Hopes And Prayers

As the 45th President of the United States,
presents himself as presidential candidate yet again,
amid ever mounting debts that have gone unpaid
and being on trial on close to 100 counts
over five main charges across several states, 
how cynical would it be to send him 'hopes and prayers'
in the midst of his present troubles with the legal system?

Jesus told his followers that they should not
repay evil with evil, but repay evil with good,
and love their enemies, the less to be affected
by the opportunism of the enmity against them.

But with some cynics, pedants,
and self appointed experts in the law
good will is always too good for them...

  

Affirmation Comes From Modest Places

 

Ultra Processed Appetites

Ultra processed food has now been proved
to give people high blood pressure
which might lead to heart attacks.  

Ultra processed news has been shown
to have very low informational value
and lead to mass cynicism and false sentimentality.

The news might well tell us of the consequences
of ultra processed food, but only in a way
that disguises the likeliness of a shorter future.

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (33) Groundhog Government

It is a truth to avoid when the public
recognise that their government is tired
and the proof is too easy to find for comfort.

First there is the setting of false targets,
where the government do not control
the means by which the targets will be met
and will not countenance this being pointed out to them.

Second there is the statistics that are framed
to show that the targets are being reached,
but the arguments behind the figures produced
more proves the opposite of what the government proposed. 

Then, to side-line all official opposition
the government find tame backbenchers
from their own side who will put out proposals
in the media, for the government to consider,
which everyone knows that they will not act on.

Then the government rediscover some old announcements
that they think everybody has forgotten about,
and put them out as if they have never been seen before...

These actions, and many more,
are the actions of groundhog governments
around the world, where every step forward
leads back to life the day, the decade, before... 

Belief - The T Shirt

In times well past, the acme of success
used to be proven by the certificate
you got from the authority
for whom you'd done the work
that proved to all and sundry
how much they esteemed you.

This was most true for academic achievement,
where each student who got their certificates
felt that it was because of their commitment
rather the actions of the awarding body.

In Martin Luther's time, close to the founding
of the printing press, belief in certificates
extended to believers having certificates
on their walls, printed by Luther's printers
that told the reader that 'Householder
(insert name here) is saved by Jesus.'.

Nowadays achievements matter less
however grand they are presented as being.
Seeing something in print means no more
than you reading this before going to page.

Nowadays certificates are more likely to used by fraudsters
than by anyone else, to show off with
as they denude the credulous of their wealth. 

If we want anyone to believe something
now, then we put it on a T shirt
or in the terms and conditions
that everyone clicks on to accept,
without reading it in any detail.   

The Blinding Absence Of Light (11)

 is like the prison it describes,

not a place for the weak of constitution,

it being a narrative about life as prisoner
in a Moroccan prison where the indifference
of the guards is a mercy, the active attention
of the guards is a test of the prisoners will to live.

But every so often an uplifting quote comes up,
where why the prisoners were so stubborn
as to want to live is made clearer...

Chapter 31, page 155

'Death has a smell. A mixture of brackish water, vinegar, and pus. It's sharp, astringent. The screech owl's cry was always accompanied by that particular odour. We did not have to verify it - we knew it instinctively. In the morning when the guards brought coffee, we would tell them, "Could be someone's dead. Better check".'.

That is the end of this series of quotations. More quotes were possible, but in the last 35 pages of the book so much changes after what was a definitive darkness, it seemed to me that it is better read in total.   

Sincere Nihilism

The distance from apparent sincerity
to the deceptive depths of nihilism
is always shorter than we think,
particularly after we have scanned,
or been scammed by, the news headlines....