I was not there when 'freedom of speech',
always an uncertain and incomplete ideal
slowly became monetised, a licence to hate.
Where media balance went out the window.
And the most cohesive communities were built
on cycles of delusion and disappointment.
But here we are, in the latest war on hope,
hoping that whoever loses will be there
to start another war on hope, many wars later.
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| As the statue of this man surely proves. I am unsure even that this reader is where facebook says he in, somewhere in Finland. But books, and being widely read, is a reassuuring lifebelt for a better life in a world all at sea, if not awash, with language, particu;arly when our media shares with us about how the unread we are and unready to know how to act before the storms of poor planning that can asssail them, where we get as careless with our words as we get with the people whose lives depend on them. |
The world is one big can of worms,
where all too many of them
have too many stories to tell
to grab other worm's attentions.
I share mine and you tell yours
whilst the wealthiest worms
gain more traction for further wealth
by selling their stories in media time,
in media which they own, whilst
formatting other worm's stories
tc provide the worms of the world
with far more words to digest, and feed off,
before like many stories we all get recycled.
From the days of the printed press,
my days started with reading the morning paper
my world still started with 'the media',
though such talk was way too posh
for the people I knew, noshing down
their reduced vocabulary, where
we did not recognise as 'reduced'
the words we used to seem normal.
Five decades on from the Red Top press
as my daily diet of once new information,
the landscape I now track has changed,
beyond all ability to comprehend how it is different.
The media before me divides the world it presents
between people who 'emit' who they are that day,
and people who 'receive' who other people are.
With little awareness that that is the role they are cast in,
in a media world of where one sided communications
are misdescribed as weak attempts at reciprocity.
When power is the fact that we all acknowledge
the weak become the audience for the powerful
who hold court on the world as if that is their role.
What the weak have to decide is when the strong
are talking to themselves more than anyone else.
Having decided that, they can end the audience,
and spend more time listen better to each other.
In IIndonesia the season of 'Musim Sampar' is approaching,
which translates as 'the rubbish season', when the monsoon rains
flush the plastic waste off the land, into the inland rivers and streams
where further water pressure pushes the waste towards the beaches
and into the seas.There the rubbish diisrupts the tourist experience
of clean beaches sparkling waterfalls and seas where what is meant
to move most are the multi coloured fish, when you can see them
through tides of plastic rubbish being taken further out to the sea.
There was a time when Indonesians lived less by convenience values,
and produced less waste which was more biodegradable. But the plastics
manufacturers have taken to making purchaces more convenient for the tourist
which spoils their journeys the tourists take. Manufacturers have no interest
in an economy of recycled waste, where for a little less luxury tourists
amd manufacturers coiuld do a lot more to defend the non-human diversity.
I can remember during the time during the second golf war
where the nearest I got to incisive comment with my friends
was to quote Sir Henry Wotton (1568 - 1639) who at the start
of the reign of King James wrote in Latin 'An amabassador....
is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country',
not that long after Machiavelli's 'The Prince' was covertly
circulating around the Papal palaces. Now the world is on
it's third and biggest bout yet of the major destruction
of the Muslim middle east. And yet again the media led
imitation of diplomacy travels abroad to every country,
by sattelite and microphone, and boy is it tiring to listen to
quite so many half truths expanded by commentators
to tired journalists who are paid to avoid asking for the truth
in sharp tongues from leaders we once expected to know better.
The world's poor are the only ones not in their own coach
on the great gravy train towards comfortable oblivion,
and just like the wealthy they know the allure of comfort.
For the rest, the imitation of piety and religion are popular,
where what we imitate will not deliver us
from becoming parodies of who we might have been,
trapped within our language and our lack if reciprosity.
The smaller the mind of the man
(it usually is a man, even when the man
fronts a faceless corporation) that occupies it,
The sooner his empire require more subservience
from the poorer - mineral rich countries - of the world
to pretend to support it whilst they hide what they think
behind circular repeats of hollow sounding 'diplomacy'.....
