Playground Squabble

I’ve said before that listening to the ‘Major Statesmen’ of the world trying to settle their differences is like watching three-year-olds squabbling round the toy-box. The latest squabble is about a comedy film, made under the auspices of the Sony Corporation, about an American plot to kill the dictator of North Korea, who has declared himself less than amused. A little later there was a ‘Cyber Attack’ on Sony which made public all sorts of things (most of them of no interest to anyone with a couple of brain cells) they had wanted to keep secret. Powerful infants in America decided it must have been the naughty North Koreans who arranged this attack, and lo and behold, yesterday the internet went down in North Korea. I wonder who did that.

But what about the film? Well, it seems that — no doubt in the interests of ‘Homeland Security’ — we are not to be allowed to see it, but yesterday I heard an American film critic who has somehow managed to see it give his opinion: apparently it is even more dire and infantile than most American comedy films.

So why am I bothering to write on this blog, this well-known bastion of seriousness and intellectual integrity, about such nonsense? Because both North Korea and America have in their toy-boxes devices that could kill every living thing on the planet. As W.H. Auden said,

One should not give a poisoner medicine,
A conjurer fine apparatus, nor
A rifle to a melancholic bore.