Narcissism By Other Means

Whether governments disagree through trade
or from bearing lethal arms and hand grenades
war is never just war. It is politics by other means
where what the politics might have been for gets lost
in the melee of bad diplomacy and insults
such that watching the news is best left to those
who put themselves on the screen, only they
could bear to view themselves that way.

For everyone else it life through a glass darkly.  

Sisyphus Seeks Narcissus For Honest Relationship

Today's Sisyphean task,
aside from seeing the world
as a place that has a purpose,
will be for me to start yet again
working out how to tell the chief narcissist
the depth of his hypocrisy, when presently
he is so far from me he doesn't know where he is
well enough for him to understand what I have to say.

He has to be shown how his hypocrisy
is the consequence of his narcissism
in some way that he will understand,
whoever that leaves on a suicidal mission.   

When Aloneness Whistles To Me

The measure of my company
that I hear most clearly
is when my tinnitus murmurs 
'When there are no other people
you have no need to miss them'.

This Was My Lie, Tell Me Yours

When I was growing up, it was de rigueur
to teach children to accept being deceived
about what sex was by adults who believed
that sex = lies so arguing they were different
was pointless. Teaching children to be grateful
for being fed lies was all that parents could hope for.

Children would make their own journey
through a world that was divided by deceit 
the way that generations before them had

until how they lied became their own lore,
to be nurtured behind their own front door.

That their parents were the first to teach
the necessity of deceit because they owned
the front door that the child hid behind
would be the last lesson they had to endure.

If any child got that far into being an adult,
that they wanted to end the age-old cycle of lies
by omission, they would have had to learn
to omit to have children they had to lie before.  

Despair Renewed

 I have often seen the quote

'Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them'

blandly passed off as a modern day truism,
no particular target of it's warning pointed out.  

When it is quoted, the writer neither credits the author, 
Spanish/American poet and philosopher George Santayana
nor recognises that in recycling the quote
the person repeating the quote is recycling
an old blame game, where the knowing
blame the unknowing for not being like them,
covering up how close to being unknowing,
and like what they criticise, they might be.

Despair that renews itself so unknowingly
reflects rather poorly on its own fallibility.  

Pushing Ninety

I don't watch television. It repeatedly redefines
misinformation, and with each repeat defines idleness.
There is already too little thought in the speculations
of the speech-based radio that I sometimes listen to.

But recently I enjoyed one programme, where the pleasure
lay in the editing of the visuals as much as the subject, Alan Bennett.
The title 'Alan Bennett At Ninety' said it all in a world
where leaders much younger than that age go insane
every time they to take to the media, in stage managed events
where the leaders ill chosen words are as natural as his staff
taking the blame for every error of judgement he makes,
to make the leader seem all the more immaculate.

Mr Bennett, playwright, actor, author, diarist, memoirist,
had over the years mined a well lived life for anecdotes
that would outlive their time, once more gave the BBC
an hour of his most composed self, allowing himself
to be shown as a two fingered typist, typing new writings.   

The dryness of what he said, and stillness of his room
were odd at first. It took some time to reflect on how well
he depicted, without declaring it, how asexual he was.

To be that still, that reflective, and yet so evidently alive 
is something I will be aspiring to in my old age. 

Numbed And Numbered

Anyone, any government, in any negotiations
has four basic positions they can settle for
with their enemies, their opposition:
win-win, win-lose, lose-win and lose-lose.

 Many a declining empire has chosen lose-lose
when it has picked which war to fight,
on the grounds that the other side is smaller.
The other side can less afford to lose
what it has than the empire
Which is rich in citizens it can lose
as cannon fodder, to prove the superior
fire power of oligarchy, over democracy. 

This is Russia's position with it invading Ukraine:
Russian can afford to lose far more than Ukraine can,
and with its autocracy and control of the media
it has already devalued what 'being Russian' means.

When Biden's America gave/sold it's surplus arms
to Ukraine to help it fight back, it strove to make Ukraine
a winner, whilst clearing out some of its arms dumps.

But with Trump such altruism, flawed as it was,
is off the menu. As Trump gets aggrieved to order,
the quiet kindness of Biden is a distant memory.
Trump needs to be the only winner in transactions
in which winning is believing he is the only engineer
of the transaction. Trump has to sow conflict
and make losers out of his enemies and advisers,
as if they both were alike, 'jealous' of his need tor be right.

Oligarchy and empires are slow to recognise
life beyond their control, but when such life advances
in their back yard, they will be numbed
by how much their days are numbered.