The Guardian 30 January, 2008
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Glocks, shocks and democracy
Did you see where the NBC TV network in the US ran a poll asking viewers to name their best and worst quotes of 2007? The viewers’ favourite as best quote of the year was the extraordinarily crass advertising slogan for Glock handguns: "You’re never alone with a Glock!"
However, while a Glock may be the weapon of choice for people who want to blow someone away — police and bad guys alike — the other increasingly popular weapon in the USA is the electric shock gun from weapons manufacturer Tazer.
In a country that not only practices and condones torture but has made it a key element of government policy, a weapon that delivers a 20,000 volt shock to the person on the receiving end is viewed with official equanimity. Australian police have now been issued with these horrific devices.
In the aforementioned NBC poll, viewers voted as the worst quote of the year the plea, "Don’t taze me, Bro". This was uttered by a young father who, after losing custody of his children in a California court, had protested to the judge.
After police officers had already wrestled him to the ground, and with them kneeling on his neck, the terrified young man pleaded "Don’t taze me, Bro! Don’t taze me, Bro!"
The police tazed him repeatedly and mercilessly. The NBC news hosts thought the item was hilarious and whilst wiping tears of laughter from their eyes kept repeating "Don’t taze me, Bro!"
Tazer’s electric shock gun has become as popular with middle class Americans as MP3 players. A tazer is one of the "must have" consumer items this season. To meet the demand, Tazer now put them out in a choice of red, pink or leopard skin!
Even more mind-boggling as a concept, they have combined the tazer with the popular MP3 player: now you can electrocute someone while listening to your choice of 300 songs. Isn’t modern technology amazing?
Meanwhile, 2008 is shaping up as the year of the arms dealer. We all know the USA is the world’s biggest arms dealer by far, but US President George W Bush has excelled himself over Iran, hasn’t he?
He declared Iran to be a threat to peace in the Middle East, at the same time that he sold billions of dollars worth of weapons to the despotic regime in Saudi Arabia. Bush then publicly offered to sell a similar package of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Iran as part of a "peace deal"!
Such an outrageous display of hypocrisy and double talk on such an important issue prompts one to ask Bush the question originally posed to the notorious Senator Joe McCarthy by the lawyer Joseph N Welch: "Senator, have you no shame?"
(It was during McCarthy’s 1954 "hearings" investigating alleged Communist influence in the US Army. Welch represented the Army. The hearings were televised, which McCarthy probably welcomed initially, but in fact the whole country sat enthralled while Welch exposed McCarthy’s use of professional witnesses and his abuse of the legal system.)
In fact Bush, like McCarthy, has no shame: he will say and do whatever those behind him want him to say or do. Anyway, he knows he’s serving God, so how could he be doing anything wrong?
In an article on the Pakistan People’s Party in last week’s Guardian, Pakistan-born writer Tariq Ali noted that the Party’s slain leader Benazir Bhutto had left the leadership of the PPP in her will to her teenage son Bilawal.
In a further slap in the face for democratically-minded Pakistanis, the PPP installed Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, a man who earned the nickname "Mr Ten Percent" because of the kickbacks he extracted while serving as investment minister in Benazir Bhutto’s second cabinet, to serve as PPP co-chair with Bilawal.
Tariq Ali asked the pertinent, if rhetorical, question: "How can Western-backed politicians [in Pakistan] be taken seriously if they treat their party as a fiefdom and their supporters as serfs…"
Easily, if they are Bhuttos: The PPP used to claim to be an "Islamic socialist party". Today it still claims to be the party of Pakistan’s toilers.
But the Bhuttos themselves are one of the great landowning families of Sindh, whose rural regions are infamous for the feudal-type oppression that still prevails there.
Bhutto showed her class allegiance by her readiness, in return for a share of the spoils of office, to work with Washington and Musharraf. The US has been the power behind a succession of military dictatorships in Pakistan and Musharraf, one of those dictators, has lumbered the Pakistani people with a ruinous World Bank-inspired economic policy.
The Washington Post, commenting on the Bush administration’s Pakistan policy in the wake of Bhutto’s assassination, noted that "despite anxiety among [US] intelligence officials and experts... the administration is only slightly tweaking [the] course charted over the past 18 months to support the creation of a political centre revolving around Musharraf..."
In other words, "democracy can go hang, says the US".