The British. I'm going to post tomorrow, but I went today to the Guardian and was rather shocked that Jeffrey Archer is going to prison.Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Political chancer with lots of fizz Notice that none of the conservative bluebloods have the guts to stand up for him, except for John Major. Hey, I think Archer's politics are contemptible, and his wonking around with the press - his lying in court to extract libel money from the tabloids - is, obviously, the kind of thing you must deal with by extracting some comparably ruinous sum from Archer. But why send the guy to prison? Not that I think he deserves some special immunity from the cell - I believe that most imprisoned folk, from drug users to forgers to drug dealers, would be better dealt with outside of prison. The monstrous machinery of the penal system does little good to the people inside it, doesn't compensate the people they have damaged outside it, and serves mainly as a monument to the state's own fatuous sense of power. In fact, it is people like Archer who are always urging that people be sent to prison, which is why I am directing this comment at his comeuppance. The guy committed 'perverse' acts with a prostitute, and then made her life miserable when she revealed this. Well, that was bad. By all accounts, the first trial was a farce, and if anybody is really to suffer for it, it should be the judge who presided as a sort of caricature of John Bull stupidity over the proceedings.
Now of course Archer is receiving the vials of press indignation - a mass outpouring of moral harumphing that is truly indicative of a class that seems to have long memories of tutors equipped with canes keeping order in Latin class. Give him a whack, pull down his breeches. Well, do, but send him off to jail for four years?
What is truly sad, however, is that so few of the people who so ostentatiously palled around with him stick with him in adversity. Like, say, Dean Acheson stood by good old Alger Hiss.