I used to thrill the reliability
of old jokes and puns,
the older the jokes were
the better I felt when I got a reaction
from who I was with when I quoted them.
Even the jokes in the plays
of George Bernard Shaw,
a contemporary of Oscar Wilde,
could be made to be fun
if they were adjusted for tone.
As I have gotten older
I have run out of humour,
and I have accepted isolation.
I now have to be both the feed
and the punchline of any joke
I imagine. Often I prefer silence.
'But I observe that you, sir, have stopped eating. Can it be sir that you are full? Very well, I will not insist; I will, however, order us some desert, a little rice pudding with sliced almonds and cardamom, the perfect sweetening for an evening such as ours, which is taking a turn towards the grimmer side. Such dishes may not normally be to your taste, but I would encourage you to have, at the very least, a tiny bite. After all, one reads of the soldiers in your country are sent to battle with chocolate in their rations, so the prospect of sugaring your tongue before undertaking even the bloodiest of tasks cannot be entirely alien to you.'.
From page 157 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.
My mind skips several beats when the phrase
'Will be much missed' is used to describe
the appeal of a newly dead popular entertainer
who when s/he was alive walked the walk
where others talked the talk of hypocrites and liars.
The point about the person who is declared
'much missed' is that where radio and TV
were their medium they had already achieved
everything they set out to achieve there,
and had left before outstaying their welcome.
What was missed much more well before the star died
was that new project in the media that was their metier
whilst the shine of the star was bright enough to use it.
'The economy is an animal' Jim [my boss] continued. 'It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain. That is where I wanted to be. In finance. In the co-ordination business. And the is where you are. You're blood brought from some part of the body that the species does not need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We come from places that were wasting away.'. I had finished replacing the tyre so I shut the boot and unlocked the doors. 'Most people don't recognise that, kid,' he said buckling himself in beside me and nodding his head in the direction of the building we had just left. 'They try to resist change. Power comes from becoming change.'.
From page 110 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.
I have a £50 banknote in my pocket. I go to a restaurant and pay for my dinner with it. My friend and I enjoy our meal, and we understand the point of eating out; the meal is a space for us to feel free to talk on any subject we like as we eat, and we don't have to wash up after we have eaten.
'I did not grow up in poverty, but I did grow up with a poor boys sense of longing, in my case not for what my family never had, but what we had had, and lost. Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way the homeless hold on to lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addictions; unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic and suicide. In this Jim [my boss] and I were similar: he had grown up outside the candy store and I had grown up on the threshold as the door was being shut.'.
Page 81 of 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist', by Mohsin Hamid, published in 2007.
would be that of being paid to talk to plants
that, profoundly ignored, feel rather lonely,
particularly the plants sold by supermarkets
where they provide limp 'window dressing'
in an environment that encourages customers
to be so indifferent to themselves as they shop,
that the atmosphere beggars disbelief.
My success as an applicant would be proved
by how much in any interview for the post
my interviewer chose me via overtly ignoring me.
In the heyday of the redtop (tabloid) press
in my country, the most cynical readers,
and other wiseacres describe the mess
presented to them as 'the news' as
'Build them up to knock them down',
as applied to some new popular entertainer.
The 'knock them down' part was to make room
in the press for the next entertainer to come along
when there was always another one to come.
Now we have an international digital media
where shrinking returns is not a double entendre
but a major fear for the wealthy shareholders,
where different news networks reapply
the old 'Build up, knock down' principle
less to some hapless new entertainer
and more between different networks,
each of which measures itself by how much
the headlines it makes up sets the news agenda.
Yesterday would have been my dad's 90th birthday.
However we tried, we never agreed with each other.
He always hoped that I would turn out like him,
but the times conspired to produce different results.
Circumstance changed what went on around it.
He never understood nature/nurture arguments.
He liked his work, being drunk with his mates,
and the false sense of rest he had with his hangover,
sprawled in front of the television playing 'sport',
in the house that he believed that he alone owned,
where for years family had to deny to themselves,
and each other, how often they tiptoed around him.
He never understood how
'hangovers and children do not mix'.
He is not here to celebrate this date,
he checked out aged 74
after too many hangovers,
I checked out of his life
just a few short years before that.
His legacy to me was that
when I hear new speeches
by larger-than-life-liar-politicians
I spot sooner the type they are
by how much their speeches
reminds me of him.
I turn their speeches off
and seek a media 'breathes' more,
that is, a media that is not a vacuum.
Happy Honi Soit* dad, you have earned it.
*Latin for 'evil be'
When grace does not live up to the ease
suggested by its name, and our daily bread
is a hard crust with which scrape the barrel,
than it is up to us to work out how to trust
that todays sense of everyday misfortune
will give tomorrow more optimistism.
When the choices men have are coarse lies
that diminish ideals about sexual consent,
or the absence of touch for lack of trust,
then they will choose the lies every time
-both by commission and by omission.
They will own their family outright,
they can always recycle the lies later
to make new taboos/immorality traps
where they put women and children
on an asexual catafalque or mount
of higher standards of morality
applied to them, than ever men
would hold each other to.
Lies always disguise how they multiply!
Women and the once-innocent can survive
the men who are pumped through the lies they tell,
mostly by outliving the liars they lived with.
But nobody will ever have returned to them
the years that were eaten up from living false histories.
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| I present a picture of my mother when she was single and socially mobile. She had the life she always wanted, which included travel broadening the mind through enriching friendships. When she was in Paris August 1956 she was free. I was barely an abstract idea in some unimagined future for her. For me there remains a distinct tension between the selflessness required of a mother to get a child as near to being the mature self reliant adult, able to navigate the world to have their needs met, that the child need to be, and the hardships of navigating a marriage where women are barred from defining themselves on their own terms because men believed that to be men it was better for them to not listen and around everyone, life moved too fast to be apprehended. |
According to David Baddiel
'Sports fills the God-shaped hole'
both in his life, and in the life of his country.
Was this meant to explain the appeal of sport?
Something played by the few, watched by the many
where the aim is to find something parochial
for fans to attach themselves to? Where only
those in the higher ranks are well rewarded?
Where the more indirect the access
the viewer has to the game being played
the more the tabloid press takes over any narrative
about the form of the most admired or maligned team?
It was a sort of tithe every week
when millions of male heads of households
spent £1 a week on football pools forms
which they let their children to fill in,
the man knowing that he would never win.
But the win for him was giving his children a role
that hid from them how much money he spent
on himself in other ways, that rewarded only him,
that it would have been awkward to explain,
if ever he was asked about the financial mechanics of it.
David Baddiel was right,
but more in the way that organised sport
expiated men who disliked being married
from explaining how far from their marriage vows
they strayed, as they mistook faith to be a gamble
where their church was the bookies, and the truer
they were to it the more ritually they hid their losses.
I am now too old, too unfit, and anti-competitive
to take even a passive interest in sport.
If I saw sport to be about anything now,
I would see it for the money it attracts
where that divides people, via gambling.
I would want to find the win-win,
relational value in it, with 1-1 mentoring.
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| This advice is certainly true for using computers where the sales pitch for wanting to use them makes them seem simple, but they are not. As for 'wiser and stronger', 'more respected' I don't know about that, I admit that I have often felt afraid to try, and is no harm in that. |
One of the media narratives
that I decreasingly appreciate
is the public platform of
'Political party X hates cause Y',
where cause Y is broadly popular
and makes a limited 'common sense'.
Where party X gleefully appropriates
an irrationality that defies explanation,
the better to separate themselves
from how other parties are seen,
they also mis-describe their hates
in terms that go beyond self-parody
on their own crony-media platforms.
When unity is at the expense of sanity
then allowing dissent feels like diversity,
still the breadth of charity will hard to make work.
It was budget day in my country
and from the fountain of words
that gushed from the despatch box
and all the blabbering media outlets
it was clear that speculative language
remained untaxed and the price of gas
for selectively gaslighting remains stable.
The new tax on queueing was cancelled
-with all the legislation that the government
has been unable to pass
they would have been taxing themselves.
What was less clear was whether
the tax had changed on goading/sticks,
and on 'sticking plaster' solutions,
and what the tax allowance was on carrots.
seems to be of 'deep fake imagery',
where the ease with which A.I.
can generate and multiply false images
alarms the consumers of older images
that were produced more slowly,
where the slowness with which the images
were made made them seem more believable.
Such slow folk fear that 'the news'
will be infected with the mutability
and disposability that video games employ,
taking over what we view as the news,
as some sort of new, newly minted
impossible-to-unpick propaganda.
I don't want to worry anyone,
but with both scale and form
we have been there in the past,
with with the fixed photographs
of early Soviet era propaganda.
whilst in liberal countries
the tabloid press sell more papers
when the headline has a pun in it
than when they are telling the public
what their government is doing.
What the present fear boils down to,
is the public spotting that something is wrong,
but them not being able to work out
what it is and how it was done.
I once had a friend who helped me
get through the absurdities of life
and as long as they was something,
even something absurd, that we shared
then we had enough life in common.
At some point our absurdities changed.
I saw my life in a different way to how
I had seen it before, darker absurdities.
As I changed so the everyday exchanges
between me and my friend got more 'stuck'
until he asked me to leave. I agreed,
I refused to pass on the loss I accepted.
Now we are apart, I am more alone
than I ever thought I would be,
and we still exchange messages
that uphold the distance between us,
that reinforce a refreshed absurdity.
The world is bent out shape
and I am newly bent with it
because age has changed me.
Denying change, due to age,
is not an option.
Accepting being honestly set apart
by how mistakenly I was made
is my only way to be myself today,
the only way left to face tomorrow,
and the only way to face the hereafter.
That starts with the slightest loss of feeling
and feels at first like a painless absence,
until it finds it's voice in mild disbelief
at what surrounds it, that passes as normality.
From there to the cynicism that gently poisons
all we do and think is truly a short journey.
The spring of sarcasm that we speak from,
after that, becomes both our source of hope
and the shared acceptance of our despair,
where however we try to clear the air
our disbelief in each other still lingers.
If you don't recognise this process,
because you know the distance
you keep, to keep yourself immune
from the emptiness of other people's
loss of belief then be aware;
immunity is the problem.
to not go grocery shopping when they’re hungry. But who will warn us in a way that makes us listen to not look for love when we can't distinguish between our 'being alone' and our 'being lonely'?
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| Though we assume that it took off from somewhere, and it must land sometime... |
Misanthropy is the best conspiracy theory
to accept; it means you don't have to subscribe
to any of the many other conspiracy theories
-you can disbelieve in other people just by yourself.
Between the 1870's and 1930's
science, religion, and popular culture
warily circled each other,
each of them presenting the rest
as if they should not exist.
Out of this conflict
science trumped religion
and out of this triumph
a secular innate white male superiority
emerged through the name of 'eugenics'.
This became the hook of false reason
on which to justify the holocaust.
The myth of a Nordic master-race
of tall blond haired blue eyed boys
became the replacement for religion
for men who would never look like that.
That Nordic genetics were non-existent
matter little; the ignorance around genetics
lent itself well to false fantasies of superiority,
which soon became reason to lay waste to the Jews.
Horror was popular in silent cinema,
with the talkies horror exploded, creating
the grossest parodies of 'eternal life',
Dracula and Dr Frankenstein's monster,
who never had a name, but his creator
became famous through his creation.
The monster should have ben named 'Eugene'
but such a name would have been
all too human and too telling.
Meanwhile in the land of the free
real science went on the rampage
by sterilising the sexually illiterate and poor
as if modern science was the new frontier
in a new civil war where the children of ex-slaves
and the poor were the new and easy-to-hit targets.
What a genuine science would have done
would have been to encourage
numeracy and literacy for all,
and have a well organised programme
where every woman would learn
about their reproductive rights,
responsibilities, and choices,
within a fairer economic framework.
That would have been the best reparation for the sins of the past.
Last but not least in this carnival of grotesques
made in the name of entertainment there is 'Freaks'
where adult circus performers of reduced height
and other differing abilities survived society
by performing for it, and took care of their own,
including settling jealousy within the troupe,
by the cruellest and most entertaining of means.
Even into older age
you maintain your online life
and it runs to familiar form.
When you tire of sending emails
and all the other 'office work',
where the screen says
'You have to get this done!'
your mind turns the screen to porn,
but even there your tastes in porn
are not what they used to be.
Where once the figures on the screen
were young, lithe and lissom,
veritable athletes in their prime,
the performers you now like
are older and they now take a lot longer
to do what once seemed to take no time at all,
just like the office work you were avoiding doing.
Every day the elderly in advanced societies
rediscover how much increased medication
keeps them alive, the better to be dependent
on technologies that have advanced that far
that its users feel like worn out cyborgs,
where questioning the point of existence
is useless-nobody will meet our doubts.
Technology can do many things,
but it can't create a community
by itself, though it will serve well
the thoughtfully community minded.
Alas technology is fine for dividing
and binding the minds of the many
who feel perpetually mildly lost
and 'want something to be part of'
without it making them property.
Britain is full of statues to Victorian men
who in their time became figureheads
for the vulture venture capital of Empire
that at the time had no known downside
to report of. The losers were robbed
of the words and the publishing means
to speak their truth with, and were often
forbidden to learn to read and write.
Britain has that many of these statues
where the plinth is effectively made
from the industrial slavery that the figures
above it made their wealth and fame on,
that it is only with the bicentenary
of the partial end of the slave based economy
that we became aware of how much the powerful
relied on slavery being taboo, kept hidden
For their reputation to be left unexamined.
Long after slavery ended the real truth
of how that economy worked would disgust
the modern public, who were previously
'sheltered' from all knowledge of it.
The question of how we repent for what
our predecessors did has become rather hot.
Do we pull the statues down? Relabel them
and leave them where they are? Put them
in museums and get those institutions
to re-explain the deeds that inspired the statue
to be made in the first place? The choices are many.....
The solution I would prefer is that these statues
should all be relabelled so as to follow the example
in the writings of Toni Morrison where she makes personal
the pain of slavery, the young black men casually killed,
the rapes of young girls, the broken and reconstructed families,
the non-existent health care, and the absolute poverty.
But where she writes about the pain she writes even more with love,
to acknowledge her love for, and bring to life, those who suffered
under the unreasoned detachment through which the laws
by which industrial slavery was organised,
not forgetting the Jim Crow laws that followed after.
There was never a sequel to 'Animal Farm',
the classic barnyard parable that paralleled
the wartime leadership of the Soviet Union,
an empire and Union that outlived
George Orwell by forty one years.
But had Orwell lived just a few years longer,
at least until 1958, he would have read
the denunciations of the 'cult of personality'
of Joseph Stalin, who in 'Animal Farm'
was satirised as 'Napoleon', the pig.
He would have had the transcript
of Khrushchev's secret speech
which would have been rich material
for the further dystopian episodes
in the animal life on 'Animal Farm'.
Systems that justify dictatorships
usually outlive both their founders,
and their critics. Orwell died
three years before Joseph Stalin,
whose cult of personality lumbers on,
reanimated by Vladimir Putin.
One exception to that rule is in the example
of one of Stalin's successors Enver Hoxha,
leader of Albania from 1944 to 1985,
and his bette noir, writer Ismail Kadare.
Like Orwell, Kadare dared to write
about the life and history of his country
with less flattery than his leader liked.
Orwell died young, Kadare not only survived
the country he grew up in, but fled to Paris,
where he is now nearly ninety and still writing.
Kadare said something of which Orwell would be proud;
"Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.".
'It is always possible to bind together
a considerable number of people in love,
so long as there are other people left over
to receive the manifestations of their aggression.' - Sigmund Freud
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| Khalid Qasim (born 1977) is a former Yemeni citizen who is one of the few still resident in Guantanamo bay. |
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| He is one of three prisoners in the camp. At present his art is the only part of him that is able to travel. |
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| Under President Barak Obama prisoners in Guantanamo became entitled to paper and drawing and painting materials. |
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| Word got out to the world and their paintings travelled in exhibitions, as prisoners left they were allowed to take their painting with them. |
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| Under President Trump more prisoners were released, but the FBI impounded their artwork and limited it being shown-they were suspicious that it might 'hold clues' they should keep secret. Joe Biden has so far not reversed the order of his predecessor. He has not let the prisoners decide what to do with their art. Left click here for more information. |
