Filibustering As Life

The  first rule of Fascism is to talk
at length about everything except Fascism.
The first rule of Communism was to take
evidence against everybody,
for use against them later,
and lie heroically about how the state was founded.
The first rule of a democracy is to talk
about choice until the electorate
no longer know how to think, choose,
or even breathe, without the direct
intervention from the corporate/nanny state.

Christmas Shopping Can Be A Stressful Experience

Der Simpl: Kunst, Karikatur, Kritik
 with thanks to  interior with mirror

I Live In A Ghost Village

where locally there is no work
and not much community,
not even a public house or meeting place.
The houses are here merely because
they had to be somewhere.
What life here is proving to me
is that where there is life elsewhere
there is noise, sound that is conflicting
and random that parallels the random conflict
inherent in human attempts at life.

Nearly all that noise is generated electrically,
and entertainment is distraction regenerating itself.
What the white noise discredits is how outside of it,
in the organically generated quiet,
there is so much more happening
than people are able to hear.

With Its Rising Walls

and 5000 years of self belief,
in spite of so many enemies,
Israel is the worlds largest
and oldest gated community.
Its strength comes from
the original gated garden. Eden.
Such an eternal pity then,
that like every community
where biology is destiny-
backed by force, that the force
defines the lack of empathy
through which it sucks the life
out of it's neighbours.

The Secret Of Preserving Youth

in old age is to loosen stiffening humors, with laughter.
If we can't laugh with our selves, we can't humour others,
and a life without laughter is the beginning of rigor mortis.

My Third Christmas Card Of 2012

Erich Buchholz, Untitled, 1920
 (printed 1984) with thanks
 to interior with mirror

Wake Up Through Work

And if you let your dreams
 lead your work ethic then
 it might be lighter work.

Proof Of Life Is Hard To Find

Centenarians are often interviewed for television news.
They are asked when they reach their 100th birthday
'What  is the secret of your longevity?'
I would like their answers to be more than talk
of some minor peccadillo. I would prefer them to mention
the health service they rely on, the reliability of their community
or family, the profound simplicity of their philosophy,
as if living slowly was living more fully,
and greater age has expanded them.
I would also like the camera to level with them,
and be still, so they can look clear eyed into the lens
as they speak, as if what they said mattered.

But the perhaps light entertainment
is the wrong place to look for proof of life.

Cars And Votes

'Democracy' is one of those words
that should have a warning in front of it,
an impediment equivalent to the red flag
that slowed down the earliest cars.
Cars and votes both suggest a sense
of individuality/autonomy that needs
to be more qualified then it usually is.
Whether a large car or a block vote,
both put the brakes on transparency
and co-equality in representation.

Small countries adapt democratic ideas best.
Their size makes them homogeneous
and diverse enough that the polity can cohere
around 'the community' which is usually singular.
Social mobility works best when the extremes
of wealth, poverty and status, are limited.

The larger the country, the more community
becomes communities, detached.from each other,
the more wealth numbs it's holders and puts the greed
into agreed, at the expense of all connection.

The Recipe For War

Take a region with several weak governments,
who are covertly co-dependent on each other.
Add to it a strong international armaments industry,
and out all of the above form several rebel factions
who consistently disagree with one other.
Blend so they constantly catch against each others
local values, in a self-tightening Gordian knot.
Finally spice it up with some late
and fatally weak shuffle diplomacy.
Then wait for the inevitable natural disaster
where the weakest die and next weakest
flee as refugees across the nearest border.

Apply The Red Cross,  Doctors Without Borders
and other charities as sticking plasters
over the whole sorry mess and make promises
/pledge lots of money. But take no further action.

Never Enough

If you live for having it all
you will never have enough,
and other people will always
have too much of you for their comfort.

Existentialism For Dogs

With thanks to brainpickings

Is This Where Extinction Started?

And once we started pointing there we could not stop
ourselves pointing everywhere. So not only has Heaven
 shrunk and divided itself, from our pointing at it, but
 everything on earth we have pointed at since, except
 our own species, has shrunk too. Shrunk beyond
 our capacity to measure. Reason is the tool that
 shrinks all it touches, including itself.  

Equality Made Easy

How I Feel On My Best Days

With thanks to dangerousminds. As if any
 human mind was safe for living. For an alternative
 version of this illustration click here...

The Emperors Old Clothes

Any society that is deaf to its whistle blowers,
sidelines it's prophets and shoots disagreeable messengers
in the foot, out of mere loyalty to the present oligarchy
is sowing the weeds of its own demise.
For as long as the regime enjoys being sold
as the emperors new clothes,
it makes every day the emperor's birthday.
Belief in the party is contingent on flattery of him,
relying on his telling lies in plain sight to the whole
wide world as he nakedly presses his suite
on his followers.

What will happen when the emperor loses office?
When he has to put on his old ordinary clothing?
Power will affect its holders, and is rarely kind
to those who, having clung to office, leave it behind.

Soft Hearts, Sharp Tongues

Saints were renowned as triggers for healing
in the lives of their followers.
Saints were conduits, 

their untidy lives birthed miracles.
Their imperfection was what allowed
the hoped for, but unexpected, to happen.
As the saints' lives were falsified through hindsight,
so the miracles attributed to them were glossed into hagiography.

Not everyone with a soft heart, a sharp tongue
and a talent for untidiness will become a saint.
Very little of what we do today will become the means
for hoped for but unpredicted, which miracles appear to be.
But from here, and for now, I will practice my imperfections.
If I am patient for the fruit they bear,
then without any over-neat account of my life
I too will find a yield of my disorder-
my private communion with the saints.

Armchair Christianity

This chair comes as one of a set of three,
 and the seat of the Faith is one
 that you can sit down in, to enjoy.

Misremembrance Day In America

But instead of the above you can
always have the human cost of resisting
propaganda, which remains as constant
as the price of eternal vigilance . 

The Uninclusive Society

Any Society can build on how it threatens others,
and how it fends off threats too.
But to build fears out of fantasies,
however old or new,
 is to be hoist on one's own petard
and lose all your grounding.

What is 'Love'?

I don't know but I have experienced
what it is like when one person walks
into the life of another from out of nowhere
and they both find that their lives
never worked as well before.
It was a good start for me, well worth
trying to repeat, with variations.

E Plurbus Unum

The higher you climb the more 'democracy' means earning enough
  to make legal tax avoidance a profitable international pursuit,
 whatever the country. The more government costs
 to run, the more the process of setting a vote up
becomes about restricting the questions the voters
 can publicly put to their putative leaders......

My Third Christmas Card of 2012

With thanks to interior with mirror

 

Headlines And Soundbites

I dislike elections, not because I don't or won't vote,
nor because the candidates are insufficient
to fix the difficulties their voters face,
though some candidate's weaknesses are obvious.
It is more that the media mediate the consultation
process because now nobody else can.
They continuously supply headlines and sound bites,
with a regularity which is meant to reassure us.
I dislike how the press buttress the inadequacy
of the candidates and avoid thoughtful analysis
of  how government might work differently.
The press make meaningless all sense
of the value of thinking who to vote for.

Optimism With Charley Brown

Of course this has been the taxation and spending
 plans for the western world for the last thirty years.
 But when the futures we create become the problem
there is only so far anyone can run....

Voting Advice

But you knew that already, without me saying so. 

Now Wash Your Hands

However much we wash our hands to clean them
they remain dirty. As the above shows
our choice comes in measuring the dirt
 and aspiring in our awareness to choose the level
of dirt we can live with. 

On All Saints/All Hallows Eve

what we celebrate is so suffused with commerce
that it simply can't be true, the least we can do
is to make our altruism more genuine.

The Dark Light Laboratory

With it's positive knowns, logic, and affirmation
of the nature of Nature science seems
to be the light of the modern world.
But what dark light is behind it?
Man is so clear about otherness to himself,
yet so unwilling  to know the path his own race.
With its view of  human history and religion
as 'an irrationality', from which it exempts itself,
secular science is surely, merely, a fresh twist
on Manichaeism where the cosmogony is reversed-
knowledge of otherness is the material of  light,
and spirituality, built on faith, is the darkness.
The division between the two remains as of old.
The stewardship of seeking the knowledge
of other species makes Man to retreat from himself.

Idleness And Resolve

New Definitions

-counselling is the new vampirism-
only those with the spleen to spare need seek it out.

Signs Of Greater Age (9)

It is a sign of greater age
that whilst being mildly entertained
by some sporting diversion
you find the simulation of spontaneity
that you used to enjoy has morphed
into some tired dis-simulation of humanity.
The lesson being that to be awoken,
by waning interests requires an older process
than you would have wanted to credit possible.