From the earliest times of the institution later known as ‘Asylum’, those incarcerated as designated ‘mad’, or not conforming to the concurrent mores of society, became the objects of public gaze, ridicule, even amusement.
Viewing the perverted, the non-conformist, the madman, was famously at its most overt at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, latterly known as ‘Bedlam’, where the insane were subjected to the gaze of mawkish onlookers and tourists whilst shackled to the walls whence they could not escape and harm the good citizens.
By one of those happy twists of fortune, the buildings and site of the former ‘Bedlam’ later became the Imperial War Museum, where the contented citizens, beneficiaries of the longest known period of European peace, could gaze mawkishly at the exhibits of non-conformist war mongers and genocidists, no longer shackled to the walls, now preserved behind the newly discovered Perspex.
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where the prisoner never knew whether he was being spied upon at any one moment, but must always be sure that he could be so, was believed to instill self discipline in a population of non-conformists. The sense that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. To know one is being watched carries with it an uncertainty that becomes a source of anxiety, discomfort and terror… Who is watching? Why are they watching? What will they do?
This morning, a co-conspirator has e-mailed me the above picture, direct from the latest bastion of conformist land, the hypocritical, politically correct land of Denmark. This is a country which is currently host to some 16,000 delegates, activists and reporters, flying in from all corners of the world, incurring a toe curling 40,584 tons of carbon dioxide according to a UN estimate – or roughly an entire years output of 30 small nations, as they seek to persuade us with grotesque TV ads of Polar Bears falling out of the sky, that our love of air travel is killing the world.
Since 1970, air travel has increased from around 383 Million passengers a year, to approximately 2 Billion. A five fold increase. The choice of Polar Bears to illustrate the supposed harm this is doing to the planet was a particularly unfortunate one, for during the same period, the numbers of Polar Bears clinging pitifully and photogenically to ever decreasing ice floes, has also increased five fold, from 5,000 to 25,000! If we are going to spar with statistics, I am prepared to take up a position that says air travel is good for Polar Bears.
I digress. In the midst of this hysterical global warmist fest at the feet of the great Goricle©, an enterprising Danish company has managed to combine Bentham’s theory of self discipline, the global capitalist’s love of profits, the ancient art of displaying dissenters – pour encourager les autres – and the ‘Green and clean air’ theory.
That is no small feat.
I give you the latest Perspex display booth, intended to house that specimen of the art of slow suicide, scourge of Western Governments, pilloried and vilified by the politically correct and the Nanny State, displayed in all its glory for the amusement of the watching, humourless, carbon dioxide belching, ‘holier than thou’ activists.
The Smoker’s Booth.
Slap in the middle of Billund Airport, Denmark.
Watch him shrivel, watch him cough and splutter, point your finger, watch him die if you are lucky.
Coming soon – purpose made Perspex booths to display ageing Grannies, autistic nine year olds, bankers, off shore account holders, wife beating husbands – all the superfluous detritus of our brave new world.
Shame and Display.
©Anna Raccoon
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An unconventional approach – what’s wrong with having smokers huddled around the entrance in the pissing rain?
The plexiglass smokers’ booth … ! Alas nothing new and indeed utterly humiliating. Years ago I dispatched one of my assistants to Singapore; a heavy smoker just like me. Therefore I had compassion with the poor guy as he was heading for a 36-hour smokeless travel and a 5-day stay in a city where one gets beheaded for throwing a cigarette but onto the footway. So I bought him nicotine pats [which were not reimbursed by my customer as they were not foreseen in the budget
] and hired 2 local hostesses for him, counting on them being able to point him the way to places where he could smoke. They did. There was ONE restaurant, where one could smoke: in a transparent one-person booth in the MIDDLE of the restaurant! The food was bad and he didn’t smoke ☺
Hell, at least it’s impervious to the weather.
Ever get the idea that there has been a hysterical [engineered] over-reaction towards passive smoke?
There’s a slightly bigger one of those at Bangkok airport.
Full of people just off a 12 hour fag free flight, it looks just like an inexplicably square grey cloud.
My travelling colleague, an avid smoker, point-blank refused to ever go in there. He preferred to wait another 12 hours to get to Australia.
I don’t care. Shove over and pass the ash tray.
Dalaman (Turkey) had one 2 years ago, albeit slightly larger about 10ft square, 1 chair, 1 ashtray and 50 people (with luggage) trying not to set fire to the person next to them…
I shouldn’t worry about being seen. Give it 24 hours and the tar will be running in rivulets down the perspex to such an extent that anyone with voyeuristic tendencies will be sadly disappointed.
binlid
As these get bigger because of demand the question will become who is watching whom.
I do agree with Sabot remembering the number of times I traveled in what was supposed to be the smoking section of the plane only to be told I couldn’t smoke my pipe yet there were people with foul smelling cigars allowed to.
Here’s a novel idea – if you can have small, self-contained, ventilated units like that, why not have one big, self-contained, ventilated unit, that could house 50 people and call it a “Smoking Room”? No non-smoker would have to go into it and everyone would be happy – you could even have them in pubs, or is that just too outrageous for words?
“Ever get the idea that there has been a hysterical [engineered] over-reaction towards passive smoke?”
A little bird (or should that be mole?) once told me that, when the Scottish Parliament was introducing the smoking ban, they consulted 32 reports on passive smoking, only 6 of which concluded that there was a link with health problems – now, if you were buying something new, would you ignore 82% of the available evidence and just accept the 18% which told you that your choice wasn’t a crock of s***e?
Nail on head, Vimes. They used to call them sin bins!
Now what is the psycology behind making them in perspex and putting them in the centre of a busy thoroughfare?
I think I already answered my own question…
Anna,
I’m fascinated by your suggestion of a glass booth for wife-beating husbands.
The booth in the photo is perspex so that people can see cigarettes being smoked – so will there be one where I can watch wives being beaten?
Having spent most of the day under aerial bombardment by the jets presuambly preparing their pilots to be killed in Afghanistan, all in our good name of course, I would find one of the units suitable for my current MP. Having been told already by him that all this disruption is necessary to train ‘our boys’ for Afghanistan why can’t they go without training – they’ll be killed anyway if this government has its way!!
re: humiliation as entertainment – i saw an episode of “school of silence ” on BBC in which small children were placed in stocks, verbally abused by a man in military uniform minus trousers (!) covered in various buckets of gloop, and under orders to remain silent whilst being monitored from afar by a woman in an office.
WTF?
Vimes: “when the Scottish Parliament was introducing the smoking ban, they consulted 32 reports on passive smoking, only 6 of which concluded that there was a link with health problems”
Sounds about right. Here is a comprehensive list of peer-reviewed studies prior to UK smoking bans. Out of 63, just nine showed a minor statistical danger (more than double that suggested a protective effect). Hardly a base for the quite ludicrous current hysteria.
Nice analogy, by the way.