A gold mermaid sofa

Both the church and the army have a taste for bling. Bishops and dictators will have you believe such extravagance is for the glory of god or the state, but I suspect it is really because self-aggrandizing men (and a few women) subscribe to the sophisticated principle best articulated by the Daily Mash: shiny thing make it better.

One sign of change in Libya is that the gold mermaid sofa which belonged to Colonel Gaddafi's daughter can now be openly and safely ridiculed. Marina Hyde adapts George Orwell's famous observations on the goosestep: "a gold mermaid sofa is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army". She goes on:

Bin Laden understood the terrible threat of people laughing at him, which he deemed a fate worse than death. Death he was ready for, he would often say, but in 2006 he admitted in a taped address: "I fear to be humiliated." As well he might. It is incredibly difficult to fight ridicule.

Especially if that ridicule is combined with philosophical insight, as in the very wonderful Jesus and Mo cartoons.

It may be no coincidence that these two tendencies – of the church towards dogmatism and the army towards militarism – have both generated huge quantities of fear throughout history and led to censorship of all kinds. One has the means of inflicting pain in the here and now while the other promises pain in the supposed hereafter (although the church also used to be quite handy with the thumbscrews, to help you make spiritual progress).

Shiny things tend to be expensive, of course, and in order to pay for them, you either need to do useful, productive work, or be in a position to coerce whole populations into supporting your projects. Both the fear of God and the fear of a bullet work wonders in this regard.

In his contribution to the 2011 Secularism Conference, Nick Cohen stressed the importance of combating fear if we want to maintain our modern, liberal, secular society. Poking fun at gold mermaid sofas is not what he had in mind, but the freedom to do so certainly is.

Random Joke #4

An Arab sheik says to an American tourist, “Mr Smith, your wife, she is beautiful. I have to have her. I will trade you her weight in gold.”

Mr Smith says, “Give me a few days.”

“To think it over?”

“Hell, no. To fatten her up.”