The Wrong Optimism

The affirmation of cynicism,
because the cynic proved right,
is surely all the more dispiriting
to the majority who in their passivity
believed in better for what proved to be
the absence of clear reason.

The Consistency Of Old Failures

Why are diets like Political Careers?

Because both seem to work for a time,
but both always end in qualified failure.

To disguise the air of defeat
both hold out the promise
of quiet re-commitment in the future.

'My Fellow Americans, Russians, Turks... '

'Are you  ready to see other empires screwed on your behalf?
We will shaft the earth itself for your delight and short term pleasure....  '

The Less That Was Said The Better Off We Were...

To paraphrase a soundbite from The Gospels,
'It is not what goes into a country that makes it unclean
but what comes out of that country'*.
What goes into a country is the mix of people,
money, food, drugs, and other vices and services.
What comes out of a country is the discussion
the nation has when it calls itself a democracy
and demands it's citizens take part in a popular vote
 'to settle matters X, Y and Z once, and for all.'.
In the UK it is always 'for all'; we decide by simple majority.
And it seems said majority are simple enough in themselves
to be unable to appreciate the power of the bile and hatred
which when properly articulated destroy all reason.


*Mathew Ch 15 Verse 11 -
'A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it.'

Promises Promises

When I was young and naive
I was taught how to write from the care home
everyone pretended was a boarding school
to my parents as part of my English grammar.
To make us more compliant to write
there was a mildly comic draft letter
we were taught never to imitate. It ran
'Dear Mother I am sending you a pound, but not this week'.

With hindsight the joke was very much on us,
we had insufficient money to send anywhere.
And we were kept at far greater cost
than ever we could have accounted for.

Now British citizens are facing a season
of resprayed/recycled electoral promises
and I remember that prototype letter.
I have to ask, did the men (it is mostly men),
who probably went to a proper boarding school,
now making the present politics of hope-deferred
for those with less ever know about that joke letter home?

It seems to me that they have adapted it,
word for word, in all their manifestos.