Save Me…… from the torture of musical extortion and the failure to capitalize on its potential for world peace

Two significant things happened this week which got me thinking. And after only a few minutes of furrowed-brow cogitation, I realised the incredible link between them and its potentially earth-shattering implications.

For a start, for the first time this year we got the fan out of the cupboard as the temperatures in Seville hit 35C during the day and 27C at night. Unusual for early May.

Secondly, the trials of five alleged September 11 attackers began at a top security US Army court room at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

There is a link, I can assure you.

You might well be thinking that my brain works in a funny way. I mean, after all, I did manage to find a connection between Star Trek baddies The Borg and Andalucian society and culture two weeks ago. Far-fetched it may have been. But it was well thought-out, skillfully analyzed and incredibly insightful, even if I say so myself.

So this week, it was frankly a piece of cake for me to see the amazing link between what appear at first glance to be two of the most unconnected events ever in the history of the world but also the far-reaching ramifications this link has the potential to create. You see, you’ve got to look at these things from a different perspective. And once you do that, the thing that links the two is obvious.

It’s an accordion. See?

Ok, maybe I need to fill in a gap or two here and there just so the picture is a bit clearer. I appreciate my mind works in very lateral ways sometimes, but I figured that was just down to the fact that I’m special. Or something.

Anyway, when the weather gets hotter here, more and more people sit outside at cafes and bars, eating and drinking late into the night. But with this turn in the weather, and the dusting down of our electric fan, comes too a menace which has remained essentially dormant for most of the rainy and cold winter months.

It is the plague of the wandering street musician. The man who spots a crowd of people outside a bar quietly talking and minding their own business, then rolls up with his tiny portable amplifier connected to a car battery, both of which are balanced precariously on an old, battered, metal suitcase trolley, and then proceeds to serenade the reluctant diners with the same crap song he’s been playing a hundred times a day at a hundred different cafes every summer for the past ten years, before going round every table demanding money for the privilege.

You don’t get a choice. You have to listen to it, whether you like it not. You can’t even pay him to go away. He just takes it as a sign that you like what he’s doing.

Me and the wife had the deeply unpleasant pleasure of this form of torture at our local café on Wednesday morning when a bloke lugging a scratched and ancient-looking accordion, cranked up the decibels right next to our table. There was nowhere to run. I hadn’t paid for the drinks yet and I still had a piece of half-eaten toast on my plate. It was terrifying.

In this way, the accordion player is very much like the CIA, who have openly admitted torturing the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in order to get information out of them.

Ok, the CIA torture their victims by water boarding them, that delightful activity where you pour water down the throat of the victim to give them the feeling they’re drowning. While I’m clearly not equating the enforced listening to a crap accordion player as being anything like on the same level as water boarding, the principle – and the fear - is the same. You can’t get away, you don’t know when it’s going to end, and you feel compelled to give him something when it’s finished in the fear that it might all start again.

Now do you see?

So how do we tackle this twin-headed monster of evil?

Media reports said this week that the Guantanamo detainees had refused to answer questions and had disrupted the court proceedings over the proven claims that they had been tortured, that the information they had given was under duress and therefore inadmissible in a court of law. Their protests have so far fallen on deaf ears. The hate between them and their captors only multiplies.

The accordion player knows he has a captive audience. He knows he can strike at any time, without warning and that his victims will be so tortured that they will feel under duress to give him something in the clear knowledge that their protests will only make him do it more. Our hate for him only multiplies too.

So you see, torture achieves nothing. As Martin Luther King once wisely said: “Hate begets hate. Violence begets violence. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. The chain reaction of evil must be broken or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

So here’s my plan of non-violent attack. We send the accordion player to the CIA and force them to listen to him, so that they can gain a sense of empathy and ultimately see the pointlessness of torture, as using it automatically loses you the moral high ground as well as the hearts and minds of decent, reasonable people. As a result, America’s aggressive foreign policy changes, prompting al-Qaeda to put down its weapons, after which Israel and the Palestinians realise it’s all been a waste of energy and embrace each other and even North Korea says enough is enough and proposes a reunification with the south.

Simple, isn’t it.

That, or I fly a plane into the accordion player’s house.