Mass Intelligence
Or call it what you will.It appears that Italian Members of Parliament have long had a reputation as drug-users. From my own personal (albeit not intimate, nor terribly grounded) experience with and of parliamentarians they're just like you and me - only more so. For one thing, if you're going to expose yourself to the public scrutiny and humiliation that goes along with running for public office you've got to have a fairly healthy opinion of yourself.
Not necessarily of your intellectual capacities, but rather that you think you're fairly special. Oh, I know there are many people who run for public office and who swear by the good book that they do this out of a sense of personal obligation. That they owe something to their municipality, their province, their country, and this is their way of paying back. Not pay-back; that comes later, when they've been successful.
There may indeed be people of sterling character and outstanding qualities who see it as their public duty to do their utmost to assist a parliament of one sort or another to administer the structures and laws of a country. I won't even go into the gradual impact that their sense of self-righteousness has upon their purer impulse of duty, when it transmogrifies as they invariably tend to do, into a sense of sacrificial entitlement.
Duty, transcribed by power or the vision of such, aided and abetted by public respect - or resentment, tinged with helplessness between elections - has a way of creating an artificial sense of self-enoblement. To those stalwart souls who conceive of themselves as the saviours of their fellow citizens through their place in their country's parliament, duty weighs heavy and the perks lighten the scene.
Now - what's this? Italy's privacy authority has ordered a satirical television show not to air a controversial segment of their programme? Why? Wherefore? Ah, those tricky programmers: they randomly selected and nudged fifty members of the Italian parliament into innocently giving up samples of their DNA by a truly underhanded operation.
The forehead-wiped swabs which the producers so kindly offered to their targets to alleviate the heat of the television lights revealed that a dozen of the thirty-two MPs tested had smoked cannabis, while four had snorted cocaine within the previous 36 hours. Whoops! Rather an unsavoury, but so unfair; is- nothing-sacred-revelation.
Although the deputy speaker of the lower house called the sting "a very serious crime" and the head of the Union of Christian Democrats denounced the programme as having "zero scientific value", some politicians denounced their colleages as hypocrites.
I have always said that if a police dog went into the chamber, its nose would first go on the blink, and then it would give up", said the leader of the Radical party, which is trying to legalize cannabis.And more power to that honourable gentleman.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 11, 2006
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