the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The news that was reported recently that president Donald Tangoed has ordered the US authorities to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco Bay that has been closed for more than 60 years is inspired.

Firstly, if it is all part of his wider strategy of ‘flooding the zone’ – a strategy that involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion – its working. The media in America are now totally unsure of what news coming out of the White House is fake, true, or worse fake that becomes true because the media endlessly bang on about it and thus it gains popular support.

It’s like when I was younger and I was caught shoplifting. Nothing serious. But my parents went mad. So I flooded the zone, except back then it wasn’t a political strategy with stupid name, it was swerve after swerve. I grassed up my brother for smoking – he was then twelve – then accused my parents of both being hypocrites because they smoked and for good measure also grassed him up for helping himself from the drinks cabinet. I really hit the jackpot when I complained that as I didn’t get any pocket money, it was really their fault.

They were so angry at this, that the shoplifting was forgotten and the discussion became instead on how lucky I was compared to their own experience of childhood in rural Ireland. All walking to school barefoot, working on the farm, yada-yada. In much the way, Tangoed has done the same, albeit on a far grander scale, so his critics constantly find themselves in a state of utter confusion and exhaustion. 

From his issuing of an unusually high number of executive orders – including basing transgender girls compete in female only sports at in schools to pardoning the rioters who stormed the Capitol building – as well as him making a number of controversial statements – taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”, the media perpetually confused. 

So maybe it is part of that strategy, to get the media all worked up about Alcatraz. But then again, maybe it isn’t, and if it isn’t, I think it’s a great idea. Why prisons are built in or near to populated areas has always baffled me, especially the high security ones, the ones that house the really mad or bad prisoners. That’s a crime in waiting, putting them near the law abiding public. No, its my belief that if certain individuals have committed a crime that so heinous that it breaks the social contract that exists between citizens and the state, then the state no longer has any obligation toward them. Some murderer’s, serial rapists, terrorists and paedophiles fall into that category.

The French had the right idea with Devils Island, an essentially uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where hardened criminals were shipped off to. It was less three meals a day than a endless quest for survival.    We have our own Devils Island. Well nearly. Gruinard Island is a small, oval-shaped island just off the coast in North West Scotland. In 1942, because it was uninhabited, it was used by the military to experiment with anthrax. Theoretically decontaminated in 1990, it is remains uninhabited. 

Why not just put the worst in society there? With no prospect of leaving. Food drops once a month – basic rations -, minimal accommodation and let them make the best of it.  Boats patrolling the waters around the island, 24hrs a day, armed guards with orders to shoot to wound anyone attempting to escape. Yes, without proper medical treatment they’d die, but proper medical treatment is to be found in hospitals, and hospitals are part of the society whose norms of behaviour they flouted. 

As a deterrent it’d be remarkably effective. 

Anyway, Tangoed controls the narrative, in a way that our glorious leader can only dream about. Plonker seems to be perpetually in fire-fighting mode, responding to things, rather than making those things happen. Already the news cycle – theirs and ours -has been forced to move on, covering the more serious business of dealing with the trade deals with Britain and Saudi, proposals to drastically cut the price of prescription drugs alongside the piffle surrounding Air Farce One. There’s also the ongoing brouhaha’s surrounding tariffs, dealing with Russia in his ongoing struggle to affect peace in Ukraine. 

By tomorrow though, or certainly by next week, there’ll be more things for the media to fret about, because that’s what they do. It isn’t so much ‘flooding the zone’, as creating the borders that allow there to be such a zone in the first place.