Donald Trump Explained To Non-Americans

I couldn't quite tell whether it is me
or whether it is a mere side-effects
of the choice that youtube presents,
but I have succumbed to the vice
of watching American political news.

I think I know why I fell for it,
because what is presented works
as a self important soap opera,
where the more self important
a politician's comments seem
the more they suck the viewer in,
where the viewer senses the jeopardy
in the politician's public comments
will before before the politician does.

Does this explain the gravitational pull
of the black hole that is Donald Trump?

Other human black holes
full of empty noise are available,..

How To Talk 'Dog'

In different languages across Europe
from here where the mao is much larger
and ther is much more information
about the different languages described.. 

 

'The Trickle Down Effect' Updated ?

The first version of the trickle down effect
was 'The government is giving more money
to the wealthy so they can spend more
on the poor, rather than on themselves,
to make those with less more healthy.'.

Private charity was the way ahead.

The rich did not know what to do
with the money they already had,
not that this embarrassed them,
but the gov't bet that giving to the wealthy
made the wealthy to be trusted more,
in spite of their ignorance, than were the poor
who were to be trusted less
in their thrift and humbleness.

That the money did not trickle down
from rich to poor was not the point;
the money was never meant to,
it was the gov't way of proving
that 'poverty is unfixable' in the long run.

The new trickle down effect
is that the leaders of a given
civic-minded organisation
are to be accepted as bullies
who expect to be fawned upon,
by those they see as beneath them
who in their turn expect to be fawned upon,
in their turn, until the lowest know how low
their status is by how much they are lied about,
and have nobody of lower rank to make look up to them.     

Book Review-'Heroic Failure' - Fintan O'Toole

I was wondering what plus points to commend this book to the casual reader for. I came up with one simple answer. What reading this book means is that I can now understand the appeal of The Daily Mail without ever having to read it ever again-for that alone the book is to be praised.  

I remember the campaign before the vote in June 2016 about whether the UK should remain in the European Union or whether the UK should leave. I remember the frenzied non-arguments and advertising this way and that, which was later proven to be over-budget and should have invalidated the vote. But the blown advertising budgets and false claims did nothing of the sort, even when they were later confirmed by BBC journalists. I remember the famous red bus emblazoned with how much more could be spent on the NHS if the UK left the EU. That bus was all over the media, and even then the leave plan, hidden from the public, was both for the UK to leave the EU and for the 'leave' government to stint on financing the NHS, like some secretive cheating and embezzling business partner.

I do not remember much of the narrative I was presented with prior to Brexit being the way Fintan O'Toole presents the arguments as here. I knew about how the English confuse reward with punishment in a version of sadism and masochism which they compound by denying that it is sadism and masochism. My memories of English sadism/masochism were very 1980s, where youths were expected to 'price themselves into work' but the work disappeared in front of them. There was nothing for them to 'price themselves' into/be paid less for. The jobs that anyone might be skilled up/trained to do disappeared into thin air, and a lot of unskilled work migrated to black economy which in theory did not exist-but everyone knew it did exist, and more that that it was a necessity that the black economy worked when the proper economy failed.

Forty years on and I have survived long term unemployment. The latest application of sadism/masochism became the UK vs the EU. It was as surprising as it was depressing when the chapter entitled 'The Charge of The Light Brigade' listed the many disasters that the English not only endured but multiplied the repercussions of by insisting that the original disaster could be overturned if the application of effort was great enough. I did wonder how much this was sadism/masochism and how much was not knowing when to stop flogging an idea past it's use by date. This in turn made me wonder whether the book was about trying to discover when Brexit was still in it's date, and what it's sell-by date used to be.

The book deals well with Boris Johnson the joker journalist who serially lied about the EU and when anyone quoted it to him or told him that it was a a lie and sacked him he said that they were fools if they ever took it seriously. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his cod-histories are also dispatched with confidence. O'Toole goes into the real Hundred year war (337-1453) and explains it's absurdities and vanities.

The afterword 'Amity Island' is a brilliant expose of the Boris Johnson method of majoritarianism, where if the suffering seems slight enough and few enough people suffer it then he is very happy and he knew how to convince everybody else to be happy. Dissecting that and the consequences of Brexit, where the United Kingdom is disunited and and disgruntled, and how the Tories reside over this disunity with promises that are inconsistent and incompatible with each other is oddly reassuring. If things seem bad then at least O'Toole exposes why. He is the first writer I have seen to explore the difference between England including London and England without London-something that forty years ago I would have said were vastly different but I would never have seen written about at the time.

Book title: 'Heroic Failure: Brexit and The Politics of Pain' 

Author: Fintan O'Toole

Publisher: Head of Zeus/Apollo. 

Updated version of the book released in 2021. 

One Man And His Dog

understanding themselves and each other
in terms that cannot be disputed
even when they are easily misunderstood. 

 

Pale Grey Track Suit Bottoms

I can't remember when grey track suit bottoms
became the definition of modern casual wear,
for fancy free young men to step out in.

At first they seemed to me like pyjamas
that young men could wear in public.  

I first noticed the change in legwear
when charity shops no longer stocked
my favourite coloured corduroys
-too few people now donated them
with wear left in them anymore.

From my past I knew
how young men disliked wearing underwear.
I have been there, I went through that phase
and many others as minor 'acts of rebellion'.

Nowadays I feel faintly alarmed
at the clear freedom of movement
that youths show when they walked
down the street in their tracksuits
wearing nothing underneath
-uncaring of the thoughts
they might be prompting in others. 

When they do that in my presence
I have to remind myself of how much
Victorian gentlemen once did the same
and hid what they were doing
behind resolutely asexual language.

Signs Of Greater Age (52)

The older you get the more you find
that you still like going the movies
but modern Hollywood franchise films
fill up far too many screens
and they lack the depth of character
that you knew films used to have;
the franchise is a sealed world
that denies the viewer
the most creative conflicts
because the viewer is younger.

What pleases you instead are slow documentaries
where some real life subject from the recent past
is explored in all their conflicts and resolve
to survive as themselves, against the odds.   

Transports Of Gratitude

One of the daily graces I enjoy
is that I don't drive
and don't own a vehicle
whilst living in a car culture.

What makes it a grace
is that public transport
is trusted because it subsidised,
and I have reached an age
where such transports of delight
are offered to me, for free.
They need passengers like me.

The citizens of many small countries
who think nothing of life elsewhere
think that only they thank the drivers,
when they disembark from the bus.

What the citizens of such countries
don't realise is that part of why
passengers give thanks so readily
is for the quality of publicly owned transport.

If every country that believed
that such everyday gratitude
was unique to them were to ask abroad, 
'What do your passengers say
when they disembark from the bus?'
where public transport was similar
they would find that such thanks
are as universal as the subsidies
that make for quality of public transport. 

Happy Centenary Kurt Vonnegut Jnr

The writer who predicted much the modern world
through lamenting and lampooning the direction
it was going in. Here is an article for the reader
who is new to this author where his books
are celebrated, worst, none of them really bad,
 to the best which are hard to put down once started.   

 

Mother Night Indeed

 'The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I had said, didn't shock me. It might be helpful in my defence to sat that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I had always known what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to mankind - schizophrenia*.'. 

Quoted from page 116 of 'Mother Night' written in 1961 by science fiction writer, satirist and essay writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1922-2007). Here is the writers website.

*A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to a series of faulty perceptions, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality, and a withdrawal from personal relationships into fantasy and delusion. Overall a sense of mental fragmentation. It may well seem like a rational response when reality seems to be complex to the point of being intangible. 

A Thought Too Late For Halloween

I am not entertained by ghouls,
or ghosts, or things without names
that don't know how to be quiet at night.

I find better reasons for fear
from being subject to jealousy
in confined spaces where, too late,
I realise that I am the target of something
all too human, and all too possessive,
for me to easily escape it.

This jealousy can happen all year round
so Hallowe'en 'celebrations'
are mostly seasonal vexations.

The most engaging experience
of this jealousy I ever had, second hand,
was seeing 'The Exorcist' at the cinema,
and less for the reason you might guess.

The cinema was full to standing room only
at the back, with young men from West Belfast
who loudly cheered The Devil, on the screen,
when, through Regan, he audibly taunted the priest
before the priest finally threw himself out of the window
from the height of the fifteenth floor apartment.

I had never seen such an anti-clerical mob before
I had no idea what they could be jealous for.

Picture Set Of The Month - The Plate Designs of Clarice Cliff

'Comet' design painted circa 1930 by Clarice Cliff
(1899-1972) she was active as designer of domestic
pottery from 1922 to 1962. 

 

Geometric design circa 1930. Clarice Cliff started
work as a gilder, a free-hand painter of gold on pottery,
aged 13 until she came to the attention of the factory
owner, Arthur Colley Austin Shorter.  

'Zap' design first seen 1930. In 1927 she was given
her own studio and white 'glost' ware on which to draw
freehand designs in which she incorporated
any mistakes she made as if they were intended.  

'Blue Autumn' circa 1932. The designs of Clarice Cliff
were stamped as hers with a 'bizzare' stamp from 1927
onward. With that stamp came a staff of 70 young
women employed to hand-copy her designs. 

'Red Roofs' circa 1931. Her work sold well in the
1930's through out the world, particularly in the
British Empire. The factory she made designs for
was bought over in 1963, but still hand-painted
pottery according to her designs up to 1968.  
 Here is the artist's website.