TMOs - Thaumaturgically Modified Organisms… could be pretty ugly.
Seriously, though, Cut-Me-Own-Throat isn’t at all like Moist. Moist is always getting in over his head, and thrives in that environment. C. M. O. T. thrives as a street peddler, and often gets into things over his head, but always fails and falls back to street peddling. Vetinari knows better than to put him in charge of anything more than a handcart.
They dont have that issue much in the UK.
Police corruption in general, including beating and torturing confessions out of people, was covered extensively in Night Watch and is alluded to elsewhere (mostly in the context of “things Vimes will not tolerate”).
Wasn’t this Night Watch?
Paul Simonon would disagree.
Also LKJ.
And no, before anyone comments, it’s not just an 80s problem.
Yeah, our forces may not have reached the depths of US police but there are more than enough deaths in police custody (to say nothing of racial disparities in stop-and-search, etc.) for an angry satirist like Pterry to take it as a subject.
But yeah, Night Watch and Thud! have, between them, addressed corrupt policing and the struggle of a good policeman not to cross the line with respect to use of force.
This line of thinking did get me thinking about the Windrush scandal (our immigration services are so riddled with racism that they have been deporting British citizens as part of standard policy) which is something I would love to see Vimes let loose on, but I don’t see it working in A-M because the traditional Ankh-Morporkian approach to each new wave of immigrants is not to expel them but to let them in in order to better economically exploit them, or at least sell them a sausage inna bun. Dwarves, e.g. were the victims of prejudice in MAA but not from the city government. As long as people pay their taxes, keep the bersek axe-charging to a reasonable mimimum and don’t summon eldritch horrors from the beyond, the Patrician, the Watch and the Guild Leaders don’t really care.
In short, in A-M you will find werewolves, dwarves, trolls, angry coppers, wizards, aristocratic dragon wranglers, talking dogs, talking gargoyles, assassins, clowns and a man with a duck on his head. But you won’t find a government sending its own elderly, sick citizens to die in a foreign country out of a zeal to cleanse the populace because that would be ludicrous.
In general, it’s tough to use Discworld to satirize government actions, because the government (as personified in Vetinari) is so extremely competent.
Jingo dealt with immigration, more in the first part.
Yes, good point. So it has been done, with the focus on popular prejudice rather than institutional. As Chronos says, Pratchett, benign technocrat statist that he is, didn’t write a government that lent itself to satirising state incompetence or corruption.
Very true. The late Discworld books were, if I may dare to say it, getting a little bit too “comfy” and utopian, I thought. You have a supremely competent and (mostly) benevolent dictator, generally honest policemen, and even the archchancellor of UU is ‘Genial Old Ridcully’, unlike his mad predecessors…
Oh, I weirdly first read that as “hottest policemen” and figured that yeah, Angua qualifies. (Well, sure, first thing is she’s a fictional character, second is that she could so easily remove my trachea, and then there’s her boyfriend who would give a severe look and then most civilly extract my guts for garters, as the expression goes.)
Remember that Terry grew up in a constitutional monarchy which, on the whole, works pretty well. I see no reason why Carrot couldn’t be King but with very little direct power (just like The Queen). His abilities as a leader are well established and he could take care of all that “I name this place Dame Sybil Hospice” and entertaining the neighbouring leaders as well as ‘persuading’ the rebellious youth to play football instead of beating the crap out of each other.
Angua would make a really good consort too.
Remember what he thought about kings.
Quote by Terry Pratchett: “Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many...” .
Well quite. It’s not only that Vimes loathes Kings and the effect they have on the populace: Carrot has been offered the opportunity to claim his “rightful” place on the throne and turned it down because he can see that while his charisma and deceptive simplicity work really well for a humble policeman, they would be disastrous in a King. He doesn’t think he should have that position; Vimes doesn’t think anyone should have that position; Pratchett agrees with them both. There’s a difference between growing up in a system and approving of that system and I think it’s pretty clear from everything Pratchett wrote about monarchy in Discworld what his actual opinion is.
I suppose that you could say that Pratchett took the British system one step further: Ankh-Morpork has a king, and benefits from it, both in having someone to inspire the people, and on the rare occasions when you need someone to put a sword into a stone. But the power of the King is so circumscribed that he’s not even officially acknowledged.
Of course, it’s also clear from Pratchett’s work that what makes Carrot king is not the particular circumstances of his birth (which are, after all, not completely known), but the belief of the people. Compare to King Terrence of Lancre, who was coronated in Wyrd Sisters.
Excuse me, the word is crowned.
People shouldn’t mistake Pratchett’s fiction writing for his IRL personal opinions.
Real republicans don’t accept titles.
But Mr Vimes’d go spare!
Of course an author’s characters don’t always express the author’s opinions. But I don’t believe that Pratchett was just writing stories for giggles and profit. Gaiman describes him as a very angry man. Seems to me that he was writing out that anger, and trying to do something useful with it. Pratchett’s books don’t just make you laugh, they make you think.
He accepted one that pretty much amounted to a medal, not to power.
– I’ll grant that also Vimes did accept becoming Duke, under pressure. I hadn’t made that connection till right now. – no, the timing’s the other way around.