Here Be Monsters

Between the 1870's and 1930's
science, religion, and popular culture
warily circled each other,
each of them presenting the rest
as if they should not exist.

Out of this conflict
science trumped religion
and out of this triumph
a secular innate white male superiority
emerged through the name of  'eugenics'.

This became the hook of false reason
on which to justify the holocaust.

The myth of a Nordic master-race
of tall blond haired blue eyed boys
became the replacement for religion
for men who would never look like that. 
That Nordic genetics were non-existent
matter little; the ignorance around genetics
lent itself well to false fantasies of superiority,
which soon became reason to lay waste to the Jews.

Horror was popular in silent cinema,
with the talkies horror exploded, creating 
the grossest parodies of 'eternal life',
Dracula and Dr Frankenstein's monster,
who never had a name, but his creator
became famous through his creation.
The monster should have ben named 'Eugene' 
but such a name would have been
all too human and too telling.

Meanwhile in the land of the free
real science went on the rampage
by sterilising the sexually illiterate and poor
as if modern science was the new frontier
in a new civil war where the children of ex-slaves
and the poor were the new and easy-to-hit targets.

What a genuine science would have done
would have been to encourage
numeracy and literacy for all,
and have a well organised programme
where every woman would learn
about their reproductive rights,
responsibilities, and choices,
within a fairer economic framework.

That would have been the best reparation for the sins of the past.

Last but not least in this carnival of grotesques
made in the name of entertainment there is 'Freaks'
where adult circus performers of reduced height
and other differing abilities survived society
by performing for it, and took care of their own,
including settling jealousy within the troupe,
by the cruellest and most entertaining of means.

Signs of greater Age (55)

Even into older age
you maintain your online life
and it runs to familiar form.

When you tire of sending emails
and all the other 'office work',
where the screen says
'You have to get this done!'
your mind turns the screen to porn,
but even there your tastes in porn
are not what they used to be.

Where once the figures on the screen
were young, lithe and lissom,
veritable athletes in their prime, 
the performers you now like
 are older and they now take a lot longer 
to do what once seemed to take no time at all,
just like the office work you were avoiding doing.

What Do I Want To Be Part Of Me?

Every day the elderly in advanced societies
rediscover how much increased medication
keeps them alive, the better to be dependent
on technologies that have advanced that far
that its users feel like worn out cyborgs,
where questioning the point of existence
is useless-nobody will meet our doubts.

Technology can do many things,
but it can't create a community
by itself, though it will serve well 
the thoughtfully community minded. 

Alas technology is fine for dividing
and binding the minds of the many
who feel perpetually mildly lost
and 'want something to be part of'
without it making them property. 

The Toni Morrison Solution

Britain is full of statues to Victorian men
who in their time became figureheads
for the vulture venture capital of Empire
that at the time had no known downside
to report of. The losers were robbed
of the words and the publishing means
to speak their truth with, and were often
forbidden to learn to read and write.

Britain has that many of these statues
where the plinth is effectively made
from the industrial slavery that the figures
above it made their wealth and fame on,
that it is only with the bicentenary
of the partial end of the slave based economy
that we became aware of how much the powerful
relied on slavery being taboo, kept hidden
For their reputation to be left unexamined.

Long after slavery ended the real truth
of how that economy worked would disgust
the modern public, who were previously
'sheltered' from all knowledge of it.

The question of how we repent for what
our predecessors did has become rather hot.
Do we pull the statues down? Relabel them
and leave them where they are? Put them
in museums and get those institutions
to re-explain the deeds that inspired the statue
to be made in the first place? The choices are many.....

The solution I would prefer is that these statues
should all be relabelled so as to follow the example
in the writings of Toni Morrison where she makes personal
the pain of slavery, the young black men casually killed,
the rapes of young girls, the broken and reconstructed families,
the non-existent health care, and the absolute poverty.

But where she writes about the pain she writes even more with love,
to acknowledge her love for, and bring to life, those who suffered
under the unreasoned detachment through which the laws
by which industrial slavery was organised,
not forgetting the Jim Crow laws that followed after. 

Life, Literature, And Freedom

There was never a sequel to 'Animal Farm',
the classic barnyard parable that paralleled
the wartime leadership of the Soviet Union,
an empire and Union that outlived 
George Orwell by forty one years.

But had Orwell lived just a few years longer,
at least until 1958, he would have read
the denunciations of the 'cult of personality'
of Joseph Stalin, who in 'Animal Farm'
was satirised as 'Napoleon', the pig.

He would have had the transcript
of Khrushchev's secret speech
which would have been rich material
for the further dystopian episodes 
in the animal life on  'Animal Farm'. 

Systems that justify dictatorships
usually outlive both their founders,
and their critics. Orwell died
three years before Joseph Stalin,
whose cult of personality lumbers on,
reanimated by Vladimir Putin.

One exception to that rule is in the example
of one of Stalin's successors Enver Hoxha,
leader of Albania from 1944 to 1985,  
and his bette noir, writer Ismail Kadare.

Like Orwell, Kadare dared to write
about the life and history of his country
with less flattery than his leader liked.

Orwell died young, Kadare not only survived
the country he grew up in, but fled to Paris,
where he is now nearly ninety and still writing.

Kadare said something of which Orwell would be proud;
"Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.".

Love And It's Different Exits

'It is always possible to bind together
a considerable number of people in love,
so long as there are other people left over
to receive the manifestations of their aggression.' - Sigmund Freud

Picture Set Of The Month - March - Paintings by Khalid Qasim

Khalid Qasim (born 1977) is a former Yemeni citizen
who is one of the few still resident in Guantanamo bay.

He is one of three prisoners in the camp.
At present his art is the only part of him
that is able to travel. 

Under President Barak Obama prisoners in Guantanamo
became entitled to paper and drawing and painting
 materials.

Word got out to the world and their paintings travelled
in exhibitions, as prisoners left they were allowed
to take their painting with them.

Under President Trump more prisoners were
released, but the FBI impounded their artwork
and limited it being shown-they were suspicious
that it might 'hold clues' they should keep secret.
Joe Biden has so far not reversed the order
of his predecessor. He has not let the prisoners
decide what to do with their art.
Left click here for more information.

Update 17th Jan 2025; Khalid Qasim has been
released and returned to Oman,
he is one of eleven Yemeni men recently returned there.