In the news: A ticket to toke!
June 12, 2004 ~ 8:27 p.m.
Some thoughts on recent (mostly British) news:
One last one for the Gipper
The Reagan funeral services held in Washington, D.C. were brilliant. Early Thursday morning, the BBC covered the proceedings live. It was so overwhelming that I sobbed for about ten minutes.
It wasn�t just for the sympathy I felt for Mrs. Reagan or grief over Mr. Reagan, but also the ambient mix of music and ceremony surrounding the whole procession. I was sorry for the Reagans, but welling up with a sudden fever of insurmountable patriotism and overwhelming pride of being an American.
The ceremony for Reagan was every bit as good as any Royal celebration I�ve seen in Britain. I seriously hoped at least one-fourth of the British nation was watching the BBC that night as I was, and seeing for themselves how well even we colonialists can do things.
Over the past week, more than 85,000 Americans no less patriotic than myself expressed their sorrow and thanks for Mr. Reagan by seeing the flag-draped coffin of the 40th president for themselves. Reagan has united the nation once more, so it would seem.
Reagan taught us the power of the individual. The Gipper taught us not to take ourselves too seriously while being rock-solid in our beliefs and confidence.
But I have no doubts that Ronnie is knocking them dead up there. He�s telling one anecdotal joke after another, always kicking them off with his famous, uniquely pronounced, �Well �,�
The �Dutch boy� from Illinois did us good and proud and now a week�s worth of public mourning comes to a close, as it should.
Portuguese for football: Fut-bong!
With all the attendant worry over England fans running riot in Lisbon as the Euro 2004 soccer tournament kicks off with England vs. France this weekend, the Lisbon police have said that they will turn a blind eye to marijuana usage among the English fans.
With all the violence that football hooligans have notched up the last thirty-odd years, largely fuelled by heavy alcohol (beer) consumption, Lisbon is taking a cue from the Euro 2000 experience that took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands during the England vs. Portugal match. Fans remained good-natured and, more importantly, good-tempered. Johann Beelan of the Eindhoven police department declared that, �Cannabis ... was part of the conditions which meant everyone had a good time.� The English fans had taken advantage of the very-close-to-legal status of marijuana in Holland and, of course, that it is cheap and easily purchased in coffeeshops.
Portugal also has a relaxed attitude to cannabis, even though it is illegal to consume the drug, especially in public. But possession is not illegal, and although Dutch-style coffeeshops do not exist in Portugal, many tourists in Lisbon are likely to be offered marijuana from street vendors, an easy way to score the drug.
The Portuguese police have all but encouraged cannabis use among England fans, who have been assured that not only will they not be arrested or disciplined in any way by the police for toking up, they will not even have their marijuana confiscated. Lisbon-area police just want to keep the order at any price.
Spokesman Isabel Canelas has said, �If people are smoking but not kicking each other, not beating each other, and not making a problem, why on earth would an officer go and ask �Is that cannabis?�
�If you are quietly smoking and a police officer is ten metres away, what�s the big risk in your behaviour? I�m not going to tap you on the shoulder and ask �What are you smoking?� if you are posing no menace to others. Our priority is alcohol.�
Compare the game in Eindhoven to the England vs. Germany match later during the Euro 2000 in Charleroi, Belgium. Heavy alcohol consumption had marred the city with a wave of violence before, during and after the game.
A columnist for The Mirror wrote that Tony Blair worries about binge drinking needlessly as he could just allow state-owned, government regulated cannabis cafes near stadiums at which football fans, or anyone else for that matter, can smoke the soft drug legally. (Cannabis was downgraded from a Class B to Class C drug, although possession and consumption still remain illegal in Britain.) Michael Howard and the Conservatives�the best old boy band in all of Britain�mutter piously about their plans to reinstate Class B status for cannabis, so if New Labour want to ensure that �Saturday night may never again be all right for fighting,� in the words of the Mirror columnist, perhaps they should do more for relaxed laws regarding cannabis than a shift in its classified status.
Labour takes a beating
But I imagine that cannabis isn�t a priority for the Labour party at the moment, though no doubt that Tony Blair would like a joint to take his mind off the singularly most threatening knock to his career yet.
Labour took a pounding in local elections, with the party losing 460 seats nationwide, and now Blair has to convince edgy members of his party in Parliament that they will not suffer the same fate during the General Election next year, which is the vote for Prime Minister. Although the incumbent party, whether Tory or Labour, has traditionally faced poor results in local elections, the results of last Thursday are significant given the message that they packed.
Labour fell to third place, a spot normally reserved for the Liberal Democrats. But Charles Kennedy�s anti-war Lib Dems catapulted to second place with 29 percent of the vote to Labour�s 26 percent. The Conservatives did best at 38 percent.
Tony Blair conceded that �Iraq has been a shadow over our support.� But if that really was true, how come the Tories�who also supported the war�fared so well? The success that Tories and Lib Dems alike enjoyed at Labour�s expense was a sign of people�s dissatisfaction with the way in which the Blair government operates, rather than Iraq per se.
In the 2000 local elections, Labour captured only 29 percent of the vote; this was long before the Iraq War. It was a year before 9-11. Whatever haunted Labour in 2000 appears to have dragged on four years later.
People want the Prime Minister to explain why he intends to stay the course, not soundbites clarifying merely that he will stay the course. They want to hear that although the Iraq war may yet produce much good, that he joined the war coalition based on faulty information. They want to be assured that they will have a voice on Europe through the planned referendum, and that crime will be considered a priority. They want a Blair they can trust not merely a Blair that says �trust me.�
Can Blair survive? Of course. There is still every good chance that Blair will win the right to yet again reside at No. 10 Downing Street. But Labour knows what it has to do to hang on to the mantle. Or so one hopes.
Livid at Livingstone
Well, Ken Livingstone won after all, despite my earnest wishes for a Steve Norris upset, but the fact that the mayor ran on a Labour Party ticket appears to have been the main cause for such a close race.
On Wednesday night, Livingstone�s support was 51 percent, which had managed to rise to 52 percent after the election. But the fact that Norris, the Conservative candidate, won 48 percent, up from 41 percent support a week earlier, suggested that the voting public may have been livid at Livingstone for re-joining the Labour party.
After having been expelled by New Labour shortly after his mayoral election in 2000, Livingstone gained admission back into Labour�s fold last year and Blair stood by him as Labour�s mayoral candidate. Livingstone, to his credit, warned his fellow far-Left Labourites not to start an uprising against Blair; as Blair stood by him, Red Ken stood by Blair.
And so it�ll be another four years of bitchy complaining over world affairs, of congestion charges, and of little attention being paid to crime. And this is touted as the one bright spot for Labour? Talk about a Pyrrhic victory.
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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