Search This Blog

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

I Have Seen the Future, and it Is Idiocy

Dalrymple: I Have Seen the Future, and it Is Idiocy
... The contrast between the authorities’ alacrity on one hand in preventing innocent filming for a matter of a few minutes (the policeman said authorization was necessary because it might cause a disturbance, and, being kind, I refrained from laughing), and on the other their slow response to a nasty incident that might have ended in murder, was emblematic of the modern state’s capacity to get everything exactly the wrong way around, to ascribe importance to trivia and to ignore the important. There are, of course, many more employment opportunities in trivia, since there is much more that is trivial in the world than is important.
...
It often seems, then, as if modern state authorities live in a looking-glass world: What normal people regard as important is for them of no importance, while what they regard as of supreme importance normal people regard as of no importance. For them the respectable are suspect and the suspect respectable. A tweed jacket is a sign of menace, while a broken bottle is a sign of harmless intent. ...

1 comments:

B. Prokop said...

"I received a parking ticket within sixty seconds, a miracle of efficiency"

I can beat that. In New York City a few years back, I got a parking ticket in the time it took me to pull over and allow a passenger out. "No stopping!" I was told.

The common thread in the two stories? Big cities. I think such occurrences are almost certainly inevitable in any densely populated area, no matter what system you live under.