Accidents of Chronology

Exactly 28 years ago, there was terrible accident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in the USA.

And what's the significance? Sweet fuck all, except that it's March 28th today.

Likewise the 200-years-since-the-abolition-of-the-slave-trade fandango which has been wall to wall on television for the last week. They've even made a really bad film about it. The cherry on the cake was a service at Westminster Cathedral, which proved too much for one man who interrupted the proceedings and shouted protests.

I don't blame him, and would likely have joined in, had I been there.

At first the whole breast beating bullshit looked like another exercise in white middle class people finding something else to be guilty about. Maybe it's more than that, though. Keep the public eye off Iraq for a week or two, perhaps? It's just the sort of numptyism which would fit the bill. "We stopped the slave trade 200 years ago! Hooray! Aren't we nice people?"

Never mind that slavery had become uneconomic to British colonial interests, and that criminalising the trade gave "us" a nice big stick to beat competitors like the emerging USA. Never mind that, because it can give you simultaneously a feeling of vicarious horror on behalf of the victims, and a nice warm glow that "we" put a stop to it. And cosy controlled feelings are far more important than historical and present economic realities.

Well, ok you might say, what's wrong with numpties getting a little warm glow now and again. Nothing, really. But an organisation in Manchester called Carisma which seeks to give young people meaningful things to do, and thereby not get involved in shooting one another, was unable to run a course for community leaders this year because "this year the Home Office said any qualifying project had to have an element marking the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade." No doubt the kids in Moss Side will lap that up. A lot of them are black, after all, and should be jolly grateful to William Wilberforce, what?

What a big pile of shit. Meaningless anniversaries can bugger up real lives.