A few days ago I was thinking that I would like to post something uplifting on Big Government. After all, there is plenty going on right now which is wrong or ludicrous, but perhaps that makes it especially important to focus on what we have to be grateful for in America. Sadly, the best way I can think of to do that is to tell you a few stories about what is wrong and ludicrous in my country, Britain- home of the Magna Carta and the Mother of Parliaments. So here are some stories of common, everyday British madness which I hope will make you feel more optimistic about the USA.

1) From Surrey Today:

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.

“I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.”

The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.

In his statement, he said: “I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.

“I didn’t know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him.

“At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall.”

Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.

Reader, try to fathom what kind of country punishes a man for doing his civic duty, what kind of idiots sit on a jury that takes twenty minutes to sentence him, what kinds of imbeciles framed this law.

Do you feel better about America yet?

2) From the Daily Telegraph, a heart warming tale from Watford where only council-vetted “play rangers” may monitor youngsters in two adventure areas while parents must watch from outside a perimeter fence:

The rules have been imposed at Harwoods and Harebreaks adventure recreation grounds.

Activities on the half acre sites include a skateboard half-pipe, a zip line, rope swings, den building, arts and crafts, plus a wide range of indoor and outdoor sports activities.

Play rangers currently patrol both parks – which are specifically for children aged five to 15 – and are fully qualified and have been cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau.

Parents already have to ‘register’ their child on arrival at the free playgrounds so staff have their contact details in the event of an accident.

But now only those who have been CRB vetted by the council can enter the sites, which are surrounded by six foot high steel and wooden fences.

Mother-of-five Marcella Bergin, 35, has been visiting with her three eldest children, Christy, 15, Seamus, 12, and Chloe, 11, for many years without any problems.

She said: “It’s like they are branding all parents potential paedophiles which is disgraceful – 99 per cent of people are great parents and certainly not child abusers.

“The whole thing is just a joke and I will certainly not be adhering to the new rules which frankly are crazy.”

And thus parents must seek their elected masters’ permission to play with their own children in a park. Reader, try to imagine the cultural climate that makes it possible for officials to pass such a law; each day in Britain brings fresh tales of petty officialdom run amok. What is most sinister here is the state’s assumption that it is authorized to invade so deeply into family life; that parents have to seek a license from the government to play with their own children.

How did it happen? Who permitted it? The line between private and public in the UK has been growing increasingly blurred for a long time. No doubt you know we have more CCTV cameras than China, and that soon every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens is to be stored for a year and will be available for monitoring by government bodies. We are not to be trusted. We must be watched. In the eyes of government, we are hapless children, and the emphasis in British law has changed from that which is not forbidden is permitted, to that which is not permitted is forbidden.

Do you feel better about America yet?

3) And finally, and on a higher level: this week the European Union will elect its first president- well, sort of. Naturally the electorates of the 27 state bloc will not be voting. They don’t even know who the candidates are. Not to worry, our leaders will decide that for us, behind closed doors. Apparently some Belgian is the front runner, although he refuses even to confirm that he is running. And there’s also a guy from Luxemburg who might win, although Luxemburg isn’t a real country, of course.

There’s a good reason why we haven’t been invited to vote – we might make the wrong decision. After all, France and Holland rejected the European Constitution in their referenda, so it had to be renamed the Lisbon Treaty and made law without consulting voters. Then the Irish rejected even this treaty in a referendum, and so they were forced to vote again until they gave the right result. This would be like a president losing an election and then holding another one and another one until he got the right result (i.e. his re-election). In Russia or Venezuela such tactics would be treated as outrageous, a sick parody of democracy. In Europe, they are par for the course. And nobody does anything. In the UK people grumble, and ridicule the system- but then they go to sleep. The next day they wake up and another bizarre law has been passed, another power given away.

Do you feel better about America yet?

The Tea Parties and Town Hall Meetings this past summer blew my mind. I had no time for the absurd Stalin/Hitler/Dachau rhetoric (I lived in Russia for ten years and can tell you a few things about communism and totalitarianism), but that was just the fringe talking. At root, here were citizens who were angry and enraged, yelling at their leaders, challenging them to justify their actions. They were aggressively defending their rights, their traditions, and their liberties.

Now America has its own share of idiot laws and lawmakers, of course. Perhaps in a few states you also have barking mad regulations like the ones described above. And you do have Nancy Pelosi. But the persistence in this country of so rebellious a spirit, and such a firm conviction that government must serve the people and not vice versa is an excellent thing.

Do you feel better about America yet?

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in.  Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)

Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.

Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.

I wanted to listen to the thoughts and fears of all those utterly insignificant individuals we never hear from on TV or in the papers- i.e. the people who actually live there, both on post and in Killeen, the civilian town that exists to serve Fort Hood. But there was more to it than that – I also wanted to gauge the level of rage on the street. You see there’s a mosque just down the road from me in Austin and I had not noticed any pitch forks or flaming torches in the night. But I didn’t want to assume that the apparent absence of angry right wing mobs outside my window meant that there weren’t any out there. That would be rushing to judgment.

***

I arrived in Killeen around noon and spent some time driving up and down the streets surrounding Fort Hood. It was a low income, mixed race area with lots of pawn shops, fast food joints and tattoo parlors, plus multiple military supply stores for soldiers wanting to supplement their kit.

The first local I spoke to was the Reverend Tracy Smith, of the Rivers of Living Waters Ministries in Killeen. Like practically everyone in the town, he was an ‘army brat’, with relatives in the military- in fact, his cousin had been participating in a graduation service when the shooting began at the Soldier Readiness Center next door: ‘My cousin, her family, they got caught up in the middle of it…and when I heard my family members were that close to it, it brought it closer to home. She had just gotten back from Iraq so she’s combat tested. But the family members aren’t, know what I mean?’

On Nidal Hasan, the Reverend Smith had this to say: ‘I heard he was going out to fight members of his own religion, so I imagine that must have been pretty hard.’ At no point however did Smith launch into an attack on Islam. When I asked whether he thought there would be mob-like retaliations against innocent Muslims, he had faith in Americans: ‘I don’t think it will happen, I hope it won’t, but there might be some small incidents involving narrow-minded people.’

Ultimately Smith was optimistic: ‘If we look at the history of America, we have always been able to rise above. An eagle always rises above the storm.’

***

My next stop was ‘America’s Heroes’, a comic book store located a few blocks from the entrance to Fort Hood. The sales clerk told me his clientele was 98% military. It makes sense: we forget how young soldiers are, or that most of them have never lived away from home before. A few of his customers had spoken about the events on base, but mainly about how long they had spent in lockdown. On Friday he had noticed much higher security around town, reminiscent of the days after 9/11, however by Saturday it was almost back to normal.

The 9/11 theme was echoed a few blocks down by Lewis Smeen who ran the Military Depot store. ‘When I heard people had got killed on post, it was like a shock. After 9/11 things were starting to calm down, and now it was like: oh no, here we are again. It wasn’t the empty feeling I felt on 9/11… that was surrealistic, like- was the world ending? But this was like a reminder, that there are still crazies out there.’

Business was bad: Smeen had only seen five soldiers the entire day, down from an average of thirty or forty for a Saturday. As for Nidal Hasan, he wanted to know why so many warning signs had been missed. ‘You have to be fair and even-handed, of course. I don’t think every Muslim is like this guy, but there were warning signs.’

As for a possible backlash against Muslims in the army, Smeen was doubtful: ‘I’ve had Muslim soldiers in my shop; they’re usually with buddies or comrades. Sometimes I’ve heard talk against the war from Black Muslims, but not from Arab-Americans, with the Muslim heritage. There’s whackos of every background in the military so there may be a few incidents, but I don’t think it’s going to get out of hand.’

***

All the pawn shops in town had adopted a strict ‘no comment’ policy on the massacre, no doubt because they sold guns for personal use and did not want to get mixed up in the controversy, even though none of them had sold Hasan the arms he is reported to have used. Quantico Arms and Tactical Supply on Fort Hood Street also had a ‘no comment’, but didn’t object to me hanging around the shop, and it was here that I met two soldiers who had been on post when the shooting occurred.

The first soldier gave his name as ‘Park’. As he had spent six hours on lockdown he had found out the details of the massacre long after the rest of us living outside Fort Hood. He described in detail the boredom and disorientation of the lockdown experience, before getting on to the topic of soldier’s attitudes towards Hasan: ‘People are shocked. Down range shit happens, whatever. But if it’s a fellow soldier doing this to other soldiers, especially stateside- well, you just don’t do that to people.’

For Park it was Hasan’s rank, not his religious beliefs, that was the issue. ‘It’s not going to be easy for the young soldiers. Think about it- for most soldiers it’s their first time away from home, away from state. They’re fresh out of high school. The relationship between a junior soldier and an officer is like a son and a father- or grandfather: you can trust them, look up to them. They’ve got more education, they’ve got more training, but now it’s an officer who went out and shot everybody. You must trust him with your life- and then you get backstabbed. But it’s more than a backstab. It’s like your wife cheating on you… no, it’s more serious than that. You are deployed and you come home and your house is empty, cleaned out, everything gone. But it’s worse than that. Those kinds of things you can move up and move on, but this…?’

The second soldier, James talked about the fearful, nervous atmosphere on post after the attack and echoed Park’s feeling that some kind of scared trust had been broken. In fact, he said, it was precisely this betrayal that had fueled the anger against Hasan.

‘Yesterday there was a great outrage as to why he was still alive. There was a real pitchfork and torch mentality- especially in Killeen, among civilians… the people in the town want to see punishment.’

This had nothing to do with religion however: ‘They dislike him because he’s not an outsider, or deemed as a terrorist- I mean that’s a justified fight. No this is much different- it’s because he wears our uniform, because he’s our “superior”, and then he turns around and shoots you. That’s a betrayal.’

Some soldiers, ‘more than a few’, would now distrust all Arabs, said James. ‘But I can’t speak for them. As for me, I have no issue with Arabs as a people, or Muslims as a religion. If they’re tolerant of me I’m tolerant of them.’

***

A few hours later, I was back in Austin and the media spin was still in over drive. Nidal Hasan was being diagnosed by ‘experts’ and journalists who had never met him, and who had no knowledge of the background to the case. The NYT was in the driver’s seat, successfully resolving every controversial issue before the investigation was complete. A fantastical new condition, second hand PTSD, had been discovered, whereby the poor major, overwhelmed by listening to soldiers discuss traumas he had not experienced, simply snapped and just had to kill lots of his fellow soldiers… and other such bulshit, and on and on, ad nauseam.

It is true that we should not leap to judgment; indeed each day we learn something new about this terrible event. But the truth is that a whole series of judgments have already been made by our elders and betters in the media and in the administration, and a whole narrative has been prepared in which the killer is the victim, while the real enemy to be feared is the unwashed horde drooling and snarling in deepest, darkest America. This is obscene: of course there are bigots out there, and there always will be, but the vast majority of people can distinguish between an extremist whack-job and an honest citizen.

Meanwhile, it’s a hard life in the army. You get shot at, blown up and paid very little for your trouble. When you’re demobbed, you might wind up living in the cheap housing in Killeen, not far from Fort Hood, among the tattoo parlors and Pawn Shops. Making these sacrifices, the least you can expect is that your superior officers don’t shoot you. And so when that rule is violated, the minimum respect we owe the dead is to uncover the truth about what happened to them, whatever it may be- and however uncomfortable it makes us feel.

Only a few days after Kennedy expired, Sergei Mikhalkov, the Stalin-loving author of the lyrics to three versions of the Soviet and Russian national anthem also shuffled off this mortal coil. And what about Walter Cronkite, Ed McMahon etc? All of these deaths were recognized as significant breaks with the past, symbolic passings that marked the end of an era, even if the era in question had actually come to a close decades earlier. On October 12th yet another such mega-death was marked in Russia, as Vyacheslav Ivankov- AKA Yaponchik- was buried in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery. Although his name is less well known than Ted Kennedy’s, Yaponchik’s life and career are highly significant nevertheless, for as the most notorious Russian mobster of the 1990s he was a living (until recently, anyway) symbol of an era of near-total societal collapse, the repercussions of which are still felt globally today.

Vyacheslav Ivankov was born in 1940 to Russian parents living in Stalin’s homeland of Georgia. By the late 1960s he was based in Moscow, where he joined the notorious ‘Gang of the Mongol’, one of the few racketeering groups that existed in the USSR at the time. As an amateur wrestling champ, Ivankov combined both discipline and muscle, invaluable assets to Soviet gangsters in the days before they had access to guns and bombs; indeed, many early Russian criminal gangs were formed by sportsmen. The nickname Yaponchik (‘Little Japanese’) was either a reference to his vaguely Asian features or subordinate status to mob boss Gennady Karkov, the ‘Mongol’.

According to sociologist Vadim Volkov there was a simple reason why racketeers reappeared in Russia at this moment in history:

‘The Soviet shadow economy greatly expanded in the 1970s. It comprised a variety of businesses that grew sporadically to exploit gaps and loopholes in the state economy: the illegal production of consumer goods and alcohol, the concealment of legally produced goods from state accounting offices, various ventures for appropriating state property, antique businesses, swindling, underground gambling facilities…’

But while corrupt soviet officials were seizing the opportunity to enrich themselves, they did not want to attract attention by flaunting their wealth, and thus sat on vast piles of cash. Between 1969 and 1972 the Gang of the Mongol specialized in identifying these crooks and liberating them from their ill-gotten gains, until Mongol was caught and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Yaponchik however actually benefited from a much shorter period of incarceration during which he was initiated into the soviet penal system’s legendary hierarchy of thieves-in-law, thus acquiring the status of master criminal. In his book Godfather of the Kremlin, the late Paul Klebnikov supplied this description of the mobster unbound in the 1970s:

“…the Jap (Yaponchik) developed an extensive operation extorting money from black market entrepreneurs and corrupt officials; he also smuggled narcotics, jewelry, icons, and antiques. He had a reputation for flamboyant brutality, often taking recalcitrant black marketers into the woods outside town and torturing them. According to one legend, when the Jap was crossed by a Moscow restaurant manager, he had the man buried alive and a road paved over him. “Killing someone is as easy as lighting up a cigarette,” he apparently liked to say. From Riga to Sverdlov, from Kazan to Moscow, he left a trail of fear.”

Yaponchik pursued his criminal career until 1981 when he was convicted of banditry and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. In 1991 however he was released on grounds of ill health after numerous grandees had petitioned for his release, among them (allegedly) Iosif Kobzon, the Soviet Frank Sinatra and Sergei Kovalyov a close ally of the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov. As often happens in such cases Yaponchik’s health miraculously improved and he was soon back at work, emerging as the leading mobster in the unholy union of future oligarchs, criminal thugs and foreign carpetbaggers that were stripping post-soviet Russia of her most valuable assets.

Yaponchik had big ideas however, and in 1992 he moved to the USA, apparently with the intention of transforming the Russian mafia into a global organisation. His base was in Brighton Beach, where he extorted money from immigrants, periodically taking breaks to preside over mafia summits in cities such as Vienna. In 1996 however he was arrested by the FBI and sentenced to nine years and seven months in Pennsylvania’s Allenwood high-security prison, for Green Card fraud and extortion. But Yaponchik’s criminal career was far from over: in 2004 he was extradited to Moscow to face charges that in 1991 he and a friend had shot two Turks in a restaurant because, as the Russian Kommersant newspaper put it-  ‘…the coat-check staff at the restaurant, hoping for a large tip from the foreigners, served them first.’ Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Funnily enough, when the case went to trial none of the five witnesses recognized Yaponchik, not even the arresting policeman. Indeed, one of them, displaying both a remarkable eye for detail and a prodigious memory, insisted that the killer- unlike Yaponchik- had a gold crown on his teeth. Yaponchik was duly released, a free man for the first time in eight years. Kommersant dryly reported that during his imprisonment Yaponchik had discovered his softer side: ‘…he wrote a cycle of poems…as well as tales for children and his autobiography, which has the working title Against the Wind. ‘

After his acquittal Yaponchik spent most of his time outside Russia. The world had changed since his heyday in the early 90s. The chaotic era of open, rampant criminality had passed, and the wealthy ‘businessmen’ who at one time might have feared him- or paid for his services- were now far more powerful than the mob boss. They wanted to consolidate their gains, and ingratiate themselves with Putin’s ‘dictatorship of law’. Tracksuits and BMWs were out; smart suits and the language of international business were in. The Russian mob returned to the traditional spheres of criminal enterprise: drugs, prostitution, gambling. That’s the received wisdom anyway- but in 2005 when a Moscow businesswoman I worked for was under severe pressure from powerful rivals and state security agencies, it was Yaponchik she called upon to save her skin, suggesting that the old crook still had a lot of influence.

And now he is dead. According to RIA Novosti, he was shot in July by snipers after traveling to Moscow ‘to settle a dispute between two criminal groups controlling Moscow’s gambling business.’ It took him nearly four months to die, but finally he got a little of what was coming to him.

Why am I telling you this story? Well, imagine for a second that American power collapsed, and the country was overrun by crooks and killers who barely bothered to conceal their criminality. Imagine that the worst elements of organised crime rubbed shoulders with politicians and business, stealing and killing with impunity, while hardworking, honest people endured lives of squalor. This is more or less what happened in Russia in the early 90s, as Yeltsin- an incompetent buffoon even in his rare moments of sobriety – abandoned the citizens of his country to the wolves. Yaponchik was one of the biggest wolves of all. During this period Russians were stripped of hope and illusions, and Democracy was retitled Dermokratiya or ‘Shitocracy’. In short, understand the career of Yaponchik and his contemporaries and it is possible to grasp why Vladimir Putin who tossed out some of the ‘freedom’ Yeltsin had offered but restored a modicum of ‘order’ (and made Russia feared again), enjoys so much support among so many of his people. Ignore the symbol of Yaponchik however and the politics of the country will make little sense.

And now, with Yaponchik’s death, the immediate post-soviet era of outright lawlessness recedes slightly further into memory, into legend- where it causes a little less pain to those who have to live with its legacy.

Just a week after the naughty boys and girls at the IOC had delivered a blow to the president’s majestic ego, some idiots in Norway had decided to puff that balloon right back up again. And lo, there was Mr. Obama on TV, floating about in front of a podium, chin held aloft, doing the old mock humility routine as he wittered on about his daughter and his dog: just a regular guy, doing my best to save the world. Aw, shucks.

Since that moment of world-historical absurdity a great deal of commentary has been produced. As even Mr. Obama admits he does not deserve to stand in the company of earlier laureates such as Mandela or Mother Theresa, the focus has thus been on the ulterior motives of the Nobel Committee. Was this a late snub to Bush? Condescending encouragement to America for electing someone all right-thinking Norwegians approve of? Victor Davis Hanson offered this elegant piece, anatomizing social democratic Norway and its pathologies. However the one factor which nobody has discussed, and yet which I think is central is-

SATAN.

Wait- don’t run away. I am not suggesting that Satan himself, Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies was sitting on the Nobel Committee, instructing his diabolical Norwegian minions to hand the prize to Obama: far from it. What goes on in the bowels of hell is ‘above my pay grade’, as a certain Nobel laureate once said. But there are one or two things I do know about, and when it comes to Norway those things are: they have a lot of oil, they used to be Vikings, and they love Satan.

Now as visitors to a serious political site such as this you are perhaps unaware that Norway is home to the world’s most extreme, satanic music, known to aficionados as Black Metal. As the name suggests, the lyrical themes are dark, frequently referencing evil, murder, rape and Satan, screamed over a backdrop of distorted guitars, crashing drums, etc. Unlike American bands however who are content merely to growl a bit and collect the check, some Norwegian groups have actually followed their lyrical themes to their diabolical conclusions and committed actual acts of suicide/evil/murder. In the early 1990s Euronymous of the band Mayhem is reported to have made a stew with the brains of his friend Dead after the latter had shot himself. Then there was a spate of church burnings of which Samoth and Faust, both of the band Emperor, were subsequently found guilty. However these acts of wickedness pale in comparison to the willful malice of the legendary Varg Vikernes of Burzum. Good old Varg actually murdered Euronymous (that’s the chap who ate Dead’s brains) in 1993, following which he was sentenced to 21 years in a luxury resort. Sorry, I mean a Norwegian prison. In prison he reportedly changed his name to Varg Quisling Vikkernes in honour of the notorious Nazi collaborator and minister-president of occupied Norway, then switched his allegiance from Satan to Odin, and so on. He was released in May after serving sixteen years.

Now the question I am sure you are asking is: why Norway? I’ve often wondered that myself, and my own theory is very simple. Every year, Norway is placed at the top of the best places to live in the world list. As everybody knows, this is actually a list of the most boring countries in the world. And so, confronted with a society that is wealthy, homogenous, lacking in any great tension and where the government supplies everybody with generous benefits, certain elements of Norwegian youth yearn for an element of risk or danger in their lives. They used to be Vikings after all. In an effort to shock themselves into feeling something, they escape into an ‘evil’ musical subculture, which a few participants have pushed to great extremes. There is another attraction: Varg and Euronymous attracted international attention to a country whose culture is deemed irrelevant by the rest of the world, and thus the best way for an ambitious young Norwegian rock band to have their music heard outside Norway is by embracing ‘evil’ and jumping onto the Satanic bandwagon. In Denmark we see a similar phenomenon in the career of film director Lars Von Trier, whose entire ouvre is predicated on shocking an imagined bourgeoisie with a radical aesthetic and scenes of rape, genital mutilation etc. Anaesthetized to the point of unconsciousness by life in his social democratic paradise, and yet craving attention and sensation like an adolescent boy Trier lashes out with peacocking displays of ‘rebellion’, like those Norwegian Black Metal types. He too formed a school of like-minded aesthetes who tried to ride his coat tails into the international arena.

So where am I going with this? Ah yes. Well basically, I am wondering whether the ageing, posturing non-entities on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, ensconced in safe, dull, mind-numbingly boring Norway do not also suffer from feelings of boredom, irrelevance and invisibility. Who cares after all about the opinions of Thorbjorn Jagland? Not me. However as they are too old to thrash about on guitars or drums, have no directorial talent like von Trier, and do not want to go to prison like Varg they instead opt to shock us by handing out millions of dollars as a ‘peace prize’ for frivolous reasons.  Give the prize to someone who actually deserves it, such as Dr. Sima Samar or Dr. Denis Mukwege and the world’s media will not talk much or remember long. Give it to Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama on the other hand and the world, especially America will sit up and take notice. For a few days Norway, and more importantly the Nobel Committee, will matter. They will exist in the eyes of the world.

I don’t know. Is this too simple, too frivolous a theory? Frankly, who cares? If it is, then I’m in good company. It was also frivolous of the Nobel Committee to hand the prize to someone whose accomplishments are so meager, and it was equally frivolous, I think, of Mr. Obama to accept. Has he not had enough of the world’s adulation already? Are there not other individuals who deserve recognition more?

 Obama had a more inspiring biography than Tony Blair of course and did sincerity better; nevertheless there were many parallels. Both were relatively young, charismatic men who insistently repeated stirring but vague mantras about change and a coming new era to an exhausted  electorate craving a break with the recent past. Both surrounded themselves with pop stars and other glamorous types, in an attempt to identify with everything that was young and progressive and hip. Of course, this being America, Obama operated on a much grander, messianic scale: Blair never implied that his victory might lower the earth’s water levels for example, and nor did anybody ever faint at his rallies as if he were a faith healer. However when Blair won the election the sympathetic Guardian newspaper did get rather overheated: I recall an article in which the atmosphere in the UK was compared to the relief felt at the end of World War II, thus equating the hapless John Major with Adolph Hitler. That total absence of proportion will sound familiar to anyone who has flicked through the People’s Temple style newsletter that is Newsweek or spent a few minutes watching the risible MSNBC. (In the Guardian’s defence however, none of its writers were ever so feeble-minded as to compare Blair to God.)

Anyway, during the election campaign I would say to those who asked for my thoughts on the Obama phenomenon that perhaps it wasn’t wise for so many people to allow themselves to be so carried away. Obama was only a man; worse still a politician; and even worse- not a very experienced one. I would then suggest that many Americans were setting themselves up for a massive disappointment: that the impossible expectations that Obama and his devotees had aroused would ultimately lead to profound disillusionment, leaving people even more cynical and embittered than if they had never been thus misled. Tony Blair’s career in Britain offered a shining example of this process in action. My listeners would then change the subject and never mention Obama to me again. I understood: they wanted to believe, they were protecting their faith.

Meanwhile I had a sinking suspicion that having evaded the Blair era in the UK (I was in Moscow, enjoying the regime of Vladimir Putin) I was about to experience the big budget American remake under Mr. Obama. Of course, it was never going to be an exact fit: Britain and America have different political systems, different histories and different cultures even if we speak (roughly) the same language. Yet peering through Obama’s cloud of lofty rhetoric I seemed to see a lot that was familiar. Like Blair, Obama was obsessed with his representation in the media and excessively keen to be perceived as cool and trendy. Like Blair, he was enthusiastic for a massive expansion of government, for the promotion of relatively unaccountable unelected officials into influential positions, for the incurring of massive debt to pay for his grand schemes, for promoting people with backgrounds in campus radicalism, and for great globs of toweringly ambitious but apparently half-baked reform.

The comparison was not perfect of course. Thankfully Obama showed no enthusiasm for several of Mr. Blair’s more notorious outrages, such as establishing a new criminal offence for every day he was in office, or transforming Britain into a paranoid, surveillance society. Nor did he speak of ‘Democracy’ in the same dreamy way as Blair, as if it was a metaphysical force for good in itself. Post- Iraq, Obama prefers sovereignty, including the sovereignty of scumbags. Still,  Britain 1997- 2007 seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb for some of the president’s agenda at least.

Recently however I’ve started to think I may have been wrong. You see, Blair, for all his faults, got things done. He cracked skulls and enforced rigid party discipline. Armed with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and faced with an opposition in total disarray, he seized the moment to ram through reams of legislation. Obama on the other hand seems unable to achieve much of anything, as even SNL has noticed, while his party is impressively undisciplined. The absurd stimulus package, so obviously stuffed with un-stimulating pet projects was an embarrassment. Then there is the ongoing civil war between elements of the administration and the CIA; and the endless shenanigans over health care etc. It is starting to look as though Obama has little control over his own party, and that its hierarchy does not necessarily respect him. Every major initiative he sets out to pursue seems to degenerate into chaos.

However, it was as I was watching Obama make his pitch for Chicago before the IOC in Copenhagen that I knew I definitely had the wrong analogy. After all, Blair won the Olympic Games for London when everybody thought the city was going to lose. Obama, on the other hand, not only lost but made himself look ridiculous in the process- the most powerful man in the world come as a supplicant before the crooks of the IOC, only to be slapped down.

Perhaps we aren’t about to live through a remake of the Blair years after all. Blair is a winner, you see- even now many think he may live again as first president of the EU. Obama on the other hand, well… he used to look like a winner, but increasingly- not so much. Could it be then that the USA has fast forwarded to what followed Blair? Maybe there will be no period of hope giving way to gradual disillusionment, no period of furious reform collapsing into widespread cynicism. Maybe instead we’re going straight to the catastrophic aftermath- courtesy of a man with big dreams promoted beyond the level of his competence, besieged on all sides by disaster, unable to effect anything. Is Barack Obama actually America’s Gordon Brown? I hope not- for all our sakes.

Would he next offer future generations the gift of flight, like Britain’s Natural Law Party, or promise to abolish death like would-be Russian presidential candidate Grigory Grabovoi, shortly before he was jailed for accepting money to reincarnate a non-existent victim of the Beslan Tragedy?

Of course not, I thought. It’s just the usual political waffle, nothing to waste time thinking about. The president was striking a pose, attempting to sound statesmanlike, that sort of thing. All politicians indulge in this type of empty, grandstanding rhetoric and Obama’s personal weakness for it is well established. Meanwhile he had presented Russia with an opportunity to get rid of a lot of old weapons they didn’t really want any more, without losing face. Perhaps that was the plan: a conciliatory gesture to the Bear in the hope that it would help in other areas. Good luck with that, by the way.

However since then Obama has continued to insist on his dream of a world without nuclear weapons and I am starting to worry that he really means it. Last week at the UN we were all subjected to a bizarre spectacle- and I don’t mean Gaddafi’s highly entertaining stream of consciousness rant but rather the sight of the president of the USA waffling on about disarmament as if he were some kind of vegetable-munching German hippy living on a commune in 1970s Munich. In order to humor him, the Security Council then passed a resolution affirming his audacious- or rather comical- hope. That was easy enough of course – as we all know, the UN passes resolutions all the time which nobody has any intention of following.

Curiously enough neither the resolution nor Mr. Obama made reference to Iran or North Korea, two states obviously intent on increasing the number of nuclear weapons in the world and who have ignored a good deal of Security Council resolutions themselves. Instead Mr. Obama waited until a meeting of the G20 in Pittsburgh a day later before denouncing a ‘suddenly discovered’ Iranian nuclear facility he already knew about, and which President Bush had known about before him. Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy stood by his side, offering moral support. However reports soon started to surface that Sarkozy had wanted to confront Iran at the UN the day before, and had offered scathing criticism of Mr. Obama’s pipe dream.

Sarkozy thus seems to believe the president is sincere. However I think we should all attempt to understand what this means before we rush to judgment. Last night I considered the possibilities. This is what I came up with:

1) Obama used to be an academic and has spent a lot of time in the company of various washed- up 1960s radicals. Perhaps, having only relatively recently left behind that playground he doesn’t realize how ridiculous he sounds. If so, we can only hope that he learns quickly.

2) All that messianic rhetoric he spouted during the campaign was not just the calculated blather I assumed it was but actually sincere. He really believes, like the late Michael Jackson, that he can heal the world. By contrast, at least Mahmoud Ahmadinejad holds that a supernatural messiah will bring about universal salvation and not himself. But while the president does display numerous signs of narcissism, I still think this is too far fetched.

Then I started to think about option 3, a variation on #2 I admit, but with a patina of rationality that would appeal to a subtle thinker like Mr. Obama. Perhaps he believes that it is impossible to persuade Iran and North Korea to disarm while Israel, the USA and other countries have nuclear weapons. In this he is most likely correct. Perhaps he even accepts that they have a point- at least insofar as they claim it is manifestly unfair to prohibit one country from enjoying the benefits of a healthy atomic arsenal when you have one yourself. And perhaps- now this is a stretch, I admit- he thinks that the two regimes are led by rational and reasonable men who would agree to give up their weapons programs if the rest of the world also disarmed. Then everybody could go home happy.

Now I know that this sounds shockingly naïve but it does explain why he went out of his way to avoid confronting the Iranians at the UN. It also strikes me as the kind of conceit which, dressed up with enough academic think tank hokum, an intellectual of Mr. Obama’s stature could just about believe in. It’s ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ after all, and are we not all fair and reasonable men at heart?

Actually, no we’re not. I therefore think it is time we banded together to persuade the president to stop wasting his time and energy. Obviously he won’t listen to anything Fox or Talk Radio has to say, and MSNBC is also a lost cause- that channel produces agitprop strictly for the internal consumption of the Democratic Party faithful. Therefore I would like to suggest to the editors and producers at CNN, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and all those other prestigious news sources that pride themselves on their journalistic integrity that every time Mr. Obama mentions his delusion at a press conference their reporters should openly snigger, and when they write about his speeches later they should preface his words with a phrase such as ‘naïve dream’ or ‘charming fantasy’. Nothing too harsh- we all know he is a sensitive soul. There’s no need to worry about journalistic ethics- this would not be editorializing but a mere statement of fact, like saying the world is round, not flat. And that way, with gentle encouragement from friends, the president might finally set aside childish things and start taking the issue of nuclear proliferation seriously- just as the Iranians and the North Koreans do.