Liverpool opinions
Staying alive - Travelling light
By John Williams
After the murderous assault on Manhattan's Twin Towers the American public interpreted many signals emanating from the all pervading smoke, but the most obvious and immediate was that flying was no longer simple matter of boarding a plane and settling down to watch the in flight movie. Al Qaeda's objective of attempting to destroy the world's greatest economy gained ground every time the Television news programmes repeated the tragedy as the fundamentalist lunatics steered commercial jets into Manhattan's skyline which was drawn against the horizon like a graph of America's economic success.
Within hours commentators were predicting that airlines would suffer losses as people expressed their fear of flying and Al Quaeda's slimy tentacles began to strangle tourism, one of the main arteries of the world economy. I could write at length about the economic damage caused to Islamic countries such as Egypt, Tunisia or Morocco, but I want to leave ironic reflection to Bin Laden's followers and instead look at the damage it did to the British tourist industry which relies so heavily on American dollars.
It is easy to grumble that Americans should have just got on with life and not have done a mass impression of Bruce Willis and refuse to fly across the Atlantic. Yet, had he been prepared to die hard and braved the crossing, he would, ironically, have possibly encountered Chelsea footballers disgracing the memory of Chelsea pensioners, who had survived several world wars, by refusing to fly to Israel in the weeks that followed September the eleventh. That said, he stayed on home ground, invoking the old joke about the reluctant parachutist who said the he couldn't wait to get back to earth because as far as he was concerned the more firma the less terra.
Camels and broken backs come to mind as the Manhattan massacre was the last straw as far as many people were concerned because Britain was not so much Cool Brittania as a seething Petrie dish inculcating all manner of disease ranging from Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis to the highly infectious Urbanis Litteritis.
Imagine being a member of the most carnivorous race on the planet, for whom steak, Corn Dogs and Beefburgers are almost staples, observing the images of mad cows and their corollary, human beings infected with Creutzfeld Jacobson Disease. The urge to imitate Macauley Culkin and stay at home must have been overpowering.
Add to that the sight of Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Foot and Mouth crisis togged out like an extra on the set of Quatermass and you can see that for many Americans the ravens in the tower of London had overnight metamorphised into vultures.
The question we have to ask is this. Are there any good reasons why Americans should abandon Las Vegas or Aspen in favour of London and the Midlands? Well, there are some benefits to living here. For one thing, the incidence of lead poisoning in Britain is almost non-existent when one considers that 25,000 Americans die every year from gun wounds alone. There are 200 million guns in private hands in the US - more than all the guns in all the armies in the world. At the rate they are blowing each other away it is a fact that by the year 2102 twenty five million Americans will have been shot dead. That, by the way, is almost half of England's present population.
Another attraction could be the absence of a bigoted and hypocritical religious movement which has a disproportionate influence on American politics. While our clergy's sins are largely confined to a desire to remove their parishioners' underwear the likes of Jimmy Swaggert seem intent on stealing the shirts from backs of their followers.
However, I suppose that if one has the choice between contracting CJD and being shot in the head then the latter would be appear to preferable as it is at least quick and doesn't involve consuming massive amounts of questionable beefburgers in litter strewn premises.