Good Samaritans, Celebrity Nonsense, West Bromwich Albion

 

The Fugitives,
  Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)
Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC By-NC-ND]

                                     

In Arizona …, a jury was unable to reach a verdict on Scott Daniel Warren, a college lecturer accused of conspiracy to transport and harbour migrants after providing them with food and shelter.  He faced up to 20 years in jail. He may still do if there's a retrial.  

Meanwhile in Sicily, Pia Klemp, the German captain of the boat Sea-Watch 3, was charged with assisting in illegal immigration after rescuing migrants in distress in the Mediterranean. She, too,

faces up to 20 years in prison.

Warren and Kemp are the latest victims of a disturbing trend that has gone almost unnoticed: the threat by the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to put on trial anyone who provides rescue or humanitarian help for migrants. 

An investigation by the website open Democracy suggests that over the past five years at least 250 people in 14 European countries have been arrested or charged for providing food, shelter, transport or other support to migrants without legal papers.

…In both Europe and America, the authorities claim that aid for migrants acts as a “pull factor”, increasing the numbers willing to risk a dangerous journey. The idea that someone treks across the Sahara, through war-torn Libya and into a rubber dinghy to brave a sea that has become a graveyard for at least 30,000 others attempting that same journey, on the off-chance that they might meet a rescue ship, or sets off on an arduous march through Central America and faces the perils of a life-sapping desert because they are convinced they will find a jug of water at the end, stretches credulity.

…The authorities are deliberately seeking to erase the distinction between people trafficking, human smuggling and acts of solidarity; to suggest that providing food and water, or rescuing someone from drowning, is of the same character as coercing people across borders to exploit them as forced labour or sex workers. It’s a perversion of the legal system and a warping of our moral sensibility.

…Yet so successful has been the anti-immigrant agenda of recent years that there is barely a discussion of such practices. It is important to resist the criminalisation of solidarity, not just to defend migrants’ rights but also because it is corrosive of civil society and, in the words of the lawyer Frances Webber, helps outlaw “decency itself”.

(Kenan Malik, The Observer, 2019)

Thou shalt not be a good Samaritan. Thou shalt not help the helpless. Thou shall not
do the right thing.

                         
Celebrity Gogglebox

Feast of Fools,

 Frans Floris the elder (1517-1570)

Photo Credit: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust [CC BY-NC-ND]

…We have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that celebrities are fundamentally more interesting than the rest of us.

… But at the risk of sounding like my parents, I resent our flagrant endorsement of rich people just not doing much. Such lazy enterprises exist only to line their pockets, and those of their agents, their publicists, and hundreds of reality talent bookers. The viewer comes last. It is an industry eating itself.

…I already know too much about celebrities from a subscription to Heat in my formative years, and now my mind is filed with information I never asked for, from Twitter, Wikipedia and the radio, all dripping into my consciousness about people I don’t care about.

…I suppose I could avoid it all by turning off. But whatever would I talk about then?

(Sarah Carson, The i, 2019)

 Turn them off or just change the channel. 

“But whatever would I talk about then?” Sarah, I’m sure, you can talk the hind legs off a donkey. Can’t you?

West Bromwich Albion

Old Man Cooking, 

Andrew Colley (1859-1910)

Photo Credit: Pannett Art Gallery [CC BY-NC]

…Frank Skinner, a long-suffering supporter of West Bromwich Albion tells Four Four Two magazine that he was once at a dour and frustrating home match, which they lost 2-0, near the end of which an announcement was made over the address system that the wife of one of the season holders had just given birth at Sandwell Hospital. There was a round of applause and then the man in the seat next to Skinner remarked: “Poor bugger. He’s had to sit through this lot, and now he’s got to go home and make his own tea.”

(The Times, 2019)