Non olet?

Digging up a sewer line outside our septic tank, the smell - coupled with a general dislike of certain occupations - somehow conjured up in my mind the clean-cut image of President Statin (or Pulin?), who breezed through the recent Beslan atrocity without seemingly getting his hands dirty.

In fact, he appeared strangely detached, such as when he fleetingly brushed the arm of an injured child in hospital without actually looking - perhaps his demeanor betrayed his years as a secret service operative when it was paramount to blend into whatever background available.

Yet there was something deeply sinister about his unemotional bearing during the hostage crisis, and his subsequent grab of further wide-ranging powers triggered a horrible suspicion in this habitually paranoid brain:

What if the increasingly dictatorial president had orchestrated the whole affair, sacrificing hundreds of innocents merely to reinforce his claim that his regime alone could crush any rebellion? And to up the ante, as it were, he warned that he was prepared to strike - as
President de Gaulle had once famously declared - a tous azimuths...

There were certainly many unexplained glitches and strange facets to the initial siege, including at one stage the roof of an annexe appearing stripped of its tiles in one TV broadcast shown in the Antipodes one day before the botched assault had got underway. With Statin, sorry, Pulin, at the levers of the media machine, we will never know all the details of the hostage horror.

And the only terrorist captured alive seemed spaced out and drugged when paraded before the cameras.

Prove me wrong, Tovarich Putin, by allowing Russian and foreign media to analyse every scrap of your disastrous policies!

And energised by this impossible dream, I went back with renewed vigour to chipping out shitty mortar, hacking through the old pipe, cementing in a new section complete with T-junction - which the pump-out contractor had clumsily ripped off with his big suction hose before he departed with a $A165 cheque for his troubles...