File Under Mental Ill Health; A History

When I was a child I was never just a child
I was also labelled 'maladjusted'.

At the time I could never work out what the term meant. 

Whoever I thought to ask, asking seemed invasive,
it invite being rebuffed and the subject of the question
changed in front of me to save who I asked embarrassment. 

Going into adulthood I remained privately confused.
The nearest I could get to the term 'maladjusted'
was to write of my youth that I had 'mixed feelings' 
whilst everyone avoided what those feelings were.  

A second problem was having no idea
how the label had attached itself to me, 
and not knowing what my mother
-the person I felt cared for me most-
thought of how the label stuck?

I dare not ask. I knew that if I did
and time was set aside for me to be
paid due attention, the conversation
would be so 'confidential' and laden
with twisted similes that neither she nor I
 would understand what we had said
before the four walls swallowed whole
the conversation we had to deny we'd had
after it was over and I was none-the-wiser. 

I guessed that my father had dismissed the phrase
before he ever heard it; he dismissed most ideas
and all mental health labels out of hand. 
He would suggest nearly no ideas himself 
but consistently damn others given the chance. 

Did Mother reluctantly agree with the label? 
And in whose stars was it more the fault? Hers or mine? 
And why were adults never 'maladjusted'? Why only children? 

In the 1960's mental health provision/definition was scant in adults. 
In children 'maladjusted' was the most common term to describe 
the character of a child who displayed any number of behaviours 
that openly disrupted the limited adult attention span
or tested the tight adult social order where such behaviour
was not criminal, just difficult for adults to understand. 

I drew the conclusion that it was a term about children 
designed by child psychologists for social workers 
to use on the parents of the children who were disturbed
by bullying in school and beyond, where the psychologist
had ideas about what was 'normal' that parents did not.
But the alarmed parents had to be given a label
that justified putting their children 'in a boarding school'

Some bullying children were also labelled 'maladjusted'. 
But mostly it was bullied children who attracted the label, 
and got the dud schooling/lack of understanding 
that went with it in the England of my childhood.  

The Best Revenge?

The best revenge must be the coldest and most detached.

What could be colder than being a slave,
being made to buckle under,
in a system where you have no redress
-all the laws about your status
apply to those who buy and sell you,
or merely use you for your labour.

So instead you invent a saviour
who gives you strength to endure
this duress, and whose superhuman
mindfulness and obedience
gives you, through Christ,
the triumph in this life
via the freedom from slavery in a Heaven,
that slave masters don't have to believe in
-life on earth enslaving others is enough for them.

If Heaven is the righteous revenge
over so many cold empires
for ex-slaves who died in obedience
to God and his servant, Jesus
then how cold must Heaven be
to be the proper revenge
on slavery and empire
that it sets out to be?      

Radio Plays I Will Never Hear (2) The Prostate Dialogues

The Prostrate Dialogues
or, 'two arsehole listen to each other
for the first time in their owners lives... '.

In this radio play two men will be in bed together
both will be talking voices positioned
at the centre of the stereo image
when they, and the listeners,
hear two other voices that come
from further apart in the stereo image,
they start talking over the central voices,
these are the voices of their arseholes.....

A1; You know these men, they don't listen to each other.

A2; And they never listen to us.

A1; Especially when it comes to what is good for us.

A2; It is almost like we are part of their unconscious.

A; With all the sensitive nerve endings we have 

and the taboos about us you may be right abut that.

A1; Some say we talk a load of shit.

A2; That is not us, that comes from somewhere further inside the body,

the stomach and intestines I think, I blame the men for eating too much....

A1; How often do you get an itch?

A2; You mean how often do I need a good rubbing?

A1; I suppose so, I had not quite thought through the implications 

of what I was asking about, yeah.....

A2; More than you might think actually, and certainly more often

than he thinks (points to the one of the couple nearest him in bed), 

Anything would do it, I would not care what it was-for a good rub

and a bit of pressure more often, women never have this problem....

A1; Agreed, but they don't have us they don't have prostates, they get other itches......

A2; Like thrush you mean?

A1; I was thinking a bit more positive than that...... 

To be continued/updated......

Where men on stage talk to men
who listen whilst sat in theatre seats
and between them they relate how it feels
to have something women have not,
that is a source of non-procreative pleasure
which has given them orgasms beyond measure
and how some have had cancer, and had it removed.

Democracy, The Economy, And Disease

In this year of economic meltdown
one of the questions that has been asked less often
than it should have been
-though it remains germane to our present day circumstances-
is 'What did the would be fascists of a century ago
make of  the so-called 'Spanish Flu'?

The answer is not that surprising. 
The more people the flu killed
the more the Nazis liked it,
and in the longer term,
coupled with the discouragement
of a big economic depression
it aided their electoral chances,
as many more of the young with leftist views
died of the disease than died
who were prepare to vote Nazi,
if only for the restoration of the economy.      

New Lies For A New Year

Today I learnt a new term
for politicians who defensively lie
about their political opposition,
though I knew how the lie worked
before I learnt the term; 'strawmaning'.

The lie works the following way
Politician A 'I propose proposition X'
Politician B 'You do know Politician A that Proposition Y won't work?'.

In this verbal process Politician B simultaneously
misrepresents and discredits Politician A's proposal
and criticises the now distorted idea for being weak,
furthering giving themselves credit for being right
and making their opponent seem wrong
whilst avoiding sharing what might have been
an internally consistent position all along.

This process has both driven and confounded
the negotiations for Brexit from the beginning
and along with false assumptions in the UK
about how absolute absolute rule in the UK ever was
has brought politics and representative democracy
to a stand-still where the gain-sayers of whatever is proposed
stop all they dislike, and produce no position of their own.   

Reflections As An Adult On 'The Season Of Goodwill'

Why is it that so many who are used to feeling
that they are part of the human race
though how they are entertained
by films and TV all year round,
that boredom and loneliness make
such highly compatible helpmates
to each other that they multiply
when the human entertainments
industry goes stale and runs dry? 

Mathematics Made To Look Easy

         Mathematician Henry Segerman showing

            how a linear third dimensional plane 

               is only a projection of the curved 

                fourth dimensional space time

               and providing the nearest image

                that I want to see that looks like 

                    a Christmas decoration.

Be Wary

in this 'season of good will'
of sharing too many
of the shaggy dog stories
people told you in your youth
in the interests of false cheer
-they could make your coming year
one long progress towards
the wrong inspiration,
dedicated to the wrong aim....

Signs Of Greater Age (48)

Dystopian visions that once entertained us
by alarming us when we were younger
on older age become quotidian realities. 

For A Cleaner Future Start With A Cleaner Present

I noticed the other day in my news feed
that China is a world exporter of solar panels,
and thus they 'were making the planet cleaner'.

Oh yeah? Exporting greener goods
manufactured by dirty means,
is not what preserves a planet better
-it is starting the job of cleaning the planet
and exporting the rest of the job for somebody else to do.

The factories in which these Chinese workers
make the solar panels do not run on solar energy.

The homes the workers live in,
in the one party bully-state that is China,
do not come home to cleaner air
to add to the glow of green living.

They prefer the comfort of burning fossil fuels,
though they might stretch to having filters
fitted in their chimneys to capture the carbon,
and stop filling the air with poison fumes
that their ancient traditions were made of.

A Solar future for industry and electricity from the sun
is not a scam, and no other future will be as sustainable.

But until we start clean we won't stay clean.

Until then the making and selling of solar panels
will be mostly designed to win trade wars
whilst pretending to be the future,
and failing the present. 

False Jeopardy

Is the emotional state we are living in
whilst we live with Covid 19.

The virus is real, it can be caught
and getting it can be lethal.

Which is why it matters that we stay in
when there is nothing outside
that we actually need, see also
the positive effects of hand washing
and the wearing of face masks.

But before Covid 19 changed our world
where were we? In year ten of austerity for some
and luxury-like-there-was-no-tomorrow for others.
Where our lives were not aimless, but our aim
was looking for where our aim had gone
since austerity had moved it on
from where in front of us,
when we felt we had choice
over what to do with our money.

Now money still flows
bur the meaning of spending it has changed,
because where we go to spend it
is now seen to be anti-social.
Where we spend it has to be managed;
we can't have all of society like that.

Society has to have figures set apart
-policemen of different types-
even as society shrinks from asking
'Who are the police?' and 'Who police the policemen?'.

Do Androids Dream Of A Happy Christmas?

The Voight Kampff test is a fictional test 
designed to discern whether
what appears to be a person
is an android or a human.
It was written about in Philip Kindred Dick's
'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep ?'
which became a key source of drama
in the film 'Blade Runner'.

In the rush to be cheerful
where we end up being false
I wonder whether the model
of Christmas we have developed
as a season for pure selling
I wonder how many of us
could prove, or fail to show,
how human we are for taking the test?  

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2020

Werner Bischof, Streams (darkroom drawing), 1941

 

No Sore Winners Here, Please...

What makes me mistrust the media
is watching millionaire politicians
appeal to the ordinary, poorer, voters
by claiming that they never receive
a fair hearing in the interviews
that it is their duty to submit to,
between enriching themselves.

The voter they seek support from
is often the 'poor' born again Christian
who lives in a small town and sees few people.
S/he goes to church to hear the preacher
zero in each week on human suffering,
and from the comfort of their pew
the suffering they recognise first
and can least fix is that of the grumpy rich
who so can't accept the idea of loss of any sort,
who surround themselves with 'yes' men
who are bound by their submission to fail
when the world says 'No' to the leader
and they can't convince their leader to hear.

This ruse by the wealthy to present themselves
as the victims of the media worth the little man's support
works so well that it looks like an electoral miracle.
And it would be a miracle were it not all pre-arranged,
a rigged fight where the wealthy not only arrange
to become pretend-victims in interviews,
they become the commentators on how
they did not get enough of their own way
when they should have got a lot more,
whilst other people live on much, much, less
for witnessing this long drawn out process.

Change A Letter, Change A Life

The difference between DNA
-deoxyribonucleic acid-
and DNR-do not resuscitate-
is just one letter
in an already short acronym. 

But it is also the difference
between an overlong long life
and an easeful departure.

Greenwash Is Us

When global oil companies
talk about 'Net Zero Emissions',
and parrot other government targets,
in their latest youtube adverts
that set out to infantilize the viewer,
the viewer might not be scared,
but the planet should be....

Some Protests Go Back A long Way

this one goes back to the mid 1970's.
Often protests get repeated because
the cause of the protest remains intact.

I will not be eating the rich,
apart from how indigestible they are,  
I would prefer to remain a vegetarian.

 

Pleased To Meat You, Hope Guessed My Name....

'Chlorinated chicken is just the tip of the iceberg...  '
or so Radio 4 tells me, and there is already
much more below that fetid water-line
in which this metaphorical ice cube is floating,
amid highly unproductive multi-national trade talks.

If the tip of the iceberg is chlorinated chicken
then some of the rest is salad, and not just iceberg lettuce
but the bags of mixed salad leaves on supermarket shelves
are yet another everyday product that UK folk buy,
which are washed in weak bleach before being bagged,
to preserve the physical substance of each leaf,
whilst destroying all their flavours,
lest the consumer get a zest for country life.

It used to be a funny to say that the food
that people bought was so full of preservatives
that the manufacturers put the chemicals in
to makes folks live longer, but now it is serious
and what we should be doing is making amends
through trade for the historic lack of welfare
that the animals we reduce to a meat experience. 

Homosexuality In Africa?

Like everyone else with an email inbox some very odd stuff lands, seemingly by itself, for me to read. Often what lands are petitions for rather woolly Liberal concerns.

But some of what comes in has some logic behind it.

Homosexuality-homosexual behaviour and identifying as homosexual, lesbian or trans is illegal in 70 of the 198 countries in the world.

The African continent consists of 56 countries. In over 30 of those countries homosexuality is illegal which makes 'Africa' a juicy target for liberal white folk and for some Africans who believe that they can reach out beyond their own continent, to where homosexuality is legal.

The defence that those countries that ban homosexuality have is less a defence of homophobic custom, e.g. repugnant norms such as men sexually assaulting lesbian women to 'make the women heterosexual', and more a challenge to those asking them to change.

Those with homophobic laws condemn their critics with phrases like 'New liberal colonialists', which make decriminalising being gay sound retrogressive whilst defending old colonial laws which the new free Africans adopted, never knowing what sort of laws they were.

The argument back, for anyone who wants to make it- is that Civil liberties are indivisible for full citizenship; if these free African countries want to throw off all the colonial legacy, as part of their autonomy, then they should throw off the logic of the toxic science of the Empires of old-their social divisions based on eugenics.

Is The Structure Of Your Days A Luxury Or Necessity?

For the poor, the forcibly retired, the sick,
and the otherwise economically inactive
that is not even a question.

The people who advise them
and help those 'without'
at least have the structure
of advising those not like them
by which to separate themselves
from a lack of structure in themselves.

How many of us have looked with contempt
at social workers for their trying to do good?
Next to mainstream church clergy
they are the people who are most recognised
for propping up pointless structures. 

But beyond that the personal, spiritual,
the reasons for needing routine
are that routines support rituals
and rituals give shape to life,
take rituals away,
or make the ritual seem pointless for one or all attendees
and life is no longer seems to be alive,
instead it becomes a series of circular non-adventures.

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2020

Edward Burra (British,1905-1976), Frogmen, 1959-61. Watercolour, gouache and pencil on card, 30.5 x 22 in 'for a more watery Christmas' is what it said inside.

 

Sceptics Inc

Here at Sceptics Inc we believe
that the bigger the lie,
the easier it is to spread it
through a media where everyday
the checks and balances
are designed to green light
the most exaggerated claims.

The more truthful the truth
the fewer people understand it
or care that it's truthfulness
is well preserved
by how few people know it.

Framed

When words define us,
and a lack of words
define us even more
then what can we share
that will not raise more a
false commentaries about us?

In theory actions speak louder than words
but words are what frame our lives with
and the frame determines the picture. 

My Third Christmas Card Of 2020

Image by Surrealist children's illustrator Gianni De Conno,
from here.

 

The Existential Angst Of Following Orders

Every time I see the small notice on the screen
that says 'Tick this box to prove that you are not a robot',
and I see the box beneath, I get tremors of guilt and fear;
if I follow the instruction then how much nearer
does my obedience in attempting to pass the test
take me towards being the robot
that I am trying to prove that I am not?

If I disobey the instruction I surely lose
the chance to disprove how near I might be,
or might not be, to being the robot that I disbelieve I am.

Given that the process I am following
is a done by robot, or a programme,
then how does this programme or robot
know that it is a programme/robot?
If it does then it knowing that makes sure
that it is more than some obedient machine?

The damning self righteous comment
that the allies made about the military
under the control of the axis powers
after World War Two was drawn from
the mouths of the military of the condemned side
'We knew nothing, we were only following orders'.

'Free Will' is a subjective idea
that we approach in fear
of our own contradictions.  

Books Vs Politics?

The book publishing industry
has done very well out of President Trump
with many of the fifty four employees
he has sacked having a riveting story
that agents and publishers believed
that the public were keen to read.

And with Joe Biden on the Horizon
another crop of political books is surely due,
not least from Joe's many departing rivals
who Trump has had neither the time
nor the attention span to notice soon enough to sack them.

All this leaves me wondering
what this latest developments suggest;
are we seeing the politicisation of the world of books
to the point where apolitical books get rarer?
Or will we see the rendering the political world more bookish?
More politics which are more historical, where the longer view is taken?
Sufficient to include speculative fiction as a possible guide to this world?

Writers of apolitical fiction don't need to worry,
there will always be room on the shelves for them.....

 

My Second Christmas Card Of 2020

'Meditation 3' by French artist Kevin Lucbert (b 1985).
Find his personal website, including links to short films
he has made, here.

 

The Zero Gain Sum That 'Representative Democracy' Has To Dismantle

The Rev'd Thomas Malthus
thought he was good at his sums
but he wasn't, and it his chums
in the then-new Conservative Party
who later became the chumps
for following his mathematics,
amid the Corn Laws crisis
whilst trying to 'buck the market'
in the value of land and basic food
for their backers' personal gain.

The 2020 Conservatives are 
The Party for Wealth and Private Ownership.

For their all being wealthy enough
to all be highly privately educated
they will divide those poorer than them
between the worthy-whose labour
directly benefits the party or it's donors.
and the unworthy poor-who the wealthy
talk about, as if the were all scroungers
for whom the last use the rich
have is to use them as scapegoats.

But in this age of universal franchise*
the poor still have one thing that the Tories
will always need-their votes in general elections. 

Malthus would have had a heart attack
at the idea of the universal franchise.

But he would have felt a lot better
when he saw how well voting intentions
could be massaged into submission,
for that ring of political certainty.

*In the UK this has been in operation since 1928,

Whilst there have been parliaments in England since the year 1259,
Scotland since the year 1326,and Ireland since 1297, and whilst
the English parliament became the UK wide parliament in 1707,
with the Irish Parliament liquidating itself in 1800 and joining
the UK parliament, the history of the constituents of all four countries
being enfranchised to vote in a representative to represent them
at the high table of government has a much slower record of reform. 

In 1780 only 2 % of men in England and Scotland had the right
to vote, and constituencies  were severely unbalanced,
These parliaments were places where feudal economic values
and social systems were hammered into shape and made to work
by whoever was most military minded. 

Only with the third reform act in 1870 was every male householder
added to list of voters, and that still left out men who were names
were not on the deeds of the houses they owned, or women,
and the secrecy of the ballot box was not enacted until 1872.
Even in the twentieth century the British were slow to catch up,
female heads of households got the vote, in 1918, women over 21
got the vote in in 1928, MP's were paid a wage for the first time
in 1937, allowing poorer people to get elected to represent
people like them in their constituencies for the first time.

Any Way The Wind Blows

Business and politics are full of 'blowhards',
alpha males steeped in the what is barely legal,
trying hard to make sure that only they are heard
as they push to get only their deals done.

When they get on their soapbox nobody feels clean
and even fewer know what to do about it, after.
They leave people itching to act and yet trapped
by the words that they are driven by.

Only when the blowhard goes silent
because he (it is is usually a he)
has had to take his time to draw breath
can everyone start to ask themselves;
'How much does he actually mean it?'  

'The Love Of Money Is..... '

It is said that 'election campaigns are fought in poetry
whereas governance happens as prose.'.

If that is true, for even a few countries
then there is no poetry like the money
raised to fight a campaign with.

And if huge amounts of money
is as poetic as country can get
whilst choosing who should be in office
then it does not matter who is elected
the country is well past being redeemable.

Government that loves only money
whatever the prose style of it's rule 
is the new root, more entrenched, of all evil.

  

Picture Set Of The Month - December - Ships In The Desert.

These are ships that have been abandoned
and left in the Aralkum Desert.

The Aralkum desert was not always a desert—
dry and rugged as it is now with not a single soul
roving its surface. The wind from the violent dust storms
picks up the salty sand that now covers the ground. 
In fact this area was once the fourth-largest lake in the world.

Fifty years ago, the Aralkum desert was known as the Aral Sea.
A lake half the size of England that sat between Kazakhstan
 and Uzbekistan. The sea was home to a fishing industry
 that produced 50,000 tons of fish which fed more than
 100,000 people across nine different countries.

Now the ships provide shelter for the ships of desert
-the camels who seek shelter from the sun.