It's All Right Everybody - God's In His Heaven

One of the most cynical pieces of text ever written is: "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." It ranks alongside: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth", and both maxims are written from a position of power and are designed to keep the less privileged in their miserable, holy-ordered place. The intention was to ensure that the poor and dispirited – the servant classes – would not try to climb out of their gutters and attempt to upset the comfortable existence of their educated masters. It's deplorable that such arrogant and contemptuous manipulation was carried out under the disguise of godliness by those unsaintly tyrants, but so it was for centuries.

I was reminded of this iniquitous behaviour when I heard a track from 'Fiddler on the Roof' on the radio the other morning. Ostensibly, the lyrics to this song ("If I Were a Rich Man") are meant to amuse us – in fact, they are somewhat condescending in the way they mock this simple peasant man and his rather crude ambitions of how he would display his wealth if he had it – but there's also a subtle cruelty within those words. I'm talking about the bit when the character reaches the end of the verse, and cries out to the Lord in questioning despair:

"Would it spoil some vast eternal plan...
... if I were a wealthy man?"

I don't know if the writer intended this line to be sung with such heartfelt humility, or whether it was just Topol's interpretation of it, but if ever a man displayed his own insignificance within the pitiless authority of the 'World Order', this is it. There's a kind of rage in there too – a fury against the injustice of God's power and the helpless condition that so many people like this plain working man were expected to endure (and still are). Topol might just as well have sung the words: "God, you're such a selfish bastard" and indeed, if God existed, he would be.

Of course, we are further reminded of such inequalities when we read of the recent vices of our dearly-beloved elected leaders. We are expected to understand, to forgive, and almost to pity such cretinous liars as Margaret Beckett when she declares that she made an erroneous expense claim because she was simply "too busy" to check the details. Try telling that to Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs if you're "too busy" to complete all the details on your tax return; or try telling that to the benefit hounds if you're a single mum who was "too busy" to inform the authorities that you have a part-time boyfriend who sometimes buys treats for your kids.

It's a disgrace, so it is. However, if the bible should happen to be correct in its predictions, and the kingdom of heaven really does belong to the meek and the poor, then we can all be damned sure that our snout-troughing MPs won't be inheriting it, that's all I can say.

Filthy, cheating, slimeball, grabbing bastards – the whole lot of them.