For The Heaviest Smokers Only

The packaging looks more attractive than the new Australian
 cigarette packs but the effect of lighting up is just as lethal.

Doublespeak

is the elusive concept of saying
less than you mean through false optimism.
It defines the ambiguity that has made the mass media
successful for the last century.
We see it easiest when it is spoken
through individuals (usually politicians)
whom we know to disbelieve
before they open their mouths.
Otherwise it hides behind blandness.
Generalities, legalese, and statements
written in the 3rd person impersonal
where who is doing what to whom,
and how, is hard to determine.

Detachment In Communication

In the U.K.the young are now more likely
to text each other than listen to each other
on the phone or want to see the person they text.
With their multiple functions the newest mobile phones
are the swiss army knives of modern communications.
Their users can navigate the (digital) world, via satnav,
then get poked by facebook, or twitter away,
then fill their sound world with an ipod,
and finally fob other people off with emails,
rather than welcome one another as sentient live examples
of the same species as themselves.
After pressing that many buttons
and doing all the machine lets them do,
the users are too tired to care.

Signs Of Greater Age (10)

1- finding it is not heart disease
to find the pleasure in hope deferred,
instead it seems natural, almost mature,
to delay the gratification of the senses.

2-finding music that is more melodic
and quieter than the music you grew up
with is easier on the ear than you expected,
and the music you once knew seeming noisy.

3-Finally finding the joy of shared silences.

Patriotism Is The Father Of Schadenfreude

The absence of war does not mean
the outbreak of calm.
Since World War II (1939-45)
and the end of rationing (1939-57)
the U.K. has had a financial crisis once every decade.
Each crisis was reported as if there had never
been financial shrinkage before, except during war.
Hindsight has taught me how patriotism
is the father of schadenfreude, thus combining
press and public ill will towards other peoples abroad
and the poorest at home who end up being scapegoated.
It took me a long time to mistrust the message,
but far longer to mistrust the messenger.

Lord Justice Leveson announced through his public
enquiry into the devalued morality of the British press
that there has been seven public enquiries into press values
since the 1950's. If ever the press offered the public
more than fake prurience about sex in lieu of morality
(which used to be the job of The Church, no wonder
the churches feel put out), then they would tell the public
about the inherent instability of post-war economics,
and put the demos back into democracy, rather than report
with blind purity the virtue of the accumulation of wealth.    

Who's Policeman Do You Want To Be?

I have heard it said by self described 'gay atheists',
never the happiest of souls in their qualified shades of indifference
towards others, that their main reason for proclaiming
'There is no God' is because they believe the church
'wants to police their sex life' and they want to resist that.
They talk as if sex is their greatest freedom
ever to be had, and for that to be free at their point of want
they have to police themselves.
I would empathize more with their fear
of external coercion if I felt that sexual technique
mattered more than the ability to form a bond.

As it is, I don't.

I see life for rich rich liberal atheists as the right
for others to have no god or guide but them,
which is like the emperor claiming the right
to censor everyone, whilst dancing naked
before his courtiers, and denying he is doing so,
dishonestly forbidding them the same choice.

Asbent Leadership

is  what teenage boys accuse adult males of
when the boys hope of adulthood
becomes the parental fear of adultery,
and youth rebels against the emptiness that formed it.
These accused un-leading men collude with women
who prefer detachment over co-dependence.
Thus inertia consistently avoids directing
its offspring. The young from gangs
to 'compensate' and 'lead themselves'.
That the majority skin colour in this errant
self leadership is not white
is a merely observing the obvious.

I was always pale,  now I am bald,
and I was never gang material.
But I felt my father disconnecting from me
well before my words struggled to explain him.
I now see my absence of being lead
as my having arrived. There is nowhere further
to go and nobody else to take me there.
Wherever I go I must lead myself.