A man in New Zealand has just been sent to prison for three months for watching cartoons of pixies, elves and trolls enjoying sexual intercourse. I don’t know, from the court report, if this was inter-species fairy-folk sex, i.e. if it was a nasty scene of one of those enormous, wart-festooned Norse Huldrefolk applying himself with great vigour to the epicene and vulnerable form of a mere elf. This information is not recorded. We know simply that Ronald Clark was dispatched to chokey and a local campaigner against child abuse said outside the court that while the convicted man had watched only cartoons of these creatures having sex, it was the sort of thing which might lead to him trying it out for real.
This kind of comment is so ubiquitous in such cases that nobody remarked just how problematic such a transition might prove for Mr Clark, were he to do as the campaigner feared. First, catch your elf, etc. It is only rarely that one chances upon such beings these days and they are notoriously difficult to entice with promises of boiled sweets or puppies. The best I could suggest would be to attempt to invoke them from the netherworld via the use of a pentacle and some magical substances, à la Crowley — but be prepared for the great god Pan himself turning up. In which case make sure you have strong condoms to hand, as well as a first aid kit.
Meanwhile, back at home we’re going through one of our regular paedofests, where we have convinced ourselves once again that kiddie-fiddlers are lurking behind every bush ready to launch themselves at our children. There is, for example, a vigilante group operating somewhere in the Midlands called Letzgo Hunting, led by a gentleman who operates under the name of Scumm Buster. These folk entice a supposed paedophile through the conduit of social networking sites and then chase after them, filming everything as they go. These films are then handed over to the police, who are urged to prosecute. By posing on Facebook as ‘underage girls’, the Letzgo Hunting mob — some of whom previously worked in the security industry — have handed the names of nine men over to the old bill, four of whom have been prosecuted.
The police, however, are not entirely comfortable with this arrangement — perhaps because they are so busy themselves with Operation Yewtree and its bold and popular agenda of arresting every light entertainer over the age of 60, parading them in front of the television cameras and the newspaper snappers, carrying lots of black bin liners out of their houses at 6 a.m., holding the poor saps down the nick for six hours, releasing them on bail and — er — not charging them with anything. Operation Yewtree has so far occupied the time of tens of coppers, cost more millions of quid and has managed to level a single charge at just one person — a BBC chauffeur nobody has heard of.
And so lots of old slebs — Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson, Dave Lee Travis, Rolf Harris to name but a few — are left with their reputations shredded and the perpetual fear that the filth will cobble together some sort of charge against them one day, based upon the testimony of someone they may or may not have importuned or groped or propositioned 40 years ago in the green room after one of their awful television programmes. A testimony which henceforth must be believed, incidentally, regardless of how addled by time it might be, or indeed how addled the complainant might be.
Because now our paedolust — by which I mean a lust for chasing paedos, real and chimeric — has become politicised and therefore Operation Yewtree cannot be gainsaid. Post-Savile, it has become axiomatic that the police don’t take any notice of women when they say stuff. Any women, any stuff. The failure of the police to act on any of the historic complaints made against that gurning northern oaf of a disc jockey was a consequence of an institutionalised sexism within the force, the very same sexism which is responsible for our parlous conviction rate for rapists. And so, in an effort to disprove this allegation, or at least to suggest to the public that they have changed as a force, that they have seen the light, now every woman who complains to them about anything must be believed, regardless of how absurd their entreaties might appear. No longer should coppers use their discretion, because their discretion is not to be trusted.
And so with a great fanfare, a great hoo-ha, and regular communiqués to the press saying they are about to arrest a famous person, watch this space, the Old Bill stamp hither and thither across the country in search of some decrepit old sleb who may or may not have genially poked someone’s nipple at about the time of the Yom Kippur war. I wonder how many people in the end will be charged for transgressions they did not realise had taken place? The suspicion at the moment is that it will probably be a round figure; a very round figure.
Operation Yewtree is institutional grandstanding at its very worst, fuelled by spite, populism and a sense of guilt. And now, if you will excuse me, I must strip naked and commune in a sexual manner with the naiads who hang about my pond at the bottom of the garden.
Comments