something that is going to take years, decades, or more to resolve, whatever happens. And that map is going to keep on ticking away until that special consensual hallucination we call ’stability’ begins to develop.

So then, Network Rail has been fined a record £14 million for screwing up rail maintenance over Christmas.

Now let’s get this straight. Network Rail is having its usual host of difficulties taking care of the tracks that are generally considered fairly important for trains, and trains are of course pretty important for getting trainspotters off the streets where they’d probably indulge their odd compulsions by collecting guns before one day cracking and heading off to work with a bagful of heavy weaponry.

Obviously then, the answer is to take away the money that Network Rail would use to carry out that maintenance because, as we all know, having less money to invest is guaranteed to mean a better service all round. If we took away all their money, just think how absolutely amazing the train networks would become. I expect we’d get a hundred trains an hour, shooting along tracks as smooth as buttered mercury.

And taking away money is much easier than looking into the problem, working out efficient solutions and employing people to do the job properly. I’ll even help them with suggestions on how to get along with even less money. For example, why don’t we convert the whole system to monorail? That’d mean they’d only have half the amount of track to maintain, instantly halving costs and freeing up cash to pay some more fines. Soon the system will be so efficient that all the funding given to Network Rail will be instantly bounced back again to the government, save for a modest fee of around 20 percent to pay for the bureaucrats needed to think up and administer those fines.

Hmm, hold on a minute. Bounced back to the government? What do you mean, ‘back’? Well, here’s the thing. It’s not a big thing, so let’s not dwell on it too much. Barely even important, really. It’s just that Network Rail is funded by…er…the government, although they are quite keen to give the impression that this isn’t the case. And the government is funded by…um…everyone who pays taxes. So this £14 million of fines is just taxpayers’ money that the government gave to Network Rail, and is now taking back again, less all the thousands of pounds needed to pay for the civil servants and paperwork.

It’s a bit like a lovely merry-go-round of taxes, except that this particular merry-go-round happens to be run by some rather creative minions of Satan who are making it slowly spiral inwards, compressing all the cash into a massive black hole comprised of nothingness and terrible rail transport systems.

Genius like this makes my head hurt.