DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

THE MEDIA JURY IS STILL out on the issue of what “happened”, or what “went wrong” in the extremely sad case of what will apparently now forever be known as the “Batman Shootings” in Denver, Colorado earlier today. The miserable ramblings of guest “experts” today on all of the rolling news channels, with their potted theories about “what could have made anyone do this” and other such banalities ignore the simple fact that Batman himself, or rather “The Dark Knight” is really the one to blame.

WARNER BROS IS SO POWERFUL that last week it shut down negative comments about the latest film in its Dark Knight franchise on www.rottentomatoes.com  (which it also owns) because of negative comments about the movie and death threats to critics who denied the film its (apparent) status as a classic.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY my friends and I used to play out in the street, with toy guns, and we used to go “bang bang” when we were supposedly firing them. Some of the more, I suppose, “sensitive” among us would pretend we had been shot and fall down and play dead, but most of us would say “you missed” and then there would be an argument, which usually led to no conclusion, and then we would go off to play something else.

IN THOSE DAYS BATMAN was on TV and everyone of my age used to watch it on Sunday afternoons, with Adam West and Burt Ward. The whole thing was camp, colourful and delightfully over the top. And no one ever got killed.

WHEN WE COMPARE THIS WITH THE WAY BATMAN movies have gone nowadays, with more killings than a video game, we have a ready-made answer as to “what could have made anyone do this”. But I have to confess that I suspect that this is a phenomenon confined to the United States of America, Finland, Norway and the two Germanies, where even people who have not finished their PhD can buy firearms. When this type of violence takes place at the Odeon in Oxford, where indeed a large number of undergraduates wear black capes already, then I will believe that the end of civilization is in sight.

DIAMOND GEEZER

THERE ARE MANY ADVANTAGES to being a senior lecturer in a liberal arts course at a university in an extremely relaxed country. The most obvious one is the fact that my teaching responsibilities are reduced to two days a week for twenty weeks a year, which is the plan set out by the absurd pan-European “Bologna” agreement, a method set up primarily to keep students at university for as long as possible in order for them not to inflate the unemployment figures.

ANOTHER ADVANTAGE IS THE FACT that I do not have to spend much time with my colleagues – or indeed with anyone – due to our timetables being mutually independent of each other.

THE NEXT STEP in this cadency is that when I do have to mix with my liberal, woolly-headed colleagues I have no need to discuss anything of any true importance with them. Most of them have no idea about, for example, the recent Euro 2012 football tournament, the Chinese programme to colonise space, the banking crisis or – the issue of the day – the first ever divorce between Thetans, as Tom Cruise prepares to be skinned by Katie “Earthling” Holmes.

INDEED, FOR THOSE COLLEAGUES of mine who teach subjects such as “Intellectual History of the Identity of Cities”, “Philosophy of Landscape”, “Culture of Analysis of Linguistics” or “Echoes of the Fox in Early English Literature”, the most important matters of the moment mean nothing. And the financial matter most discussed today would never pull them out of their ethereal complacency

“BONUS” BOB DIAMOND, head of Barclays Bank, resigned today in the wake of the Libor interest rate fixing scandal and selling of anti-interest rate fluctuation packages against rate increases. The first misdemeanor (as it is not yet a crime) probably negatively affected hundreds of thousands of people who are buying property worldwide; the second has sent at least (as far as is known) two hundred small businesses into distress and liquidation.

NOW THAT “BOB” HAS RESIGNED, he will be free, tomorrow to say whatever he thinks is true as he faces an investigation into false Libor submissions. Whatever happens during this inquest, and whatever subsequently takes place with Marcus Agius, helmsman of the bank that has “stiffed up” so many of those who rely on interest rates, this will not deflect my happy, giggling colleagues or my morose, introspective ones, from their way of looking at the world. And, as one sometimes thinks (or even says, in the right company) when visiting the zoological gardens, perhaps they are really happier than we are.

SENSE AND VINCIBILITY

ALMOST DIRECTLY ON CUE, David “Dave” Cameron and George “Boy George” Osborne seem to have come to the modicum of whatever senses they have and decided that enough is enough over Europe. Whether this has to do with events heralded in this very blog on the 28th of June – the day when the Eurozone became a centralised state awaiting pan-Eurozone taxation – remains to be seen; nevertheless, the moment has seen Cameron and his fellow Old Etonian prankster change from a softly-softly warmish approach towards Europe and the dreaded European Union to a mildly cool one.

ADDED TO THIS, THE EMERGENCE of former defence minister Liam “After the” Fox with an outright anti-Europe speech this morning, calling for a referendum about “leaving Europe without pain”, shows that the Conservatives are just about getting their act together. And they are doing so in a manner swifter than anyone might have imagined last week. Perhaps, cynics might suggest, as it is becoming clear that no other Conservative policy is going to be a winner in the next election and the anti-Europe vote is a guarantee of an extra 10 %.

NEVERTHELESS; WITH A BIT OF LUCK this sudden faith in good sense will last long enough for Britain to be able to leave the hideous European Union permanently in the near future, hopefully before the European Federal Superstate is established, something which is far, far from the “common market” that we joined in 1973 under hapless Ted “Grocer” Heath. Unfortunately, summer break is at hand, and after this our good leaders will come back and will probably have found some other “hot” issue to discuss, such as obligatory carrying reflecting jackets or triangles in our cars. Or whether killing badgers should be banned.