The Lighthouse
A watch on events
Rose Galt
Getting to grips with the reality of a shooting war in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century is difficult enough, but I find understanding the causes and apportioning the blame even more bewildering. On one hand we have the ‘plucky little Georgia’ near-consensus, particularly resonant on the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and on the other the ineluctable fact that Georgia started it by invading the breakaway province of South Ossetia. I suspect that however erudite and in-depth the expert analyses swamping the weekend quality press may be, what will decide people’s response in our celebrity-ridden, PR-driven, photo-opportunity world, will have as much to do with perception as hard fact. So let’s look at the two protagonists. On the one hand Mikheil Saakashivili, the tall and handsome, Columbia-educated, English-speaking president of a small, democratic nation seeking ties with the west and on the other, Vladimir Putin, monoglot Prime Minister (but really still in charge) of the mighty Russia, ex-KGB, seeking perhaps to re-establish the former hegemony of the USSR and with a face like a rat. It should not surprise any of us that, even without the efforts of the Brussels-based PR firms that both Tblisi and Moscow employ, Georgia is winning hands down.
Once again the Prince of Wales has leapt into the breach with a less than temperate attack on GM technology as representing a bigger threat to the world than global warming. He may be right, but his remarks on this and on many other matters of controversy make me uneasy. Setting aside my Republican tendencies and my natural sympathies with a 60-year-old man waiting for his mother to die before he can have a real job, I question his credentials in this area. What, I wonder, is the difference between this non-scientist’s spluttering pontifications on GM food and the global warning deniers to whom Channel 4 last year gave far too much air-time? The absence of any consideration of the role that might be played by GM food in a world lurching towards over-population and starvation must give cause for concern. Here as elsewhere the retreat from rationality and evidence-based science in favour of a David Icke-type New Age lunacy is deeply worrying. No wonder Professor Richard Dawkins is so alarmed about the ignorance of teenagers about science in general and Darwin and evolution in particular. And that’s even before one considers whether or not to give credence to anything said by a man whose valet puts the toothpaste on his brush.
It was with delight as well as a touch of schadenfreude that I followed the tale of Bernann, aka Joyce, McKinney and her cloned pit bull puppies. It turned out that she was a fugitive from both US and UK justice, having in 1977 fled bail after being charged with abducting a Mormon minister in Essex, imprisoning him in a cottage in Devon and forcing him to have sex with her on the not unreasonable grounds that she wanted to have his child. I so remember the case – who wouldn’t? – which deflected our attention from the Grunwick picket line, galloping inflation and the death of Elvis. The question must be: why would this woman, who has had other brushes with the law, court international publicity by telling the world about her puppies? Did she at heart want to be found out? For all readers and pet lovers either gratified or horrified by the five-fold cloning of Booger, the latest news is that Ms McKinney has left Korea without the puppies. Maybe the laboratory took the view that she was not a fit mother for its creations.
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