Cheese or Democracy

This is probably one of the oddest questions I've ever been asked, so I should have fun writing up my answer.  Question 2: Cheese or democracy - which would you go without for five years?

Of course, the good responsible citizen's answer would have to be "go without cheese".  To say that you value your toasted cheddar sandwiches above your political freedom would be to disregard the sacrifices of those who... um... sacrificed stuff, to earn the vote for the rest of us, and so on and so forth, blah blah blah.

But that sort of logic (while sound and patriotic) doesn't make for a very entertaining blog post, does it?

There's a case to be made for saying I can actually choose to keep the cheese, and it goes something like this: in between elections, we seem to have relatively little sway over our government.  We can jump up and down and complain that something's a terrible idea, and they just push it through anyway.  T. Blair was pretty good at that, as you may remember.  So with the current fixed-term parliament, you could argue that we're more or less going without democracy for five years anyway.

Besides, cheese is integral to lots of other things.  You can't have a Staffordshire cheese and bacon oatcake without cheese, because otherwise it'd just be a Staffordshire bacon oatcake - which is still good, but not as good as the version with cheddar in it, in much the same way that a sponge cake is good but a sponge cake with jam in is better.  You can't have Wallace & Gromit without cheese, because Wallace's love of cheese (and his consequent propensity to make rash decisions for cheese-based motives every so often) is one of his most important character traits - after all, their first adventure was all about going to the moon to get some cheese because the moon's made of cheese, wasn't it?  And that leads me onto another important point: the moon is (at least allegedly) made of cheese, and therefore to go without cheese for five years would mean spending those five years without moonlight, and without any tides, which in turn would wreak havoc on the marine ecosystem (how can a turtle come to lay its eggs on the spring tide, if there aren't any spring tides?), and thereby possibly set up a domino effect leading to the collapse of all life on earth.

Therefore, on balance, I think I might actually say "go without democracy".  Even if I only do it for the sake of the turtles.

I'm deeply curious as to how Tim will vote on this one!


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- The Colclough