Crocodile Dundee

Let the poor chumps sell their stories! The prime minister is a poodle, his cabinet is stuffed with New Age thugs, the opposition is in a constant sexual panic and the Lib Dems are simply silly. They’re all neck deep in batshit. There cannot possibly be bigger laughingstocks. Their concerns over propriety are ludicrous. The fiasco is their existence. There is no possible harm coming from any of the sailors’ stories. Even the bloated vanity of the politicos is safe.

-Scruggs

We'll place this under the category: Dr. Capitalist: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Decline of the West. It's a continuing series, really, on the common derangement among the most loquacious defenders of Western Civ, who haven't found a ruin of a value-edifice that they wouldn't raze. Every hostage is endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights among which are the right to read cue cards into a camera and to profit mightily from his ordeal. His character-shaping ordeal. His life-changing experience. His harrowing encounter, through which he rediscovered the values of family and faith. Yes. Cut. Print.

It's like the poor guy David Hicks--an Australian kangaroo-skinner for chrissakes, as if it could get any better than that, who got convicted in, wait for it, a kangaroo court--who's now been shipped back to his homeland, a curious irony indeed given its penal-colony origins, and who's been forbidden from profiting from "his story." Well then it's not really his, is it? Rather, the story such as it is belongs to the government, hell, to the community, and that seems to me a strange circumstance in an ostensibly capitalistic society. Australia produces a wannabe terrorist, and Australia gets a monetary reward for it. You can see why I find myself sympathetic to the anarchist argument. Consider that gang-banger, whatsisname, Snoopy Tokes or whatever, who went to jail for killing a bunch of people. He did what every wise felon does: he found Jesus, and he found a literary agent, likely not in that order. Why not a kangaroo skinner? He might have wanted to kill someone, but so far as we know he never actually did. He already flipped from Diamond J to DJ Moho. Send him on some sort of chain gang walkabout, let him discover the aboriginal holiness of Ayer's rock, repent of his terroristic ways, start a youth ministry.

That, friends, is the Western Way.