Taking The 'Arian' Out Of 'Majoritarianism'*

The pink star is now well known
in the small constellation of coloured stars
that social and racial minorities in Nazi Germany
were labelled with, as whatever the colour
they were packed into trains and despatched
from that country's civil society to the work
/death camps that dotted the German countryside.

Camps that the local population knew about,
but had to deny for the sake of their liberty and sanity.

Pink stood for 'gay', the choice of sexuality
that only in the late twentieth century
in wealthy liberal countries has been accepted
as nearer normal. But what of the other colours?
The yellow (the Jews), the brown (the Roma),
the purple (Jehovah's Witnesses) the blue (emigrants)
the red (political prisoners and the Freemasons)
the green (ordinary criminals), and last
and far from least the black star (the vagrants,
drug addicts, the indolent, and the prostitutes).

What is a society without these choices?
And where are they all in my society?
Why don't they join us in recognition
of their previous loss? Is it still 'too dangerous',
for them to make themselves known
through the commemoration
of their absent forbearers? 

Perhaps many in those groups prefer to side
with the quiet majority and quietly add to the gaiety
of the country they belong to, and let their losses be.
Or let other people account for their history. 

Job done, for this year at least.

*Majoritarianism means majority rule, or a majority monoculture,
in societies where the undeclared aim is a consensus that both
makes minorities vital to the economy and socially invisible,
and does it in ways that said minorities can't resist.
Example; The Jim Crow laws in the USA .   

Fascists both appropriate and dislike majoritarianism.
They will use it for the cover it gives them with the majority
of a given population, but they also know that by definition
they are a minority who should never be naturally popular.
Easy acceptance is against their nature, which is to divide others. 

But still they feel that they are a minority whose destiny
is the right to rule, and majoritarianism is part of the path to power.

The Music Room-A Room Of One's Own

How people arrange their houses matters.
One of my fondest memories as a youth
was discovering that my new friends
refreshed their friendships through
keeping open the physical space
where they shared their interests,
which allowed those interests to change.

I met my earliest friends via my school,
a space where I did as I was bid. I chose little.
Outside the school my friend and I had nothing in common,
but through music we tried to create conviviality. 

I was 20, and mad about music, when I made friends
who would last. They were all just enough older.
They had plenty of evenings for sharing music they liked
and teaching to me why their music was good
after I recovered from being amazed
by the variety of design of the record covers.

Before then I had been starved of such choice.
The family house was set up around the television
and what my father thought were good programmes.
This meant sport and other non-verbal competition,
the communication of which taught me nothing.

Music, even recorded music, meant musicians
agreeing with each other through how they played.
However much music was non-verbal, dad had ears of tin.
The din of hierarchies forming themselves were the key
to how his hearing worked. Dad loved seeing others
make themselves the boss, with no sense of process.

But my friends were different,
hierarchies had to be accidental
and would always be subject
to the great leveller, change.

None of us knew who Virginia Woolf was
but we would have 'got' her 1929 feminist plea
for women to have space and money to be themselves,
rather than be confined within the image of their family.

The best thing about rooms for sharing music
is how the host inspire their guest to create their own.
Whether guest, or host, that is what I did....     

The Tourettes Of Technology

When technology gets us alone,
it always make us ruder
than we can admit that we are,
with other people.

This is not about porn
which most adults know about,
where the secret with it is less
that we know how to find it
and more that what we hide from ourselves
is how our wanting it is proof that we are bored
with the more evasive, but socially acceptable, agendas.

Who knew that boredom multiplied so easily? 

The rudeness I want to point at
is what happens in the home
when the printer wont listen
and obey it's controller, they both act
as if they have had an argument,
and we feel like we are the losers
when we can't print what we want.
They won't listen to us or each other,
that is when the tourettes of technology takes over.

Narcissism And Creativity

It is less that narcissism stymies creativity,
and more that whatever a narcissist sees
happening around them, the more they will 
mistakenly credit themselves for that creativity,
as if it were the centre of everything,
including the creativity of other narcissists 
with whom they share the same condition.

Assuming being the centre of the creations
of other people starts slowly, with flattery
whilst behind the scenes the narcissist
finds cover to hind behind, through which
to take control of what belonged to others
they come to believe was theirs all along. 

For the creative person who gets trapped,
escaping the narcissist gets difficult,
it often means partial permanent surrender
and an income for the controlling figure
that morally the controller does not deserve,
but self centred people have no interest
in morality, unless the argument serves them.

And that is to say nothing
about the overweening control
that multinational corporations
who have more power
over individual consumers
than medium sized countries 
have over their citizens. 

On The Centenary Of The Birth Of Ivor Cutler

 

Ivor Cutler(1923-2006) was  singular talent as a writer and performer who led a singular life. He picked a careful path well away from 'being famous for fame's sake', where he remained popular and consistent with himself, right to the end. He remains the highest profile member of the Noise Abatement Society that the society ever had.

Who's Art (Or Life) Is It Anyway?

One of the lesser known civilities
offered to the detainees of Guantanamo Bay
was, from 2009, giving them art classes 
and materials with which to be creative.
Under Barak Obama they were permitted
to take their art with them when they left,
as innocent men, scarred by incarceration. 

From 2017 Donald Trump's government
released more prisoners, unannounced.
But changed the rules, the prisoners' art
was declared the property of the state,
The detainees could not take it with them.

'That is a small price to pay for being free'
you might say, and yes their liberty
meant more than than what they left without,
but I have to ask 'What measure of pettiness
should such a wealthy western government
be known for, when it disallows departing detainees
the small freedom of choice that was
once permitted to them when confined.

For the full story, please left click here. 
    

Twenty One Years And Counting....

A shade under ten years ago I blogged
this blog entry, a horrific list of neglect
and American state legal avoidance.
Who realises that Guantanamo Bay
was opened 21 years ago yesterday?

Who knew that in that prison
America imprisoned 780 Muslim men,
and not one person of any other faith or gender?

Who knew that nine prisoners died on the site?

Who knew that by detaining them
as 'unlawful combatants' the Bush
administration gave itself exemptions
from all known conventions
on the treatment of combatants in war?

Who realises that even if the last three
living 'unlawful combatants' there were released today,
and the prison camp was empty apart from the staff
then because the camp was created in a legal vacuum,
where so many laws were avoided in it's creation,
the legal process for closing the site down,
and returning it to the Cuban government,
and ending the stain on the American legal system,
would cost more in lawyers fees than it had
when it held prisoners, and be that protracted
that President Joe Biden would be a centenarian
before the process was complete?

Well you know now.....