This Blog Is Taking A Rest.....

Please enjoy the interval music from Terry Riley on piano, and his son Gyan Riley on guitar. 

Marxism Today (2)

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, 
finding it everywhere, 
diagnosing it incorrectly 
and applying the wrong remedies.". - Groucho Marx

Shark Food

Who knew that slave traders
cared so much about life in the sea?

When slavers carried so many slaves
across the many oceans of the world
and kept them in such a poor state
that they knew that a quarter of 'their stock'
would die of illness and malnutrition
before they reached their destination.

The sharks could smell the sickness
on the ships from a long way away.
They were patient for when the dying
and the dead,
about whom they knew nothing,
but had their own natural self interest,
were due to be thrown overboard.

Since it was well known
that slavers 'had souls'
but slaves, for being owned,
did not, the latter had no need
of any parting ceremony
before they were disposed of.

The slavers and the sharks
that followed the slave ships
were surely both very happy
in their mutual efficiency
with how they processed human life,
though the role of the sharks
take in this story makes them
the  most altruistic of the two.

What else were dead bodies at sea for?

Riots'R'Us?

Without the communal leadership
set up securely before they start
riots are rarely the rocket boosters
that blast democracy further
that our media tells us they should be.

Riots become the most sharpest way
of addressing the oldest grievances,
but in peacetime the ongoing battle
is always cultural much more
than anything else.

The most powerful campaigns
re-balance civil society from within,
and achieve this without the erasure
of the previous version of history.

The gradualism of these campaigns
means that they are rarely credited
with what they actually achieve.

This is why I'll do what I do,
but I'll never expect the credit
.

Silent Alarm

Between the virtue signalling
and the dog whistle politics
denying what they mean
I find it best to keep as quiet
as a statue of a former national hero
that is now under metal covers,
hiding from the riots around it.

The Measure Of Idiocy

In a competition to find the biggest idiot
the most idiotic people of all
would have to be the judges.

Who else would know enough
about the rules of the competition
to adjudicate with the wisdom of fools
well enough to make the wise
avert their eyes in despair?

The prize for winning the competition
would have to be the means
of the destroying the planet
disguised as 'good government',
in a representative democracy
which was openly laid waste to
by twitter and television
for all to watch and see.

Too Many Cold Callers

can wreck your telephone, and still leave you annoyed.

Mr Humbug?

I'd rather have virtue
then be seen to be virtue signalling,
in the same way that I would want a life
more that than I want to be absorbed by a lifestyle
designed for me by some corporation for their gain.

Where form empties out content
then humility and consistency will leave.
My disbelief in what I am caught up in
will be ignored whilst I am seen to be Mr Humbug.

Dialogues For The Deaf

When sarcasm passes for truth
more easily than sincerely meant enquiry
that is how we know that our mass media
has taken one too many shortcuts to be truthful,
and they are leaving behind who they report to
in the Gadarine rush to get the best headline
because that what raises their advertising revenue.

It does not matter that anger at racism
is quite rightly righteous, it is plain wrong.
Nobody needs add their false self to prove that.

But when we close the space where our doubts
about the best solutions might be shared
we lose the place where we can hear others and be listened to.

The Poor Man's Science Fiction

Since I have lived in isolation
porn has been more of a temptation
to me than I expected them to be.
At times it has felt as if sexual images
were some sort of odd proof of life,
an infinite intimate engagement.

If I wish to resist the images
I have to learn to believe
that the reduced language
and tiny palate of ideas
of engineered submission
and physicality of 'power'
is science fiction for people
who don't want to read
who have ceased to want
to be spoken for.

The Good News

Is that other futures, and present times, are available.
But only if we move away from the circular logic
of making dystopias for others that we then
get thoroughly caught up in, ourselves.  

Marxism Today

There is a lot of sadness
that I can't do anything about.

If I focus on it too much
then I carry the feelings
that I know do me no good
and do not change the world.

My respite is remember Karl Marx
'History happens first as tragedy
then it repeats itself as farce',

If I look back to the first times
of a particular event they become the original,
but by now well worn, tragedy.
When it is repeated become farce.

Whatever the bathos of an event,
with how the farce repeats itself
this proves that the worst that can happen
is that we are the butt of a cosmic joke.

Survive that and we can survive anything.

The Old Faux Stoicism Problem

And the problem is never just that men limit themselves
to an emotional range of faux stoicism and anger.
It is that they expect everyone who is not alpha male,
and who is by circumstance pushed into depending on
these so called alpha males, into thinking that behaviour
based on this narrow and distant emotional range 
is how all world leadership is meant to work. 

The House I would Like To Live In

The cloud storage would be literal, rather than digital.
I would live much more lightly, and the birds
could come and go through the place.

The biggest downside would be
that I would have no escape
from my immediate awareness
of the pollution of the planet.

The Unassailable Argument

Irony is impossible to openly disagree with.

Either the ironist never says what they mean,
or says that they always meant something else
or else the ironist simply wants to say nothing,
for fear of talking too much about themselves.

A thorough ironist closes down the space around them.

  

How Wrong Was George Orwell?

The vision of the future
was not going to be
'to imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever'.

The vision of the future
was going to be the filmed asphyxiation
when the policeman put his full weight
behind his knee on the neck of his victim.

That would be the final confirmation
of the human death, from within.

---------------------------------------------

Before there were armies
there were hunting parties
and nature was their prey.
The detachment of the hunter
from what they preyed upon
was now 'the new natural'.

The evolution from hunting to militarism
is merely to change the target;
the advantage will be for the men
who's army wore the biggest boots.
That is the root of the emotive detachment
of the military-industrial complex.

The bigger Big Brother grows
the less he knows
how big he is
or what he is doing.

Picture Set Of The Month - July

Devised by Fraser Muggeridge and Jeremy Deller,

This simply designed limited edition poster ran to 1500 copies. 

It soon sold out and raised funds for the support of refugees 
and asylum seekers who were resisting being made homelessness in the UK.

Thank God for a message that does as good as it says.