Fasten Your Seatbelts And Toughen Up For A Bumpy Drive

It is not news to say that most news
is bad news, consisting of reports
of earthquakes, pandemics, wars
and brutal changes of government.
The latest brutal takeover of power
starting with a vote, that after threats,
faked violence, and a rhetoric full of hubris
created a narrow but clear majority vote
for the most grasping leader, at his greedy height.

The new president, an old one four years out of office,
returned meaner and harder than before,
with 49.8 % of the popular vote, barely charged
for all the crimes he was well known for before.

For the second time he won by less than half the vote.
Now the world's media have to balance how to report
the angry new leader, as he rages against his enemies,
and even his allies, against their viewers' inherent sense
of wanting, and needing, to worry proportionately
about what they they know they can't control.

Still if government runs as it has in the past
viewers, readers, and listeners of world media
can count the days, 1460, 1459, 1458, and so on
until his last day of office. Then we can look in horror
at what remains of the levels of attempted humanity,
that the human wrecking ball has not destroyed. 

The Bedroom Is The New Dangerous Place

In the analogue world the bedroom
was a place for parents to feel safe
leaving youths to play their music
at a distance from the parents' ears
where the benefits were mutual,
whilst  what teenagers might have thought
about the sex that they should not be
thinking about, much less having,
could be left unasked about;
to ask might make the family
seem like the blind leading the blighted. 

Nowadays teenagers have the world,
at least the world of the internet,
at their beck and call in their rooms
where room service is world service.

There they redesign how the world
blames youths for being uniformed,
whilst it tries to make sure
they know too little to be dangerous.

It Was 75 Years Ago Today

That The Observer published the following obituary written by then world famous Hungarian author and journalist Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983) of similarly famous author George Orwell (1903 - 1950). Read on... 

                                        IN MEMORY OF GEORGE ORWELL

The staunchest British Left-wing of the Soviet regime during and after the war was George Orwell. He stood out like a rock in the swamp of the fellow-traveling intelligentsia of varying degrees of muddiness. It was thus almost inevitable that we became first political allies, then friends, however different in character and background. The task of writing his obituary, which the Observer asked me to do, was made all the more painful by by the shortness of the available space.

To meet one's favourite author is mostly a disillusioning experience. George Orwell was one of the few writers who looked and behaved exactly as the reader of his books expected him look and behave. This exceptional concordance between the man and his work was a measure of the exceptional unity and integrity of his character.

An English critic recently called him the most honest writer alive; his uncompromising intellectual honesty was such that it made him appear to be inhuman at times. There was an emanation of austere harshness around him which diminished only in proportion to distance, as it were: he was merciless towards himself, severe upon his friends, unresponsive to admirers, but full of understanding sympathy those in the remote periphery, the 'crowds in the big towns with their knobbly faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners; the queues inside the Labour Exchanges, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning....   '.

Thus the greater the distance from intimacy, and the wider the radius of the circle the more warming became the radiations of this lonely man's great power of love. His ruthlessness towards himself was the key to his personality; it determined his attitude to the enemy within, the disease which had raged in his chest since adolescence.

His life was one constant series of rebellions both against the conditions of society in general and his own particular predicament; against humanity's drift towards 1984 and his own drift towards the final breakdown. Intermittent haemorrhages marked like milestones the rebel's progress as a sergeant in the Burma police, a dishwasher in Paris, a tramp in England, a soldier in Spain. Each should have acted as a warning, and each served as a challenge. answered by works of increasing weight and stature.

The last warning came three years ago. It became obvious that his life-span could only be prolonged by a sheltered existence under constant medical care. He chose to live on a lonely island in the Hebrides, with his adopted son, without even a char woman to look after him.

Under these conditions he wrote his savage vision of 1984. Shortly after the book was completed he became bedridden, and never recovered. Yet had he followed the advice of doctors and friends, and lived in the self indulgent atmosphere of Swiss sanitorium, his masterpiece could not have been written - nor any of his former books. The greatness and tragedy of George Orwell was his total rejection of compromise.

The urge to genius and the promptings of common sense can rarely be reconciled; Orwell's life was a victory of the former over the latter. For now that he is dead, the time has come to recognise that he is the only writer of genius among the litterateurs of social revolt between the two wars. Cyril Connolly's remark, referring to their common prep school days: 'I was a stage rebel Orwell was a true one' is valid for his whole generation.

When he went to fight in Spain he did not join the sham-fraternity of the international brigades but the most wretched of the Spanish Militia units the heretics of the POUM. He was the only one whom his grim integrity kept immune against the spurious mystique of  the 'movement', who never became a fellow-traveller and who never believed in Moses the Ravens Sugar-candy Mountain - either in heaven or on earth. Consequently his seven books of that period from 'Down and Out' to 'Coming up for Air' all remain fresh and bursting with life, and will remain so for decades to come, whereas most of the books produced by the 'emotionally shallow Leftism' which Orwell so despised are dead and dated today.

A similar comparison could be drawn from the period of the war. Among all the pamphlets, tracts and exhortations which the war produced, hardly anything bears rereading today - except perhaps E.M. Forster's 'What I believe', a few passages from Churchill's speeches, and above all Orwell's 'The Lion and the Unicorn'. It's opening section 'England your England' is one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character and a minor classic in itself.

 Animal Farm and 1984 are Orwell's last works No parable was written since Gulliver's Travels equal in profundity and mordant satire to Animal Farm, no fantasy since Kafka's In the Penal Settlement is equal in logical horror to 1984. I believe that future historians of literature will regard as a kind of missing link between Kafka and Swift. For, to quote Connolly Again it may well be true that 'It is closing time in the West, and from now on an artist will be judged by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair'.

 The resonance of Orwell's solitude and the quality of his despair can only be compared to Kafka's - but with difference: that Orwell's despair had a concrete, organised structure, as it were, and was projected from the individual to the social plane. And if 'four legs good two legs' is pure Swift, there is again this difference: that completely lost faith in his knobbly-faced yahoos with their bad teeth. Had he proposed an epitaph for himself, my guess is that he would have chosen these lines from Old Major's revolutionary anthem, to be sung to be sung to a 'stirring tune, something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucaracha'':

                         Rings shall vanish from our noses
                         And the harness from our back...
                         For this we all must labour,
                         Though we may die before it break
                         Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,
                         All must toil for freedom's sake.  

Somehow Orwell really believed in this. It was this. It was this quaint belief which guided the rebel's progress, and made him so very lovable though he did not know it.  

Travellers Tales

One subject less shared about nowadays
is stories that describe hitch-hiking,
where women are rare, but an optimist
will stand next to an easy-to-stop-by place
on a slow road, slow because it is narrow, 
where the optimistic male will raise a thumb
to attract the attention of passing drivers,
in the hope that in passing one of them
likes his face enough after a brief glance,
for the driver to stop and give a stranger
a ride closer to where they want to go.

In the car (lorry insurance now bans hitchers)
the hitcher will pay his host for the journey
with a well digested thought through point of view,
on a subject that is and out of the news,
or they will leave the driver a question to ponder.

I write 'less is shared'; I am referring to the UK,
where since the 1980's learn to drive was a way
of making teenagers more social and mobile,
where their parents buy the teen their first car,
and their parents have taxed and insured it too,
to get the teenager on the road of life early.

But for poorer folk, like me, hitching taught us
how to talk and listen to strangers,
taught me how to get to the places
I would not otherwise get to for free,
when I gave myself the extra time,
and all the while travelling thousands of miles
in short but necessary journeys,
whilst saving myself an estimated £60,000.

What I could never get
from my yen to travel on the cheap
was the experience of being a provider.

  

The Weather With You

Amongst the winter season adverts
that seem to be popular in countries
that view their weather as c-o-l-d
-though the temperature is temperate
compared with cold in the countries
that are coldest in the populated world
-come glossy adverts for holiday breaks
in sunny climes, where the host countries
speak the language of the tourists, and offer
them food and drink that tastes of home,
amid luxury lodgings that are presented as 'self tidying'. 

How much do the audience for these adverts
for cheap holidays realise that when more of them
fly to escape the cold, that is not that cold really,
they will be the harbingers of more extreme weather
in the future, when the price of their flights
is added to the otherwise unaccounted for cost 
of preserving the biosphere for the future? 

Self Interest Always Divides Unequally

When any government, or employer,
wants to sell me the latest false self esteem
in the name of their material self interest,
then let them - in a society based on growth
through debt, that is their bounden duty.

My duty to myself is to define my self interest
in terms of living well, within my means,
even when that means having less than others
and less to offer a self-interested employer.

I have no interest in upward mobility,
which why I resist the lure of the jobs
where employers say 'working for me
is good for you' to would be employees, 
whilst saying nothing about how it is best them.

I can't mind how self interest divides people
into relative 'haves' and 'have nots', as long
as I do not esteem myself by such inequality. 

Change From All Sides

An English journalist asked Irish poet W.B. Yeats
what he thought of the Irish Civil War, Yeats replied,
'I stand with the gunmen on both sides',
which caught the journalist off guard,
as it usually does when anyone agrees
more with the foot soldiers for change
than they agree with those who most seek power.

Guantanamo Bay News

 

Guantanamo Bay High Security Prison
now has fewer occupants than it has ever had before.
Fifteen prisoners remain from the worldwide
haul from 'the war on terror'. Among the latest
to leave Guantanamo is Yemeni prisoner Khaled Qasim,     
 painter of the above picture which toured the USA,
who is one of eleven Yemeni prisoners transferred to Oman
because The Yemen is 'too unstable a country to return them to'.  
  

Don't Be Surprised

If Israel is still bombing Gaza
as you read this, four days after
signing a declaration for D. Trump
to brag about as he is sworn at,
sorry sworn in, as president
please save your anger
for when it seems more useful,
when ever that might be.

WW1 did not end in a day,
though that is how we commemorate it.
Signing the armistice for November 1918
was only the start of the end of conflict.

Open war slowly stopped across Europe,
until the last guns were laid down in June 1919,
as from January of 1919 to June 1923 treaties
were negotiated and signed across Europe.
Blame was firmly cast on 'losing' countries 
and future enmities given a firm foundation.

Expect the same with Israel vs Islam,
of which Israel vs Gaza is just one chapter.

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (40)

Different people are adept at different things,
Some people drive vehicles, others never learn,
Some are good at DIY, others fine it best
to get their DIY needs met by amenable friends
and later repay them in kind.

Some find technology easy whist others lose their nerve,
after losing the message they had taken ages to edit,
by 'pressing the wrong button', but they retrieve
a botched version of it from the machine that is okay,
but it is clearly not what they really wanted to say.

They would have been better off making notes
before ringing a friend, and quoting them in a live conversation. 

A klutz has to manage being a klutz;
as adults they have to get by surely knowing
that how their lives were managed and mangled
where when they were young is a difficult domain to explore. 

By nothing annoys them more than being told,
of some function on their smartphone 'It's easy to use',
by somebody who knows always knows best
what to press and why (and why not) to press it.

The clever chap did not intend
to condescend,
but leaves the klutz smarting... 

The Diminishing Potency Of Cheap Music ?

CD's have been around for forty years,
in that time the companies behind them
have both said that they are the best way
for the public to hear their favourite artists
and gambled and lost as their material
has been found to be easy to copy,
and thereby reduce the company revenues,
such that artists get more from T shirt sales
whilst on tour, than they can earn
from writing and recording new music. 

What I find harder to fathom
is how lazy the record companies were,
when they persuaded consumers to love
this new format for conveying music,
but then again from the billions of discs
sold to the public needed no persuasion.

Beyond the simplicity of laziness
why did the music industry settle
on a format for selling their wares
where they could have predicted
that the excess of shoddy product
would lead to public boredom
on a scale where random piles
of unsaleable CD's occupy the corners
of charity shops uninterested in them,
where they stay for years unlooked at,
waiting for something more saleable to take their place?

The Eternal Life Of Matter

Did you hear the one about the icicle?

In excessive heat he committed suicide by melting

and reinvented himself as a pool of water instead, 

before he became vapour. 

He wanted to join in with, and mark, the soon-to-arrive sixth extinction.... 

Where Is My 'Snoopy' ?

For when the people 'out there'
all seem like half - people to me,
and make me seem half human too? 

 

Daylight Again?

'We must not let daylight in on magic'
wrote the journalist Walter Bagehot
(pronounce Badget) in 1867, about the public
viewing the openly grieving Queen Victoria
clearly missing Albert as she performed
the royal duties that she alone could do
for a public who were kept at such a distance
from her, that they only knew who she was
and what she did by what a tame press wrote about her.

But grief and duty are part of a long list
of markers of life best not looked at too closely
if they are going to maintained in an age of deference and wide disparities
of wealth and poverty, health and disease,
crime and cruelty also thrive when the public
averting their eyes from them, the less
to be offended by the effect of knowing
what happens when they are left unwatched.

Surfing The Waiving Of The Rules

The 21st century liberal line is
that 'slavery is wrong', as if in our time
we speak for all history,
and in our time we can account
for what history was meant to be. 

But history tells a different story,
and the older the times we look back on
the less reliable it gets, and harder it is
to explain the times are to account for,
and yet we should examine them closely
to find the humane and compelling in these accounts.

We can't know who wrote those account about powerful men,
any more  than we can know what the men were like as children
or the women their mothers were, and what parenting was like. 

The lives of women and children were seen
as too weak and inconsequential
for accounts of them to be thought to matter.

In this historical vacuum lived the domestic slaves, 
where they were like women and children,
where they were all became the property of male masters
and patriarchs who owned everything that was owned,
from cattle, sheep, to family, servants, and language.

For slaves domestic slavery to a household
was a way of escaping homelessness, poverty,
and worse; it was better than the alternative.

Where histories record a loss of choice,
we must recognise history as the outcome
of the Hobson's choice past for the present day. 

With the enlightenment came industrial slavery
and an industrial scale slave trade, in which
the rich countries named the poor countries
ransacked them for resources, and abducted
their population to process what ransacked
and dumped the slaves, their names lost from history,
in moves which were the opposite of domestic slavery.

Where domestic slavery housed those it contracted,
in their lack of means, industries of every type
made millions not just homeless but stateless,
existing well beyond their means of reversing it.

Distant Living

I can resist being pushed into debt,
I am comfortable, each night
that I return to the warmth of my bed
where I have a choice of book to read
or an enquiring radio programme
to fall asleep to half way through,
and a diary in which record
my thoughts, dreams, and days.

Each day I eat my breakfast,
with the bad news of the day
the radio tells me, and I note
how much 'me' is part of 'media',
whilst wondering what to do after.

What happens between the morning
and the night is meant to be a life,
much of it is life according to the screen
I read, and compose from to write this.

Since the computer screen replaced television
I remain amazed at how well my days fill out,
with me so low on the world's priorities
whilst I live without companionship.

This is what 'my freedom' now consists of,
the freedom to age in comfort at home,
as part of a mass collective of indifference
connected  by how we are meant to care
when don't know what to say each other.

Choose Your Battles Carefully

Because swallowing the unacceptable,
and accepting less is the choice for everyone
with a sense of sanity and proportion about life
and anyone prepared for the insanity of being
themselves at all costs deserves the end result.
  

 

As Prophets Predict

the future of the human race as being in space
I hope the adherents of these secular prophets
take the fullest account of the stuff that humans
are made of, the bacteria, elements, and DNA,
and last but not the least of these, the viruses
that limit the longevity of human life,
to keep the universe cleaner than they kept the earth. 

Powerful Invisible Friends

The poorest children in the world
don't go to school; amid their poverty
what they learn is how well poverty
make individuals, and individuality, invisible. 

What the educated world's young take home from school
reduces to either how to be a bully without seeming to be,
or how to withstand being bullied in plain sight,
when those who might stop it excuse it
-in the name of 'competition', or social Darwinism.

What unites both the bully and the bullied
is how much both states use fear and threat,
where the fear of a threat isolates the bullied in plain sight. 

I remember well the shouts in primary school,
where the bullied tries to say to his bully
'I will set my dad/big brother/the police on you'
as if said invisible person would defend them,
where mentioning the police was the weakest threat;
the police were viewed as people who would defend
their own before they would looked after anyone else.

The invisible friends of the bully were usually stronger
than the silent friends of the bullied, this imagined strength
became real life strength when the bully bullied harder
whereas the invisible witnesses of the weak bore witness
to the ineffectiveness of the weakness of the weaker boy.

Adult hierarchies were explained as those with the most
had earned it by making the invisible hand of the market
their powerful friend, until they tamely ate from it's hand,
more readily than anyone else was allowed to.

It was hard to argue against imaginary thinking like that. 

Who Do You Fit Around Awkwardly?

The image above presents the idea
of 'the humility tile' where those living
in the dwelling are warned against the pride
they invest in perfection when they see the floor.

  When I first saw the image the word
I saw was 'misfit', as if the tile was out of place
in the space it took up. But it fitted the space
very well, well enough to explain,
how we can be wrongly placed - socially - 
and how a workable imperfection
is the best we can ask for.

 

The Ultimate End Always Requires The Ultimate Means

When the end, the cause that is on our minds,
is The End, the apocalypse, then the means to it
requires the surrender of all we know we have done,
and all we started not realising we could not finish it
without us knowing whether the cause is right or wrong.

By then what we gave will be gone,
our faith cashed in for an unknown eternity,
where for all our brave words getting there
we cannot know where we expect to be.

It is unsurprising that men prefer to make
what and who they worship easily recognisable,
through the shorthand of ritual and repetition 
with much more alacrity than accept the unknown. 

The Fog Of Truth

When truths become so vital to us
that we have to kill for them,
or they cause the leaders of empires
to start trade wars that reduce trade
and peacetime life between countries,
then 'Wither division, to what effect?' 
will be the only question left for us to address.

For when belief becomes war,
then war will be what we believe,
and we will all be our own enemy
whilst becoming the enemy each other.

My Last New Year Card ; Life Is About Looking Up

The underside of a mushroom. Photo by Isabelle Soule.

 

The Gerontocracy Of American Politics

Every day that politics in the USA
relies on men and women who were fit
and young when they joined their party
of choice stay on as if they were in it for life
becomes another day for America to embody
the oldest of black/bleak humour
-that of the T shirt that says 'elect the dead'.
Where the dead will stand in elections
and be voted in by the not-very-alive,
supervised by never-alive AI processes.

If the elderly want to stay in politics,
let them stand down, and be like Jimmy Carter,
set up charities where they see the changes
they want to be, but they now can only see
- age stops them being it. But financing it
is as near as they can get to making it happen.

For as much as they can see, but they can't be,
let them support others to make the arrangements for it. 

Among Iranians

The most popular tweet this last week
has been 'The Islamic Republic was born
with Carter, let it end with Carter's death.'.

Whilst I might wish The Islamic Republic
to be brought to an end,
I doubt that any winding up of it 
would leave Iran at peace until a long time after.

Carter was not the cause of the Islamic Republic,
he was the inheritor of a failing US foreign policy
towards Iran, where failure seemed like the only option.

Carter was one of many US presidents since WW2
who, when they could change the home country
for the better, would so - if only for the short term.

US foreign policy is extremely hard to direct,
for the betterment of the peoples in troubled lands
where rulers like The Shah of Iran kept themselves
in power with arms sold them by the USA, and UK.

If Carter had backed the Iranian people,
and not The Shah, how would he have done it?
Which sect of Islam would Carter's USA have backed,
before he changed tactics and was forced to change sides? 

In A World Seething With Inequality

The thanks that a beggar gives
for the small change they are given
when they sit outside shops, in cities,
the better to attract the loose change
of customers going into the shops,
that humility, is worth more
than all the money freely given;
the words are all the beggar have to give
and even then they lose volition,
the power of choice,
in a world that does not listen,

This makes the size of the soul of the giver
small change itself in a world
where the self importance of the giver is what counts.
That said small change is better than nothing
when not caring about having a soul seems to not matter.

Don't Try This At Home, Kids (Or Adults... )

I went to see the film 'Queer' on the second day of it's UK release in a packed Belfast cinema with some doubts. What I wanted most was to see a film where 'Christmas' did not exist. Willian Burroughs was famous for his difficult writings, where a short passage by him was easy to follow, but when a short reading becomes a long paragraph the readers attention span  and concentration are soon tested beyond everyday endurance. Would this film be as difficult to watch as Burroughs famous cut-up texts were to read? I used to like difficult films, and like the person that Burroughs projected himself as being, as an author. But I was caught between admiring him as how he projected himself as an artist, whilst I wondered what the off-duty William Burroughs was like.

Daniel Craig has an energy and presence as William Lee/William Burroughs that cannot be doubted. Craig is in every scene in the film, though in some scenes he is in he makes his entry part way through. The script comes mostly from the 1985 novella 'Queer', a sequel-of-sorts to the novella 'Junkie'. 'Junkie' was Burroughs first published work, published in 1951, and it portrayed with clarity unusual for the times how chaotic Burroughs' personal life was and what life was like for the criminal underclass where become addicted to any illegal substance turned into a life of petty crime, in  support of the criminal drug habit. At the time of writing and living 'Junkie' Burroughs life was chaotic enough that it took decades for Burroughs to organise himself enough to reclaim the rights to that first work and republish it, heavily revised, as 'Junky'. 

So, 'Queer' is set in the Mexico of 1951. The outside of the buildings seem to be period enough, and the cars look wonderful, though the streets seem to be relatively clear of traffic. Since Burroughs was part of an ex-pat American drinking set, where they drank together the streets and bars could have been that clean, light, and pleasant to be in. Could have been pleasant  enough for sociable drinkers to play chess whilst having a slow afternoon drink. But I did wonder how clean such streets would have been back in the day.  

Critics had made much of the filming of the sex scenes, where what was filmed was not simulated. As a viewer I got the point; Burroughs was both in lust and in love, caught between intense neediness and reverence for his handsome new lover, Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey. Before they go to bed Eugene sees the drug taking kit in one corner of the room as Burroughs fixes them both a strong drink. 

Thus begins the start of a wary but deepening friendship between Burroughs/Lee and Allerton where Burroughs/Lee seeks the companionship of the younger man, and the younger man has watch as Lee reveals the everyday details of his drugs habit including the long term consequences of addiction for Burroughs/Lee. There is only one scene in Mexico City where Burroughs/Lee crashes a party, already drunk and difficult and looking for Eugene whereas up to that scene he seemed controlled of his drink consumption in public. That scene becomes a turning point for the next part of the film.

For as long as there have been laws against taking recreational drugs there have been people who have strived to get around those laws and around their unintended addiction to the drugs-the admission of which is complicated by the laws that prohibit the consumption of said drugs.

In Act two the lover is allowed to watch as Burroughs takes the drugs in his room, extending the level of trust and intimacy between them. By this time Lee/Burroughs knew he had to leave Mexico City, I was happy for this change of scene since by the time that decision was made the musical soundtrack of the city had taken some odd turns for being Mexico in 1951, as the music that attempted to reflect the dramas Lee/Burroughs was going through became an eclectic 1980's pop soundtrack that seemed odd, if it was meant to reflect Lee/Burroughs mental state.   

To shorten this review, Lee/Burroughs invites Allerton to join him in the jungles of South America, to take a mysterious substance known as Yage, that Lee/Burroughs tries to impress upon the medicine woman 'Would give the individual telepathic powers, because that is what he had read the CIA as saying it does, and the CIA also say the Russians are seeking it out for 'mind control' reasons.'. This made me laugh inwardly at the absurdity of the scene, and yet admire the chutzpah of Lee/Burroughs' pretensions; in any real jungle what the CIA said about America, Russia, or what the cold war was about would seem so far away that they are irrelevant. The jungle is your law and guide. The film begins to take on elements of being like a video game from there onward. But that is more a reflection of how much live action video games have changed the depiction of drama in film making, than any reduction of the narrative of the book the film is sourced from.

Then comes the centre of the film, the depiction of ego loss for both of them, which is well done and the original music enhances the visuals very well; time seems to disappear as their bodies move on the screen in an a sense of absolute interiority. Then there is the snap back to reality. Lee/Burroughs leaving the jungle alone and heading back to Mexico City looking and acting as if his time in the jungle had cleansed him, from the inside out. There he seems calm, lucid, and friendly but distant. 

After that there are a series of postscript scenes, dream sequences, where I assume that each scene refers back to his time in the jungle, referring back further to some of his actions in Mexico, dreams in which remorse came back to him from some of the life he pursued with friends and attempted partners. The uncanny intensity of these dream sequences, shaped by  his having been an addict of heroin and opium, where taking the opium was originally meant to 'be a cure for the addiction to heroin', were astonishing too. 

In the last airless image he dreams of his own death. Cue a very long series of credits. 

A Late New Year Card

Wacław Szpakowski. B9, 1926

 

When Amnesia Breeds Amnesia

In the 'politically correct' media I often read headlines
written in outraged tones that declare 'End slavery now!'
often after the latest discovery of some shocking abuse
by people (mostly men) who hid how they did not care
who they hurt, until they were inevitably found out.

It is mostly men because...  ...they are the gender
most linked with evolving ideas of ownership, trade
and values of exchange where those are enslaved
are the most convinced before they can think otherwise
that their sole worth is in the value of their labour to others.

History is the history of empires, peoples and leaders
who through warfare have engorged themselves
to become the sole subject of the historical narrative,
after having swallowed whole, and anonymised,
the many smaller countries in their paths.

In this historical narrative live the roots of slavery.
But it is incorrect, if not inconceivable, for todays generation
to look beyond their lifespan for where the roots of cruelty come from.

Any generation that cannot see beyond itself
will reproduce the same myopia future,
and is setting itself up to be forgotten.

Picture set of the Month - January 2025 - More Landscapes By Felix Valloton

Souvenir du Romanel painted 1900.

Le Champs Plateau de la Croix Rouge painted 1914.

Coucher de soleil nuages, bleus 1918.

 

La Rue Ensoleillee painted 1922. 

Falaise a vousoy painted 1910.