Sex And Violence Ancient And Modern

This image was published in the Sunday Express 8th October 1972
shows Mary Whitehouse as God, and Lord Hill, then Chairman
of the BBC Govenors as Moses, prostrate before her, makes play of the idea
of  her making her way through the tide of depravitry that the BBC broadcast,
the thilthy waters of which she parted - for her  to tread a clean path through.
 The filth would cleave and retreat as she stepped forward, afraid of her.....

 The image is from a 1973 book of the scripts for 'Til Death Us Do Part',
 one of the BBC programmes she liked the least. In my twentnies I read
The Old Testament, and I used to joke to my disbelieving parents,
who were small c conserative, 'It is full of sex and violence'
which it is - the violence more than the sex, I had to look harder
to find the latter. I still read the book today, but less for the shock value,
or the renewing some feint old hope of being freshly scandalised.    

 

In This Age Of Unoriginality

Through the reinvention of corporate theft
I wonder how long it will take, before
the corporate recycling will meet itself,
coming back from it's previous thievery?

When it does, what will it recognise,
given how vanity does not recognise itself? 

Nobody's History

As the world draws closer to a stage
where the ill will that leads towards war
proves irretrievable I notice a new tactic
from thos who seek to dircct thoughts
that will lead to adversarial behaviour,
a new varition on 'throw the stone
bu hide the hand [that thre it] after'
at first allow their enemies to quote 
what they say, accurately direct from the sourcs,
then change the way of engaging with the public
to allow words to be recorded but without attributation.

So the words exist and leave their mark
on human behaviour but who said them
and when they were said freshly anonymises
the new chapter in the history of human conflict
as if some lived and many died, but nobody
alive now knows why, or who it all starterd with.   

The Partial Attention Span Economy

Not only do I start to read fewer books
than I once did, but I often don't finish
what I read either. It could be, to quote
the writing on the work house clock,
that 'The Time is Short', where the urge
to work, whether my work is at words
or at the physical labour of the sort
the clock once encouraged, is no longer
as urgent in seeking achievement as it once was.

In my new self I lapse from the standards
my older selves once set. I like who I am now,
much more than who has led me towards  being that person

I am less drawn in by past and present day versions
of the partial-attention-span-economy
that misses the point it once attempted to make.

Open Thought

To underthink something
is less about approaching the subject, or idea,
with so weak a formal agnda that it is formless, bare,
much more that the idea is strong but spare, and open....

To underthink something is to let the idea breathe,
and allow the idea to follow the tide of the air
through it's natiral course, nearer it's concluson,
like a river undiverted where the only dams
are the barriers that get set up by Mother Nature..... 

Forty Years Before 'Animal Farm' Was Pubished,

amid the clamour and noise of WW2,
there was another alegorical novel
that drew on how country life was torn
by division and strife, which also used animals
to illustrate human politics.
 - 'The Wind in The Willows', by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame used animals to describe the class system,
just as much as George Orwell did. But where Orwell
aggressively divided his animals via different tasks
which amounted to a managerial theory for how a farm,
or enterprise, might be maintained without a owner,
Grahame's book was a responce to the then-new threat
facing the Edwardian social order - where historically
the aristocrat protected the peasant. The threat came from
the newly urban peripatetic peasnts who saw socialism
via the redistribution of land, as the solution to their unrest.

They saw themselves less as upstarts, more signs of new growth
 - part of a new eco-system, that was drew from the old,
which it would in time replace. In the end the upstart weasels
in the book were defeated, as were The Labour Party in real life.

The old order of Toad in charge,
Badger Ratty and Mole as his friends,
when he wanted them to be, was restored.

The old feudalism won over the calls for wider redistrobution
and restored it's hidden divisions and mutual denial, fit enough
to defend itself against future challengers. Wherever they started.....   

Second Hand Health And Safety

I like my present day neighbours, I really do.
Neighbours who can agree with each other,
whilst being from such differnt backgrounds
are a 'win - win' particularly when they share the prizes....

Even so differences can be divisive, particularly when  
I can admire, but I cannot quite follow, their ideas,
on health, safely, and risk.all of which depend on a wealth,
education, and life chances, that my head can't get around.

But when the space makes us all slightly looser,
for a little drink, I can be honest about how rough
some of my life was, without me sounding like
I took too many wrong turninings for my health,
wealth, and sense of safety, being so second hand.