Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson

about probability. Still, I’m back in Italy, and that alone is cause for rejoicing. I switch on the TV and find the BBCNN channel, which in itself shows how addled I’ve become. It immediately reminds me that what I dislike is not so much my native land but Anglo-Saxon culture in general. Between them, American and British TV broadcasters somehow manage to imply that they have a semi-divine right to interpret and mediate the world for the rest of its six billion inhabitants. This cocky assumption is immediately implicit in the familiar (not to say over-familiar) mateyness that now booms from the TV set.
    As though to share some cosmic in-joke exclusive to themselves , BBCNN newsreaders are specially trained to grin andspeak at the same time, which is how they introduce their weather seers and prophets who are also grinning insanely while waving vague hands towards a map of Africa in gestures that, by the time they are half completed, cross China while a farrago of pop meteorology comes sweep in in there from the Atlantic an
push
in those rain shahs ere over towards the west coaster Denmark which spells a largely sunny dye ere in Ukraine but over in Sarf America well, still a few otspots left from that depression centred on norfeast Brazil over the last few dyes … Hectic blank smiles, spastic gesturings, maps, images and symbols blinking and collapsing one after the other in wild cascade. The screen is a loony chaos of dizzying junk masquerading as information. Running straps top and bottom about sports, stock exchanges, President Bush shoots himself in the foot while hunting terrorists on his Texas ranch, while in the middle of the screen two presenters made of high-impact plastic carry on their grinning knockabout act while their mouths babble about a baby polar bear born in a zoo, Guantánamo Bay, a car that runs on Coca-Cola, a small earthquake in Chile, a White House aide who fucks penguins for charity, torture, car bombs etcetera, and now it’s exactly seven o’clock Southern Pacific time and time for the News but just to keep up BBCNN’s famous irritation quotient here instead is a stream of advertisements aimed at drumming up visitors to countries no one has ever wished to visit and that thousands have died trying to escape – like Voynovia ! Whirling images of travelogue guff, national costumes, sun-tanned cleavages, all-purpose
Zorba
-esque music, ecoparks (formerly the hunting preserves of the late dictator-for-life Bashir Mohammedov) and hotels … God, how many hotels! … those vile caravanserais of the jet set that resemble an architect’s idea of what Nero would have liked, all pools and palms and mother- of-pearl -inlaid foyers exclusively sited on yet another piece of the world’s previously unspoiled coastline, now forever ruined, the images syruped together with words supposed to convey pitiless luxury: pampered, beyond, paradise, dreams, palace, deserve, exquisite – but abruptly the screen dissolves into share prices and a Chinese-looking Dax-hound in shirtsleeves and glinting horn-rims is reading some supremely resistible information about the equities market in Bonn off the autocue and strings of figures spool across the screen in arbitrary directions and so it all rolls on and around in a great flashing blather of interglobal garrulous garbage brought to you by BBCNN 24/7 and don’t forget it’s all there too on our website and also beamed direct to your mobile phone and hearing aid and equally accessible on your prosthetic limb or electric toothbrush thanks to instantaneous XP Vista chip satellite technology because we know how important you are and how vital time is to you and how as a top executive you absolutely need up-to-the-minute information about White House aides pleasuring flightless birds because otherwise some beady-eyed bastard who’s leaner and meaner and has the world’s biggest bladder will steal a march on you while you’re away from your desk taking a leak. And yes