Giving 'Em Gip

Returning to reality from my dream the other night - in the ancient land of Egypt - famous for the Sphinx, the Pyramids, the Pharaohs, Moses and Joseph - there has been an uprising of the people against its long-serving Pharaoh President, Chesney Mubarak O'Barmy. (This must be true: Beeby See and her strange fly agaric-swallowing stablemate Guardy-Ann have told us all about it.) Rioting has been taking place in the Old Bazaar in Cairo; costumed thugs and uniformed bandits have been clashing with hordes of protesters. It’s not been pretty, and feelings have been inflamed to fever-pitch.

Mubarak O'Barmy has ruled over the region with an iron fist for millennia; the long-suffering natives have recently woken up to the realisation that they don't have to tolerate heavy taxation and other forms of ill-treatment by the president and his self-serving political henchmen – not to mention the legions of diversity co-ordinators, pigeon psychiatrists, costumed thugs, cat license administrators and fish quota accountants, who have wallowed in the riches of Croesus while lashing the natives with bullwhips to make them more co-operative, productive and poor. It’s a strangely delicious irony that Edweird the Milliner and his fly agaric-led Redistributionist Faction were until recently devoted ideological supporters of Chesney Mubarak O'Barmy and his Egyptian Peoples Faction. They’ve recently distanced themselves from them. Funny, that…

But – shrewd political operator that he is – Chesney Mubarak O’Barmy has been using the predictable ‘Divide-and-Rule’ trick, and has managed to gather a small, but influential and well-paid crowd of khat-chewing, hashish-smoking devotees to rally to his noble cause. The consequence of this is that there have been clashes between the protesters and these self-serving sleazeballs noble patriots, who have dutifully been knocking seven bells out of each other.

I’m glad that the Egyptians are making a stand against their oppressors; they’ve suffered injustice too long, and I wish them well in their struggles. But I worry about them, too. Despots like Mubarak O’Barmy use cruelty to keep the lid on various evils – some of which are likely to be worse than they are. When Pandora opened the famous box, all kinds of fleas, flies and fevers escaped, and once released they couldn’t be caught and restored to their original container.

Egypt is famous for the plagues that befell it in the Bible account. It’s also renowned for its flies and Gippy Tummy. What fleas, flies and fevers are waiting in line to plague Egypt if Mubarak O’Barmy crawls down his exotic bolthole with his ill-gotten gains?