Nature Is Closed For The Forseeable Future

Legislation That Seems To Have Been Inspired By An Episode Of The Simpsons Part 512: Arnie 'I'm As Stupid As I Look And That Takes Some Doing' Schwarzenegger has come up with a new solution to California's budget deficit. That's the budget deficit he was elected to solve and which has now grown to $26bn. He's proposing to shut down virtually all California's national parks. Terminate them, if you will.

Now, I'm a little shaky on the American national parks, but I gather that they're not quite like the British ones. They're the only rural places where people are allowed to wander freely, the rest being private farmland with no rights of way. Arnie is basically wanting to close nature.

Two thoughts come to mind. One is that Californians are going to get really fat. Even fatter than they are now. That's what happens when you deny people the chance to exercise. So if obesity starts to suddenly rocket, for once McDonald's Ginormous Size Burgers (or whatever) won't be to blame. It will be Arnie and his superbly chiselled body. The other thought: how do you shut down nature anyway? I guess there are two possible things Arnie could do. He could simply fire all the park rangers, close down the information centres and let the areas become wildernesses again, free to man and beast. Or he could put whopping great fences around them all and shoot anyone trying to get in. Arnie is a member of the Republican Party. Which option do you think he'll choose?

Some of the many criticism of the plans say they are short sighted on economic grounds. Closing the parks will stem a revenue stream for the state, however meagre. Unfortunately I think Arnie is less myopic than people suspect. He will be left with a great deal of land doing nothing, costly to police but much of it in spectacular locations. How soon before he starts accepting bids from developers looking to build yet more Exclusive Executive Housing? And even if California decides in the future that it can reopen the parks, the sold land will be lost forever. A plan worthy of C. Montgomery Burns himself.

Yet Another Gate

So that's this week's Grand Villains sorted out. The group who excite days of inflammatory headlines, public – i.e. media – outrage, chin-stroking analysis and calls for regulation, castigation and annihilation. I'm surprised there's anybody left. After expense-fiddling politicians, greedy bankers, crooked TV companies, women in burkhas, children in hoods, worshippers of Islam and (time after time) asylum seekers comes... the print media. The ones who always lead these moral panics. There's a whiff of the French Revolution here, the original persecutors ending up on the guillotine themselves. Though it's rather less bloody, of course, and much, much duller.

Basically, the claims go, the News of the World hired a legion of Philip Marlowes to bug and burgle assorted public figures. Then, when the figures found out, it paid them thumping out-of-court settlements to stop the cases coming to light. Which they have now anyway, largely thanks to the hush money paid to PFA head Gordon Taylor. The BBC has been gleefully leading with the story, probably still sore from the kicking which the NotW gave it over the phone-in scandal and the Queen docu-fiasco. The motive of the Guardian, which broke the story, is slightly different. “Murdoch's £1m bill for hiding dirty tricks” bellows the headline, and phrases like “Murdoch executives” and “Murdoch company” appear throughout. Nobody has yet profited by going after Rupe, as Setanta has just discovered, but the Guardian clearly thinks it worth another shot.

What stands out, as is so often the case, is the absurdity of it all. Gordon Taylor is one of the few high-profile union leaders left and so a hate figure for the NotW. There was conceivably an effort being made to destroy him. A couple of politicians, Tessa Jowell and John Prescott, were also bugged. But so were two agents, Sky Andrews and the egregious Max Clifford. The paper wasn't conducting an investigation into the secret mechanism of Britain here. It wanted gossip and tittle-tattle. Surely it could have just made all that up, as it usually does? Instead, though, it paid a lot of money to private investigators and a lot more to camouflage their actions. Even with Murdoch's funds to draw upon, this is a shocking waste for an industry supposedly in crisis. There is also similarities to the great scandals of the 1990's. From Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Archer, what got them was not the original act but what they later did to hide that act. If everyone wasn't so damn cautious all the time there would be a lot more happiness around.

Anyway, the journalists have been exposed by the journalists. We know how it works now. More papers will probably be pulled into the miasma. The whole industry will don a hair shirt and promise to reform itself. A great many self-righteous articles will appear; Gordon Brown will fire off some pompous sound bites and maybe appoint someone like Alan Yentob as Journalism Tsar. And then the next Grand Villains will appear. Personally I'm hoping for the novelists. They're too smug by half. And they must have done something. Everyone has; which is why these calls of outrage are always so shrill. Get your torches, you vengeful mob, and head off to Bloomsbury.