Exclusive to this site, August 24, 2001
Over a three-year period, Saddam Hussein claims to have given 28 litres of his own blood that served as ink to write a 605-page Holy Book for the new Mother of All Battles Mosque in Baghdad (National Post, August 17, 2001). This means that 20 pages were written with each litre of Saddam’s blood, or 0.05 litre per page.
Not surprisingly, the Baghdad regime is not better at blood-writing than at missile-firing, or, for that matter, at feeding the Irakians, even if it seems efficient at building mosques and palaces. Dr. Mike Ackermann, a physician in Sherbrooke, N.S. – who is also incidentally the president of the St. Mary’s Shooters Association – calculates that we should need no more than 0.01225 litre of blood per page.
Now, this makes blood-writing within reach of a small democratic state like Canada. For, after all, our politicians are at least as willing to sacrifice themselves for their people as the Irakian leader is.
The main problem is that our equivalent of the Holy Book is a bit thicker, and a new one is written every year: 5,000 pages of new laws and regulations are adopted every year by the federal government alone. Writing these with a politician’s blood would have great symbolic – and, as we shall see, practical – advantages. Using Dr. Ackermann’s technique in order to economize our human resources, only 61 litres of blood would be needed to write a one year supply of federal laws and regulations.
My proposal, then, is that all laws and regulations of 2002 be written with a politician’s own blood. Of course, we want to choose a politician well known for his selfless devotion to the public good. But who? There are so many of them.
Jean Chrétien would seem the natural candidate and I, for one, wouldn’t fight the idea to my last drop of blood. But we can find better: Allan Rock, this man who had the guts to criminalize several million law-abiding Canadian firearm owners, before taking on 6,000,000 smokers. What a courageous man!
Assuming that the production of laws and regulations is spread evenly over the year, 0.17 litre of blood per day will be required from Mr. Rock.
The first advantage of this proposal is that Mr. Rock will be happy to continue sacrificing himself for the public good. And a politician’s happiness should count in the social welfare calculus like everybody else’s. Tyrants are humans, too.
The second advantage is that the Canadian statists will gain an official martyr. For, according to Dr. Ackermann’s estimate, Mr. Rock would unfortunately pass away at the dawn of the 19th day, after having given 3.2 litres of his blood to write 260 pages of laws and regulations. National funerals would be held in Miramichi, in an incense smoke-free environment.
The third advantage, for the rest of us, is that we would be spared, during that year, 4,740 pages of laws and regulations.