Take A Chance On Inequality

The morality of gambling
should be less that it entertains
the great mass of the poor,
as week by week they seek
a wealth they can never win,
and more that the virtue
of gambling is how it disguises
justifying the rich getting richer
whilst it presents everyone
as 'having a chance', when chance,
and wealth, are so unequally distributed.

In that respect gambling
is nearly as consistently moral
a force in society as banking is.

Morality relies in justified poverty
for making opportunity for the few.     

When T.I.N.A. Is Your Leader

Not only is change not allowed,
be cause There Is No Alternative
but even talk of change is muffled
as the great leader ages, and selectively
his record becomes 'his legacy',
what he wants to be known for
as he tries to do more to be sure
of what he will be remembered for.

Only for the voters to realise,
that change is the only constant
that ensures the future,
including a change of leader.

Three Women

Long before 'Three Sisters'
by Anton Chekov was first staged, 1901,
the intrigues that happen between three women
-particularly sisters living in provincial towns,
as they plot their escape from surrounds them, 
has been been a staple of stage and life.

The format has had many 20th century updates
each time it has reappeared in each new media, 
film, radio, then television, then back to print
where it has always started off, in scripts.

Each newer version has been more feminist
and has had to explain better the absent male.
Never more so than in my favourite update,
the 1980s radio situation comedy 'After Henry',
where the formula was perfected, the male
appears only in the title, him being survived
by a daughter, wife, and widowed mother in law,
in a house big enough for each of them
to have their own door, their own space,
but they can't live apart from each other.

The series has one man they all like
but he is gay and runs a book shop,
and has a partner who the listener
hears a lot about, but never meets.

Listen to the first series, of four, here.

Beauty And Nothingness

...and the nothingness is all the more perfect
when it is more transparently imperfect.... 

 

22 Instructions For Better Living That King Charles III Will Ignore

Because  whilst he will claim to 'be green',
and appreciate simplicity and recycling etc,
the palaces and castles he lives in rely
on levels of luxury that are worlds apart
 from how his ordinary citizens/subjects live.
Also he knows that he is the acme of privilege
and abnegation of responsibility that many
millions of rich people, who live on less than him
but much more than most people, aspire to follow. 
   

 

Progress Through Stasis

If boredom could be made more immersive
and make people more attentive on less
-think of all the effort we would save!

Think of how what is presented as 'news',
is not just not new, it is actually speculation. 
We could avoid all that by rejecting
already desperate looking headlines.

Whole digital news channels would die,
leaving advertisers looking for viewers
more prepared to be restless elsewhere.

Last and far from least reflect on
we could review all the changes
we would not need to go through,
because our stillness and contentment
have now proven them unnecessary....  

'Just Between Us Bots..... '

Today I heard the future of human communication
on my radio, as spoken by a human from the past.

The discussion was about access to banking
where the spokesman for the past said
to a fellow customer, or maybe a banker,
'in future my bot will be talking to your bot',
the programme rushed past what these bots
might say to each other, or respond to,
and what the humans who initiated the bots
might gain from the bots' engagement.

In a later programme a similarly detached
management had been applied to the care
of a child who was severely handicapped.
The family had a social worker 'on call'.
But the only detailed direct access
the family had to the social worker was a zoom call
with the social worker at a time dictated to them
by the management, who withheld all paperwork
from the family involved and was on the end
of a telephone they could leave messages on.
Where the manager would not ring them back.

When management keep their distance
via technology and says 'It is all very new,
the system has yet to bed down.'.
Users of the system will know to disbelieve them.