Weird World

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair! If you go into the forest the big, bad wolf will eat you up. Beware the trolls who hide under bridges ready to snatch the Billy goats gruff. A giant lives in the clouds and keeps a goose who lays golden eggs... and he will grind your bones to make his bread. No, not another allegory about what the Labour Party believes in, much as that blog rather tends to write itself these days, but the astonishing real life reminder in yesterday’s news that real life is truly stranger than fiction.

There we all were, celebrating the Olympic Games, where extraordinary feats are accomplished by determined humans, when along comes... well, this. A mother has been jailed for submitting her children to surgery in order to maintain the lie that they were disabled. Yesterday I wrote about the naked opportunism that propelled mankind from rock to slime to mudskipper and then on to what we regard as the pinnacle of the evolutionary race to the top, then this piece of unmitigated shit reminds us that the human race can also be run backwards.

It’s bad enough when people fake their own shortcomings to garner sympathy and riches, but at least they only hurt themselves and a few million taxpayers. And it is always amusing when they get caught on video ditching the limp or the wheelchair for a bout of football with the kids on holiday. Then there’s the risible spectacle of people who take a joke too far and turn themselves into unemployable scribbling books, covering themselves in disturbing tattoos, or displaying full-on mental instability like the Nevada cat man. For all that they are the architects of their own downfalls the worst they have to endure is living with their decisions to mutilate or make fools of themselves.

But, your own children? How sick do you need to be to deliberately cause suffering and potentially permanent mental damage to your own offspring? Hold up though, don’t all parents take that risk simply by having kids? The things that some people grow up believing are normal are beyond weird; imagine being born to the kind of narcissistic self-celebrants that Max Clifford created only to later discover your famous parent was only prominent for being ridiculous and all the money was pissed down the drain anyway.

Don't talk to me about muslims. They are mental!

Or worse; how much anguish is created by religious fundamentalists, passing on their warped beliefs to their innocent charges? Having such an absolute faith in an invented deity that you think no sacrifice is too great in spreading the word. Imagine dressing your kids up as suicide bombers and preparing them for martyrdom. Imagine teaching your diminutive replicants that the west must die in order for you to perpetuate a regressive existence with no prospects for enlightenment or joy. I take it back, compared to islam, surgically altering your children for money looks pretty harmless.