0648 - ButtOut

We want to begin by explaining why this column is not, as was promised last week, called “WildlyExciting”. The proposed title came from a modestly priced bottle of hair soap (shampoo) called Herbal Essences® Normal”. Normal is the sort of stuff the House Steward here buys to wash hair. This bottle of Normal has a label which can be read standing in the shower. This begins: “Wildly Exciting Is Our Normal. Enter a world of botanical bliss and unleash the power of your naturally beautiful hair.” The OO says it washes the hair, but nothing much else has been released. Your experience may vary.

This week, though, we wish once again to note how attitudes in Anguilla reflect attitudes all over the world. Should you not know, “Butt out" is an Americanism meaning “Mind your own business, not mine.” Anguilla, though small, kind, and not given to formation of vicious religious militias, offers a curious reflection of events in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the like. Start with small things: people in Anguilla, particularly people with posts of some bureaucratic significance, such as running a grocery store, restaurant, or tiny Government desk, simply do not want to be told how they can simplify or make their duties more efficient. They want you to Butt Out. At the higher levels, this hostility is absolute. No ancient British Colonial practice of writing in ledgers or issuing tiny stamped receipts can be or will be ever abandoned. True, computers are arriving, but they simply add one more level of entry and receipting. Suggestions that time and money could be saved are invalid. Similarly, when the Post Office or Lake’s Grocery provides marked parking spaces, for many of Anguilla’s macho males pride says not to park between the lines.

Of course, in Anguilla, no one yet shoots you for telling them where to park, though there is a recent well-documented event where a macho fellow offered to chop off the arms of someone who turned off his 200-decibel auto boom box. Compare daily life in, say, Kabul, where guns and shooting are a way of life. There, regular attacks are mounted against hapless soldiers on duty to pacify and assist the Afghan Government govern. The latest is that the Mullahs are furious at the U.S. and friends for preventing the killing of that hapless fool who converted from Islam to Christianity and then went home to Afghanistan. Preachers in Anguilla are much more kind and loving, but there is still much hatred of any imposition of British standards on moral issues (e.g,, homosexuality).

The total mess that is Bush’s Iraq evidences the hatred of any foreigner telling Iraqis of any stripe what to do. By now, it is quite plain that all the Iraqi sects unite in hating the Americans and the Brits even more than they hate each other. Frankly, it is plain that the population of Iraq well deserved Saddam, and indeed were probably generally better off with him than they are today [generally, not entirely]. He was their own dear vicious dictator. Are their armed religious gangs better now? Are there fewer mass murders? Not so as you could notice.

We suggest that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, yes, and Blair be sent to Anguilla to live for six months. There, without the vicious habits of the Iraqis or the Sudanese, in an atmosphere of fine religious tolerance, they will learn that the foreigner who tries to rearrange the lives, or even the tiniest daily details of life, of a relatively peaceful population will be told in no uncertain terms to Butt Out. In this world, no one wants to receive instruction, good or bad. Just Butt Out. And go home and tell that to the UN.

Next time: WorryWorry [OO #649]

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