Numbed And Numbered

Anyone, any government, in any negotiations
has four basic positions they can settle for
with their enemies, their opposition:
win-win, win-lose, lose-win and lose-lose.

 Many a declining empire has chosen lose-lose
when it has picked which war to fight,
on the grounds that the other side is smaller.
The other side can less afford to lose
what it has than the empire
Which is rich in citizens it can use
as cannon fodder, to prove the superiority
of oligarchy over democracy. 

This is Russia's position with it invading Ukraine:
Russian can afford to lose far more than Ukraine can,
and with its autocracy and control of the media
it has already devalued what 'being Russian' means.

When Biden's America gave/sold it's surplus arms
to Ukraine to help it fight back, it strove to make Ukraine
a winner, whilst clearing out some of its arms dumps.

But with Trump such altruism, flawed as it was,
is off the menu. As Trump gets aggrieved to order,
the quiet kindness of Biden is a distant memory.
Trump needs to be the only winner in transactions
in which winning is believing he is the only engineer
of the transaction. Trump has to sow conflict
and make losers out of his enemies and advisers,
as if they both were alike, 'jealous' of his need tor be right.

Oligarchy and empires are slow to recognise
life beyond their control, but when such life advances
in their back yard, they will be numbed
by how much their days are numbered.   

A Choice Of Dangers

Many people know that public book burnings
are a sign of a democracy in a state of distress,
the sign of imminent deportations, and worse.

But there is a stage well beyond that,
where citizens have to burn books in private:
the ideas in them have become heretical and dangerous.

If aired anywhere by citizens,
these ideas would get their adherents arrested and tortured.

Still, I would rather have it that some ideas are still dangerous:
the most dangerous state is when the majority have no thought at all. 

Mark, Read, And Inwardly Digest

that today is World Book Day,
the day the book publishing industry
seeks the attention of the public
via the more ephemeral media, film,
television, podcasts, and the internet,
as to how, down to the last news bulletin,
they are all founded on words to make
what they say intelligible to their audience.

How much more people become aware
because of this day of the power of language
remains to be seen, but we have every means,
including blogging, to share and declare this. 

Whose Puppet Are We?

One of the easiest accusations to aim
at the politician we, as individuals,
dislike is 'They are puppets', as if,
through labelling them we claim
to be an authority over the misbegotten state
they front and the narratives that hide behind it.
Until under us their number is up, they are history.

Puppet states and puppet leaders have existed
from ancient Egypt, Rome, and Babylon onward
right through to modern Russia, China and America,
the latter of which resists being called an empire,
but through the trade rules it sets for smaller countries
it acts exactly like an empire, propagating slavery under it,
not least from within for laws like the Jim Crow Laws. 

Empires are consistently opaque, and the way
that America presents itself is true to to the form.

Given how similar puppetry is to slavery,
amid the toing and froing between America,
Russia, and Ukraine, all of whom have histories
which they wish the public would ask less about, 
the least the public can do is ask the empires
of Russia and America Who is controlling you?
What false history is pulling your strings?
By what long annulled law do you rule the universe?

Don't be surprised, though, if when these empires blank you,
take your voice by controlling the media, and cuts down people
like you for claiming a life outside of subservience to them,
that these empires don't want you to believe exists.

Marriage Etc

I have distant friends who nowadays
say of themselves to others 'I was born Gay'.
I understand why they say it, but also I find
that the same birth right is not true for me,
in spite of my sharing in their sexuality. 

In the language that was common
when I was born, couples were meant
to court, engage, then marry for life.
There marriage meant men being
the only breadwinner in the house
they got themselves in debt for,
and slowly paid for with their wages.

There men lived most outside the house,
in the world of money and power, and alcohol.
Women were meant to stay at home and not ask
to see the man's wage packet each Friday.
As housewives and mothers they were meant
to say nothing about what they did without
whilst being grateful for what they were given.

So much for the social divisions of the 1950s.

The reason some men now say they 'were born gay',
is that in some churches and 'tradition based' structures
the view is promoted that inside every gay man and lesbian,
there is a heterosexual who at an early age got diverted,
but who can be brought If the gay man submits with vigour
the diversions that made them gay could brain-washed away
and family values will replace a misbegotten past.

Such beliefs have long been on the dark side
of the health and wealth gospel, where success 
is worshipped, and money always comes first..   

I am gay, but I was not born that way,
I was converted to it by how change,
choice, and money were set against me,
making marriage etc a fantasy
I was never going to complete.

What Is On TV Tonight?

Whatever it is, a book* will be better. 
Because the measure of a life
is how much more live books are
than adaptions of them for visual media
can be. And only print can do this.
I prefer my print on paper but if some.
folk prefer e-readers okay, but let it have
nothing to do with me. 

*excludes texts where no hand, eye,
  or mind has shaped what is written,
I.e. 'A.I. texts in which machines learn
badly how ordinary people write
       and can't sense what the text is missing.        

 

The Deity Of Dyslexia

Many wonder how much
God is the deity of the dyslexic,
with how His Word was loosed on the world, 
and when the world became so prone to error.

On the first day of creation The Word created the heavens,
the second day the earth, the third the waters,
on the fourth day land the between the waters,
on the fifth day came the creatures of the seas and the land.
And in those days the days varied vastly in length,
God did not need a watch to knew what the time was.

The result and the timing were perfect. But with man
The Word got mis-spelt. Woman came after that,
woman, of whom man thought 'She is my alibi:
before God I will blame her for all I don't want to be known for.'.
When God invented obedience to himself he made it as part of choice.
It took man to take the choice out of obedience, and create slavery,
making the sense of choice disappearing universal.

With modern science came a new choice
of who to blame: nobody. Where theology
pointed toward the human 'who?' and 'why?',
in the oldest, and most circular, blame game,
Science made friends with Hypothesis, Test, and Result
when all four confined themselves to the much more
reflective question of 'How?', with our being.

Nowadays I am careful about how I live,
and seek to believe, whist avoiding the blame games.   

Picture Set Of The Month - February - The Paintings Of Paule Veselay

'Six forms in Six Compartments' as painted in 1936
by British painter Paule Veselay, who chose the name
when first worked and her work was exhibited
in Paris in the 1930s.  

'L'Animal' as painted in 1929 by female artist
Paule Veselay (1892 - 1984), who retained her fame
in Paris long after working there in the 1930s,
but returned to England In 1939. 

'Composition' as painted in 1933 by British abstract
artist Paule Veselay (1892 - 1984) who also made
 sculptures, made constructions with string,
and collages. 

'Paris' as drawn in 1926 by Female Surrealist
Artist, Paule Veslelay (1892 - 1984). 

'Neolithic childhood: art in a False Present' a 1930
painting by Paule Veselay (1892 - 1984) who in
this image was drawing on the sense of crisis
in society and politics prevailing at that time.