30 March 2007

Bad fences

One of the most common complaints that the British have about Americans is that they have "no sense of irony". I try and point to folks like Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken but they generally find that insufficient evidence. However if American's are not consciously ironic many find it impossible to live their lives without unconscious irony.

Let us take the case of Golden State Fence Company executives Melvin Kay Jr. and Michael McLaughlin. Their company, one of California's largest fence construction concerns, had worked on, amongst other projects, security fences on the US - Mexican border that were designed to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing over into the United States. Obviously the unintentional irony is that a large portion of their employees were illegal immigrants. The two aforementioned executives have now been sentenced to house arrest, over 1,000 hours of community service and probations for their part. The company has also been banned from government contracts and forced to make significant numbers of staff redundant, presumably the illegal ones.

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