And countries get closer to reviving
old trade wars, where neighbours withhold,
and ransom, emblems of neighbourliness,
goods that were once thought basic to survival.
Instead we get closer to the remoteness
where arms and drones are what we exchange,
in wars that offer no escape from conflict.
There our former stance of holding tight
to our allies, whilst keeping a closely watch
on our enemies, all in the hope of unity,
now seems somewhat pointless.
Diplomacy used to be the art
of 'saying the quiet part quietly',
and leaving the diplomats to get on
with tasks required of them.
But with modern wars of attrition
diplomacy has become headline news,
as day after day each shift in position
prompts a new speculative quote
fills the acres of online print
and hours of radio journalism.
If only, I think, we did not need
the quiet part to be said at all.
but with a 'bread and circuses' media
feeding us whatever jot and tittle
of gossip has fallen from the leaders table
we know less and less of what
is actually going on than we ever knew
when we knew nothing at all.
Alchemy is to autocracy what science is to democracy.
When an alchemist has a success he will share the results
with his fellows, whether alchemist or high status citizen,
but he will never share, or compare with other alchemists,
the processes by which those results were achieved.
Autocrats, like alchemists, root their faith
in their manipulations of nature and people
in how far they are above having to explain
their actions. able, Whether alchemist or autocrat,
they hide their failures behind word salads,
and slight of hand and word presentations.
Both modern science and democracy
are experiments where confidence
in the process depends on openness,
and well thought out definitions
for the parameters of what counts
as as 'success', where the process
of being observably effective
matters more than any given result.
Though how either system stacks up
against the plethora of new media,
boosted by turbo capitalism, remains to be seen....
