The G7 nations met recently in Paris to try – without much success -
The G7 nations met recently in Paris to try – without much success – to forge an effective counter- terrorism strategy.President Clinton has just signed legislation sponsored by Senator Al D’Amato of New York, and previously passed unanimously by the House of Representatives, that imposes sanctions on foreign companies which invest in oil in Libya or Iran.The idea was to warn off European oil companies. But this week Turkey’s new government has announced it will build up Iran’s oil industry by buying no less than $20bn of oil. Does anyone really imagine that, even if the governments of Iran and Libya were to be vaporised tomorrow, the problem of terrorism would disappear?What about Syria, for one thing? Damascus, too, has supported terrorism in the past. or even military action.For years terrorism has never quite left the headlines. Events such as the Lockerbie bombing, the bomb attacks in the Paris Metro, the sarin gas in the Tokyo underground and the bombing of the New York World Trade Center have kept it there.Now the issue is moving back to the top of the diplomatic and the political agenda.There is a widespread fear that the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island was caused by some kind of terrorist. the United States.
The point is not that Americans have a double standard when it comes to terrorism. In recent years they have done a great deal to help the British authorities bring IRA terrorists to justice.It is that terrorism is at once older, more widespread geographically, ideologically more diverse, and far, far harder to eradicate than you would gather from some of the proposals for stamping it out by economic sanctions.
The only trouble was that for the British, terrorism meant Irishmen; for the Americans, it meant Arabs. When the American experts talked about the need to deny terrorists their safe havens, their British counterparts were embarrassed The haven for the terrorists they had to deal with was … A dozen years ago I went to a conference on terrorism at one of those country house conference venues It was very high-powered. The heads of the CIA and FBI were there, as well as the heads of Scotland Yard and the then-still-mysterious MI5. In a short, fantastically funny novel, he has resumed and explored a debate that has generated so much hypocritical space-wasting in newspaper columns, we might almost have been in danger of growing weary of it. Fiction, in Ben Elton’s hands, proves infinitely more capable of a succinct and intelligent handling of the argument.HELEN STEVENSON. For anyone else – read it, memorise bits of it, and be glad Ben Elton exists and that lesser talents didn’t have to invent him.
Copycat crimes are cooler than straight ones and TV channels have a ratings interest in convincing us that the ”film creates reality” connection exists, with film setting the style. Thus a news item can, with impunity, double as an undercover snuff movie.There is so much brilliance in this novel that a short review can hope to do little more than paraphrase the theme for people like, say, world leaders, directors of TV channels, film makers or heads of police departments – people who are maybe just that bit too busy and important to read novels. Wayne may be a bit imprecise in his administration of justice, but he’s extremely precise in the execution of his plan for his and his girlfriend’s ‘’salvation”. By taking Bruce, the Playboy ”actress”, Bruce’s ex-wife and his daughter hostage, and getting Bruce to debate the ”do violent films create violent societies?” argument on live TV with a gun to his head, Wayne hopes to persuade the entire TV population of America that he is the victim of a society that glamorises murder and should therefore be allowed to walk – like OJ Simpson and Lorena Bobbit before him Et ego victima sum And if the film is a killer, TV is a vulture. In the drawing room of his ”fabulous Hollywood home” the killers are waiting to congratulate him on his triumph.
He’s a bit down about his acceptance speech, a masterpiece of parodic brilliance from Elton, but anticipates a considerable pick-me-up from his pick-up. By the end of the novel he’s been knocked for six, and it is part of Ben Elton’s complex achievement in Popcorn that we are not entirely sure whether or not he deserved it.After the Oscars party Bruce comes home with a Playboy model. He’s right to be feeling a bit defensive – there are two killers out there, Wayne and Scout, a young couple who appear to have taken their inspiration from one or all of the 57 murders shown in his smash hit ”art” movie. I take what I want in order to create what I like.”
You can feel that Bruce’s wicket is sticky with the blood of potential victims here. He also has an appointment with a killer, but he doesn’t know that yet
On Coffee Time Bruce is tough and fun.