MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"

MANJIT

by Kevin Carey

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It is with a deep sigh of exasperation and resignation with which one observes the sheer other-worldliness, the surrealism --- often creative but sometimes cruel, the absurdity packaged as sagacity, which constitutes the Californian (one hesitates to use the word "outlook") view of social relations.

Confined to the liberal arts this exaggeration establishes a favourable comparison with the populist philistinism exhibited by Mayor Guiliani of New York over the exhibits of Damien Hirst, but applied to criminal legislation it amounts to an enshrined hysteria which the U.S. Supreme Court should have the power to overturn.

I have in mind particularly the Tyler-Jaeger Act which makes nonsense of the judicial function by establishing a mandatory 25-year sentence for any person who uses force on a child of eight "likely to cause great bodily injury". Discounting the absurdity of "likely to", the draconian inflexibility is staggering, making equal both an act systematic child torture and the miserable tantrum of a teenage babysitter.

Thus it was that the agonised, castrated, Judge Kennedy found himself with no leeway in sentencing British Sikh Manjit Basuta to 25 years for (not having been in court I have to accept the evidence regardless of the supposed grounds for an appeal) shaking a child so ferociously that it died.

Those with a news addiction, for nothing else can justify such neural commitment to trivia, will recall the tabloid cause celebreof Louise Woodward, a white British nanny who was dealt with much more humanely through the good offices of a Massachusetts legal system much further from the British than the British is from the Californian. During the Woodward trial and afterwards the British media, including, shamefully, our BBC, supposedly committed to high-minded public broadcasting, heaped abuse on the judicially most courageous entity in the world and all but concreted television cameras in the local hostelry where Woodward had been wont to sip the odd glass of inferior white wine, whilst the public set up a "Fighting Fund" for the benighted child and tied yellow ribbons round the trees as if she were a cherub basking in the unearthly light of the Angel Diana.

But, then, Baby Matthew was not white, so it wasn't quite a murder, whereas Manjit, being non-white, must have been the wickedest murderess that ever lived and surely deserves to die.

This aspersion is only indirectly cast on the comparable legislatures, there being substantial evidence that Judge Kennedy would have pronounced a much lighter sentence had he the means, but my paraphrase accurately summarises media coverage of the two cases.

Admittedly, the British have a penchant for legislated hysteria which grows apace, but even then one might have expected some outcry over Tyler-Jaeger in comparison with the Solomonic codices of old Boston; yet there has been nothing. For all the chidings of the new, self-defining progressive political establishment, a racist nation is reflected in media so ingrainedly racist that the BBC is part of the collusion.

It is not just in our criminal reporting that we are subjected to this corrosive undermining of racial equality. Admittedly, there is a certain grim humour in such headlines as "Jumbo Jet Disaster: 350 Killed: Tulsa man scratched."

But there is a grimmer algorithm behind this macabre self-centredness. How many Bangladeshis in a ferry disaster is equal in value to one white American or Western European who falls under a train? And how many Bangladeshis have to die in the ferry disaster willingly inserted to fill a gap on Saturday, to make it into the Tuesday bulletin? Would I even have heard of the fireworks factory disaster in Mexico which killed more than 50 people had it not been a very light news day?

Put the other way round, why should I hear about any of these criminal cases or everyday disasters?

Surely the point of individual cases, if they have any point at all, is that they illuminate some general matter of proper, as opposed to prurient, public interest.

It ought to concern all Americans, for instance, that the legal systems of California and Massachusetts are just one manifestation of a country whose citizens are subject to a level of legal inconsistency which might have been tolerable in the days of horse drawn transport but is simply absurd in the age of the automobile and the airline.

There should, too, be concern on the part of small businesses in the United States that the supposed free trade of NAFTA is being infringed by corner-cutting on safety in Mexico.

It is more difficult to see how the serial reporting of crime and disaster unconnected with public affairs can be justified as news and can only be classified as the unscrupulous mutilation of the respectability of "news" as a genre in order to rifle yet more gratuitous cruelty, violence and private mishap into the schedules.

In Britain at least - an American retort would be invaluable - public broadcasting, particularly as manifested in the BBC, has lost its nerve; it is incapable of setting the news agenda based on the lapidary principles which its Charter requires. Last week the flagship news programme of the Corporation, the Today Programme, was granted an interview by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Rather than framing his own questions, the Doyen of all political interviewers proceeded quite openly and unashamedly to lift his questions from the most right-wing newspaper in the country, starting with a flurry on the stupidly narrow issue of hunting foxes with hounds, a subject which no doubt gratified those starving, addicted and desperate in our worst ghettos. For, in truth, there are many in this country who will struggle for the right to kill a fox and, paradoxically, demonstrate against the treatment of veal calves but who will not lift a finger nor a dollar to help the tortured, the homeless and the starving of their own or any other land. In Britain a dog can expect better treatment than a political refugee.

Bearing that in mind, a little subliminal racism is hardly to be wondered at.

KEVIN CAREY is a writer, broadcaster and social entrepreneur. His interests range from the relationship between information technology and social exclusion and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. He is the director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a politcal theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet.

Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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