03 December 2004
why I am not a liberal
1. Everyone in the country should be forced to do national service at the age of 18, though possibly not in a military way (buffing guns: not very useful). No! Instead we recommend: leaving your living room, hanging out with old people (they are cool), collecting rubbish, freeing hedgehogs from lager-four-pack plastic dividers, putting local library books back in the correct places without demanding acknowledgement or recompense, smiling in a non-insane manner at strangers. That sort of thing.
All British 18-year-olds have accidentally rendered themselves annoying and fat lately, and it's time they did something other than go to university or twat about on 'gap years' (invented circa 1998, such that potential students would amass horrific debt before they even got to open a single book as an undergraduate. Not that most of them do that, even. The ungrateful anti-intellectual bastards!).
2. Bring back, er, not the death penalty, exactly, but the 'fear of death penalty'. Thus you don't actually execute serial killers, pet rapists, or the person who recently stole my laptop as I slept, but force them to read everything anyone has ever written about finitude. On their own, in a room. Forever! Smudgy photocopies of Heidegger, bits of Sartre, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Nancy...and Simon Critchley. Fear of Death Penalty. It's effective. Work out the difference between mortality and finitude for yourselves, criminally-minded and badly behaved citizens of Britain!
All British 18-year-olds have accidentally rendered themselves annoying and fat lately, and it's time they did something other than go to university or twat about on 'gap years' (invented circa 1998, such that potential students would amass horrific debt before they even got to open a single book as an undergraduate. Not that most of them do that, even. The ungrateful anti-intellectual bastards!).
2. Bring back, er, not the death penalty, exactly, but the 'fear of death penalty'. Thus you don't actually execute serial killers, pet rapists, or the person who recently stole my laptop as I slept, but force them to read everything anyone has ever written about finitude. On their own, in a room. Forever! Smudgy photocopies of Heidegger, bits of Sartre, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Nancy...and Simon Critchley. Fear of Death Penalty. It's effective. Work out the difference between mortality and finitude for yourselves, criminally-minded and badly behaved citizens of Britain!
