And Breathe Out?

Christians have been lambasted
for their unscientific stupidity
in these Covid 19 times,
which have laid waste
to the liberal consumer economy.

But what disbelievers of Christianity
don't take in is how Covid 19 strikes
at the very symbols that the faith is built on.
E.g. How the tactility of a hug shows
the depth of a personal greeting.

If  our lives are founded
on how God breathed into us
then how can it be that our breath out
has now become so poisonous to others?

For believers it is like having to re-learn
what 'The Fall' means, all over again
-an infinite immovable existential angst
which is more than 'A mental health problem'.

Those who disbelieve say they follow science,
and yet their science has little effect on politics,
society, social status, and how we are made
to spend our money are all made to work.
All have a contrarian logic built into them. 

Without the right to be contrarian
societies shrink, and we feel trapped
by our new inconsistency,
when we should have known
that society could always be like that.

My First Christmas Card Of 2020

An art deco design created in 1930 by Edouard Benedictus
(1865-1930) the man who rather more usefully
invented safety glass, glass that does not shatter
when it breaks, not that he knew what it was going
to be used for in future when he invented it. 
  

 

Mental World Health Crisis; A News Update

Following the process of the latest US election
now being final and complete,
the latest pandemic is now digging deep
into the voters who voted for any of the six
candidates/teams who stood for president.

America's latest and greatest gift to the world
is Continuous Hyper-Partial Attention Deficit Disorder
and it is coming to a television and computer
near you today, with the latest media reports
on what your government is doing for you. 

Schrodinger's Dumpster

But many a human being is like this too,
as we find with the consistency of their charity. 

The Government Washing Machine

Between the laundered money,
and the spun government claims,
it should be no surprise to us
how clean our government is, of virtue.

Miss misinformation
is good enough at housekeeping
that she knows the most
about what she is doing
when it appears that she does not. 

Note To My (Now Long Distant) Mother

When we invest in another person
we rarely recognise the shape
our investment will take
in who we have made it,
until long after they leave us.

But rest assured-every investment reaps it's own dividends.

The Point About 'Fake News'......

    ...and the rumour mills
about this or that party leader,
is never just that the story is fake in itself.

The point is that the story generates
further rumour and further doubt
like a fire that, once lit, never goes out.

The oldest fake news that most people
half-know about is 'The protocol of the elders of Zion'
a patchwork of documents put together by anti-Semites
circa 1900 to suggest that the Jews,
a people then without a land, had a plan
for taking over all of the world.

Discredited as it is,
in the twenty first century it is easy to find.
Just look online....

 In the UK in the 1924 'The Zinoviev letter'
was cooked up by White Russians
as an instrument against the Bolsheviks.
It was in turn taken up by a mistrustful British Secret Service
against the first elected Labour government.
It was a lie, but it was a lie that stuck
because of mounting domestic fears
and failing international diplomacy. 

In the present day, business confidentiality
and money that launders itself through property,
are what fuels the present day rumours
of which politician is secretly tied
to which government, other than their own.

Who wrote the lie? And who did they write it for?
Which of the politicians enemies-at home or abroad?
should be the points that should be answered
in an effective and free press. 

But by the time the story is that clear
neither the politician nor their enemies,
or the popular press, want to hear any more
of what was never even slightly true in the first place.

All Because Coloured Lives Matter....

all of which goes well beyond language
and proves how we blight ourselves,
then we curse other people
through the language we use
without ever realising we were doing it.

Norman Vincent Peale

was never my idea of a writer
and his ideas about spirituality
were implicitly pale and racist.

Not for him the grit of being black
and inch by inch taking back
your sense of agency
from a wealthy white culture
that boxed in non-whites
with laws where the poor
simply had to be stronger,
to endure the privations
that white folks heaped upon them.

Peale has now gone down further in my estimation
his were the sermons that young Donald used to hear
in the church that the Trump family attended every Sunday.

As an adult Donald now believes in golf more than in God.
His Sunday Service is on the course on his own,
with club and ball, his security at a distance from him.

There is where finds his respite from the burden
of his property empire with all it's debts
and from being the leader who has to be
his own press agent whilst president
because the press agent is the presidential staffer
who the press expect to see most
whilst the person that the people
should know most is their president. 

It is one of the 'what if's' of history
to ask what candidate Trump would have done
had he not won the presidential hole-in-one
of being elected the first time he stood?

Would his being made to wait to stand again
have improved him as a man and as a governor?
Would he have become more patient?
Nobody could begin the guess the answer.

Winning first time and serving one term
has done him no favours whatsoever.  

Celebrification

noun - the conversion of a society
where real people once did everyday things
without having to be filmed doing them,
and the film made public for all to see,
to a society where computers and machines
replace a vast amount of human labour
which downgrades many purely human skills
and the cognition required to maintain them
and remakes said activities as activities
to be watched by the many and done by the few
 in a celebrity obsessed, uncontrolled, media
where passive submission by the many to the few
is the very model of obedience to an orderly governance.

A half life is still viable in the celebrified society,
as long as the machines that humans rely on still work,
and the masses don't care who or what governs them.

Beautiful Land

'I think [that] having land
and not ruining it is the most beautiful art
that anybody could ever own' - Andy Warhol

Where that leaves anyone
who owns one of his art works,
which is worth $o $o much
because of an inflated art market
is open to a rueful retrospective smile......   

Social Isolation

Requires us to be as tough as mountain goats.
Where we are not just tough on each other
   but often tougher on ourselves as well.  

 

Why I Don't Watch Television News

It is not just the lies sold as truths,
or the interviews where politicians
go on the channel to sell us contradictions
that the news channel had no choice but to sell
through the contracts the channel had to sign
about the questions they would not ask
for the leader to appear on their media.

No, what makes me turn off,
mentally at first but physically second,
is the bleached grief of couples
who are interviewed at length
on uncomfortable looking settees
who are reduced to cliches by the camera
as they talk about how they miss
their missing loved one, now gone,
due to a careless government and Covid 19. 

In The Land Of Gerrymandering

they prize what the call 'democracy'
as if it were their own invention
rather than the flawed process
only half recorded by history
of what some city states
in ancient Greece once did.

Yet even as they laud and praise
the ability to choose via the vote
they celebrate even more
how regularly elections are rigged
to produce dishonest winners.

What the praise disguises is how close
the honest loser was to winning the prize
before the winner won the election.

Very few American presidents
have been chosen by landslide majorities,
or even won the majority popular vote.

US Presidents like to ignore how their new role
is more the result of a legal settlement
than the triumph of some new consensus
in which they are merely first among equals. 

Boiled Motherhood

How well I remember the food
that I was served when I was young,
the soft texture of which
was meant to encourage me to eat.

I also remember Mother selecting stories
to tell me to keep me walking beside her
when I was young. Stories of her being single;
where the single life was a challenge.

When I look back I regret that I did not think
to ask her more thoughtful and harder questions.
In this way I played my part in our resisting
a more durable and deeper held maturity.

Motherhood was like over cooked food;
it was about making women seem soft,
the easier to make boys use weak reason
so as not to be a test to their parents.

Fathers needed their distance
to be seen to be 'the good provider',
and wives were often more resourceful
than anyone was ever admitted them to be
or little boys could begin to recognise.

The Normality Of Strangers

And many people don't know
that they don't know themselves,
which makes accepting strangers
for who they are, at face value, 
more tricky than anybody dare guess.

 

Democrazy (2)

When we lend our votes
to autocratic leaders of parties
who care more about the engineered vote
than those who choose to vote for them
it is not just some rhetorical act
on the part of the individual voter
of shared and normalised masochism
but also the death of individualism
that we say that we seek to uphold.

Why I Will Never Be A Heterosexual

The heterosexuals I grew up among
were as happy to talk down to children,
as they were to anyone they thought to be inferior,
about loyalty between partners within a marriage
as they were to secretively excuse male adultery
due to excess alcohol, as if the addiction
to alcohol itself were not also a form of adultery.

The heterosexuals that I grew up among
were not just homophobic, but sexually phobic,
reducing themselves and each other and marriage
to the process of a breeding machine which was careless
about what it bred. Whether that was people or values.
Their complexity was way beyond their expectations. 

They were ignorant about what sexuality is
and how it was and is a key part of everyone's life.
What they said about homosexuality to anyone
who thought about or felt they had cause mention it
was that 'It is just a phase', as if by batting it away
it would cease to exist in their world,
when whether they talked about it or not,
when same sex attraction is part of every world. 

What this little phrase hid was many centuries
of hysteria and denial, where mis-recorded histories
hid men and women who tried within their limits
to use their sexuality as an accepted part of themselves
for the good of those they saw around them.

As for me, I have learned to live with a sexuality
where I am better off being practically asexual
because my experience of heterosexuality,
the majority culture I can't avoid being part of,
has made me unfit for intimate and trusted use
by the secular, hypocritical, family values
that I have to accept that I grew up with.

   

If The Caps Fit.....

The difference in a tweet
between 'LAW AND ORDER'
and 'Law and Order'
is not merely a question of assertion,
where the CAPITALS (CAPS) used
assert an insecure authoritarianism,
that the more agreeable
lower case does not express.

That factuality of the lower case
puts the trust with the reader
rather than wreaking
of the weakness of the leader,
and both messages have their effect.

Unpatriotically Yours

From the diaries of Edward Elgar who lived comfortably,
materially at least, for a further fifteen years
after the November 1918 Armistice.

A Life Of Two Halves?

The person I trust most in this life
has a misanthropists outlook
where with consistent rigour
he finds the worst in human behaviour
and sees it as if it were the norm.

Half the time I know he is right,
I accept the same media as him,
along with some sources he refuses,
and what he believes is easily confirmed.

The rest of the time I accept
that I try to be a qualified optimist,
where the limiting parameters
of my optimism are limiting indeed.

I don't know which half is truer
or precisely where in me
the divider between the two lands.
What I settle for is that at my best
I create around me and a sustainable life
that allows for others to be both chippy*
or happy, and accepts that others are entitled
to find life in the depths of despair.

Between the extremes
I would like to be their escape
from the depths of human hypocrisy
when life Fucking Well hurts,
particularly when others say
that the hurt 'is healing and wholesome'.

*as in 'having a chip on his shoulder'
-a sense of guilt or the fear
of having stolen something,
the chip being a piece of wood
that at a chippie/carpenter steals
from their employer.

What The News Does Not Tell Us

For the last ten months
there has been one major subject
that has been classed as newsworthy;
the progress of the Covid 19 virus
through the world human population
with it's corollary; the change in the economy
when people have to keep their distance
from each other in order to be 'safe'.

But every time I hear the latest figures
of who has contracted the virus,
and who has died from it I do not pray
'I thank thee Lord I am not as other men'
but give thanks for the unmentioned number
of people who don't have the virus
and have gone about their business
with care and consideration for others.

Radio Plays I Will Never Hear (1); 'Alan Turing This Was Your Afterlife.'

The radio play I would like to hear is one
where the ghost of Alan Turing (1912-1954),
the pioneering mathematician who theorised
the idea of mechanical computers is taken on a tour
of the human inventiveness that his creation has since unleashed.

It was not his fault that he was both a gay man
who was happily serially sexually promiscuous
who was also deeply caught up in cold war secrecy
for having been a leading scientist during WW2.
It was this toxic combination that made his 'suicide' inevitable.

Since the Babylonians, information has been a means to power.
The machines that Turing theorised could be created
meant that much more information could be collected
about a far greater numbers of people
than had previously been imagined.

Before Turing 'Computers' was a term applied to people,
often women, who counted things, e.g. votes in an election
and did calculations for (usually male) accountants.
The machines he worked on during WW2 decoded messages
and were not concerned with collecting mass human data.

All that would start when the first computer
was booked by CBS News in 1952 
to predict the outcome of the Presidential election
and even then the pundits distrusted the result
though the computer prediction proved correct.

Even they next use of 'big data' in America
by the Democratic Party in the 1960 election 
did not make the use of computing machine
catch on for popular consumer use, and the UK
the computer was most used to settle the accounts
of Lyons Tea Shop, and Lyons were more taken
with teacakes and tea than with computing.

When they got out of computers to focus
on their core business of tea shops
they were only the latest to miss ,
and not recognise, the future.

Fast forward to 1969 and The Pentagon
invented the email as an internal messaging service
without telling anyone else. The world found out
decades later, long after Microsoft was founded
and changed the world with it's skilled machines
which are still taking the communication of life
further than previously computed to be possible.

Modern Surrealism (3)

Shoes in good tune, 'Duet' by Jill Armstrong,
an assemblage assembled in 2003, from here.

'Marriages Are like Pianos....

....they go in an out of tune', as Virago author Sarah Waters
well observed in in her book 'The Paying Guests'. 

Waters was right. Pianos and marriages play many tunes,
and are much subject to warp and weft of life.

What they play is often enhanced
by the vast accompaniment
of our poorly understood role
in serving mother nature.    

Whose Side Are We On, And Who Is 'We'?

Today is the day the English celebrate
'failed democratic reform day', when in 1605
a Catholic 'terrorist gang' led by an English mercenary
who had been fighting the (Catholic) Spanish
planted explosives in the cellars of the House of Commons.

The English being the hypocrites they are
they don't know what they are 'celebrating'
that the gunpowder was put under Parliament
or that it was discovered and the plotters arrested
before the reforms it would start could take place.   

The English, who like letting off fireworks
whatever the cause. or lack of it,
use this date to 'entertain children'
with bonfires, simple food, and fireworks
neglect their history as if dates and sides,
and old laws and old prejudices, no longer mattered.

Representative democracy is a recent invention
that only arrived with the full franchise in 1928,
and when for the first time MP's were paid a wage in 1937,
thus allowing poorer candidates to stand.

But already the idea was being prepared to be lost
in an amnesiac media where what the news said yesterday
was being prepared to be forgotten by tomorrow.    

Invisible Pride

The new Right Wing populists
want to permanently end
what they call 'virtue signalling',
where when particular newscasters
who have a notable media profile
outside of their place of work
and being over-friendly with the viewer.

I heartily agree, which is why
I want not to see poppies on the chests
of any news presenter this November.
Let us leave official patriotism to royalty
and the new right wing populists;
as if they alone are virtuous, let virtue
be the main reason that they serve us. 

By all means give money to the charities
hat support the veterans of the many wars
fought for king and country past,
where we all  sought to be civilised
when the battles were over but  don't wear a poppy.
Follow the advice of Jesus;  'Do your good deeds in secret'. 

Democrazy (1)

The biggest winner in the competition
to become the next president of the USA
 will be Capitalism, the only choice
left for voters will be which candidate 
will work with Capitalism better than the others
or creatively resist capitalism, 
for the sake of a sense of community,
given how Capitalism operates on individuals.  

 

God Does Have A Sense Of Humour

That we can trust in when times prove hard.

He made a germophobe 'the leader of the free world'
and left loose a virus that it very hard to stop
for said leader to limit the spread of, to keep afloat
his economic hopes in the year he hoped to be re-elected. 

Picture Set Of The Month - November -The Bath Tub Marys

Because cleanliness is close to Godliness

And God is close to kitsch,
 

Both are ubiquitous and about recycling.