Asking the chicken for help

OPINION: At this time of year it is customary for a columnist to try to peer round time's corner at what awaits us in the months to come, writes Joe Bennett this week.

To help me in this task I consulted one of two gifts that the dog and I received at Christmas.

They were contrasting gifts. I got a copy of New Scientist magazine. The dog got a rubber chicken. The magazine was packed with learned and lucid articles about such matters as global warming. The rubber chicken was a rubber chicken. The choice was easy.

"Rubber chicken," I said, "I wonder whether you could help me," and I prised it from the dog's jaws and sat it on the desk in front of me. The dog relinquished the chicken reluctantly. When bitten in the chest area the chicken makes a noise that is meant to resemble a rooster crowing but sounds more like the departure of the last few pints of bath water. The dog enjoys the noise very much.

It is a rubber chicken of the traditional, vaguely obscene design, but it has been titivated. It has been given a fancy hairdo, a football moulded to one claw, and the name David Peckham. The dog, poor thing, appreciates none of this excellent humour. All the dog knows is that when you bite David Peckham he groans.

"It seems to me," I said to David Peckham, "that you are a most representative rubber chicken. Indeed I think you are a symbolic rubber chicken.

"You were manufactured in China. That makes you in your own small way a symbol of the current economic world. Colossal quantities of money have flowed in recent times from the declining west to the rising China. In the opposite direction have gone colossal quantities of rubber chickens and other gewgaws. The result is an imbalance of trade. The West is in debt. China's in clover.

"The same thing happened a couple of hundred years ago. Back then the British resolved the problem by starting the Opium Wars, one of the more despicable episodes of their history. Do you think, rubber chicken, that something similar is in the geopolitical offing right now? That the waning States, in particular, will seek conflict as a way out of debt? It is after all the pre-eminent military power, just as Britain was in the nineteenth century. Few nations give up pre-eminence willingly."

The rubber chicken said nothing.

"OK," I said, "may I suggest that you are not only economically symbolic but you are also culturally symbolic? You are a frippery. You serve no purpose beyond temporary amusement for a dog. Only a wealthy society that already had more than it needs could have brought you into being. You represent, rubber chicken, the hamster wheel nature of acquisition, the shopping mall world in which he who dies with the most toys is deemed to have won.

"But that is far from all, rubber chicken, for you are no ordinary frippery. You are a celebrity frippery. You have been decked out to resemble a famous person. Much has been written about the cult of celebrity, but I would suggest that you enshrine it better than any words by being hollow.

"In the light of which, rubber chicken, I wondered whether you have thought of standing for high political office in 2010? Don't scoff. You are mildly amusing and you have a face that people recognise and warm to. These are more than adequate qualifications. The confusion between celebrity and worth is so complete that actors are now constantly becoming governors and presidents, while governors and presidents are increasingly resembling actors."

The rubber chicken said nothing.

"Very well," I said, "let us move on to a matter on which the writers at the New Scientist have much to say, the matter of global warming. They state, and I have no reason to doubt them, that the world is incontrovertibly heating up. It cannot be proved that human beings have caused the warming, but it is probable that we have. And we would be wise to do anything that we can to limit it because the consequences are almost certain to be catastrophic. A good start would be to limit industrial emissions produced in the manufacture of such things as rubber chickens got up to resemble David Beckham. And yet at the recent conference in Copenhagen, no such decision was reached. The rich countries were simply reluctant to give up what they had. Tell me what you make of that, rubber chicken. What lies ahead? Will we fiddle with rubber chickens while the planet burns?"

The chicken did not reply. Nor will he, I'm sorry to say, ever do so. For this afternoon the dog and I played a game of tug with David Peckham and his head came off.

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

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