Tuesday 23 November 2010

Come to you as an Irrational being

They sicken of the calm,
who knew the storm.
We can only liberate ourselves,
Or enslave others.

You come to me
On bended knee
Just as a flea
With your money
and your key

Renaissance in Reverse


Liberal economics are based on the industrial work-ethic revolution, which is a post-feudal state of affairs.  We use liberal economics but live not so much in an industrial society but on an industrial globe, industry interests and the conditions are their workforces now very largely elsewhere.  (In Europe,  all our quality industry is in a medieval or at best, reverse-Renaissance state.)  Therefore theres a massive imbalance within this country, this society which can't be plastered over by the market economic theories of Keynes, nor even the more radical reactions of Schumpeter.  Mistake ye not, this is a post-industrial culture and we're only beginning to theorize what that means. 

Do we find a new medieval idyll ?  We have to treat technology with contempt, or become slave to its death-culture.  Regarding the death, we aren't merley talking about its application in drone war, but its 
primary deception;  it mirrors real life while actually being on the contrary, an unsentient machine which has chain-ganged us into being stokers to its ever growing engine rooms.  (we built it to serve us, now we serve it, because its now infinitely seductive in, and of, itself).  Never mind its pervasiveness - into our private time and how that reconfigures our ability to perceive objectively.
A computer began by being a machine with an end.  Now its multi-functionality supersedes and transcends its utility.

Ox on the run

Oxford university aint what it used to be....blue cheese for gus...chives for relish....beach house in Aquataine...two-year Imperators, gargantuan decline in a song of slop, a final slop song....what next - cocaine in the libraries?  dry days at the top, the dusky apogee....
dog days for mcdooley...the whole mass shanty song mirrored in metered shards of my own soul....my own heart street beat...sauntering
through the gentrifical fugues...unable to outrun the banal tide...
Fat bastards with old yellow masters...recess is the goal of american high schools, why wouldn't it seep onto everywhere else?  are you a mouse or are you emperor...shunting off proper scally schools, makeshifts for the middlebreaths...Breathe cheaper air here....skull and bone crotch...working for me? or working for the ewes ?....irrational hours maketh the man.

Croque to Qwim
moochers on the run...crystal chessboards on sale...boneheads of biloxi...happy hour at the Greased Owl...infantile but mediocre style...all presidents and premiers now inching toward their thirties...new psued class war, watch the middletons scatter either which way...at least Cromwell was man enough to stick his head up...William Cromwell, Olive the Conqueror...one bastard, one patricide.

Monday 11 October 2010

CULTIVATING INDIFFERENCE

"Numbness is also an emotion, and when cultivated and pondered, a very fine one "- Z. von Roretz

When you cultivate indifference you don't concede to big business, you don't get entangled in brokering for either side, unions, workers or industrialists.  None of them should have any bearing on the Ekklesia, Senate, or House of Lords.  The politician should primarily be  philosopher, indifferent to these parties and deferred to by them.  Tony Benn is an example someone who's entire understanding is based on Puritan righteousness, Cromwellian democracy, forms of English cant completely uninformed by Heraclitus, Plato or Aristotle - who were indifferent, informed and engaged seamlessly.  Philosophising does not necessarily result in a tenacious and dynamic society.  England has undoubtedly fared better over the centuries without any philosophical bent, but now as big business, so pragmatic in it's application, so methodical in it's logic dictates the terms, we need Sophia.  Its certainly odd that educated people not interested in politics "because its a waste of my time" are allowed to vote with their poor derivative opinions.  


afterword
T.B. says that Marx was like an old testament prophet.  I agree, although without the powers of Elijah or Moses, and with all the bigotry of Leviticus.   There is a reason the gospels are in the New testament:  because the old testament became a fundamentalist, male-orientated statement of aggression and domineering stultification.  This is why Christ was the new testament, the liberator, why John was the Revelator.  
Back to Benn;  Puritan righteousness begun possibly in England with Wycliffe, which led from the Lollards then much later the non-conformist Diggers, Ranters, Levellers and Fifth monarchists. The trouble is they believed they had found truth over and above the prevailing society and its Lords and leaders.  It was bible-based interpretation underlying their beliefs.  Their interpretation which could contradict others and which could be also be countered by the Bible itself.  So, its an intellectual argument in which faith was subsidary.  Are they not as those reffered to in Luke (18:9) "which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others".  Oh..& the English civil war was helped by a huge obsession with the year 1666 (just 'round the corner).  The end was nigh (Yet it always was thus).   The downside with all this setting oneself up alone, brooding with your own conscience,  only finding righteousness, is that it leads to losing touch with human condition, compassion and thus, humanity (community) and the embrace of sheer ego. It could be argued that inversely it begins with opting out of human community, the anti-social which only can produce anti social behaviour (futile schisms based nothing more than self-assertion).  
Marx, like an old testament prophet, like Luther, thought the people, as a mass, were idiots.  They needed the prophet to show them righteousness and to command them to stop worshipping idols.  This leads us directly to Cromwell.  Of course the Nazi's were predominantly voted in by a Lutheran majority populace...and Luther himself ended his days bawling for jewish blood to be spilled, publishing possibly the first properly anti-semitic book, asking for their shops to be torched, because they just wouldn't drop their jewishness for his church, the church of christ without the virgin.  Methinks, not a coincidence.  One does notice that Lutherans are pretty mum about it though.    

Tuesday 28 September 2010

Fascism in E5

Friday 24th September

London, E5.
On the way home around 9pm I noticed The Windsor Castle pub on Lower Clapton rd. had police vans (the larger ones with cages over the windows) outside with a lone copper blocking entrants.   It looked rather chronic and after thinking perhaps there must of been a violent incident, thought nothing further and turned off the corner and ran into a Windsor local I was already acquainted with and we began talking about our matching cars, mentioning  nothing about the palpable police presence behind us.  Some of his friends then appeared out the Windsor's rear who said the place was subject to a massive search and sniff raid w/ dogs (he said it was a bit of a laugh when the police tried a pincer movement on entry through the set of double doors and foolishly jammed into each other).  

Perhaps people are dealing and smoking pot.  But so are a quarter of the population,  not to speak of other pubs in the area, that shan't be named here.  Yet, doubt they'll be subject to similar raids.  Suddenly thought I was back in South Africa, during the state of emergency period ('85-'94).  Its very obvious the borough mayor has downwardly directed this intervention, ostensibly as a clean-up, yet its rather apparent what they're cleaning up is anyone who doesn't fit the 'Olympics' brief, anyone not conforming to middleclass mores or anything with a scent of new-gentry.  They don't have a voice,  hence count in the new international yuppie society.  

Its a stitch up, cause we all know people from so-called respectable backgrounds are also using fairly filthy class A's lets face it, pretty often.  Its not about drugs, its about what the consumer will choose to spend money on other than drugs.  Whether or not they'll shun the dive cafes for the pseudo-homegrown smart cafe the morning after.  Supposedly this sensible tactic is to get these bum pubs closed so their locals will go "elsewhere" - further north east ?.. its The Cricketers, act 2 (a council-closed clapton pub which wasn't shimmy clean enough).   If you want culture, go into pubs that are strange to you.  Yes, you may not be able to jive with locals because they're alien visages, but don't shun 'em entirely. They're interesting, you'd certainly gage more about the real world than reading the culture section on Sunday.

 

Saturday 25 September 2010

GLOBAL ABYSS CULTURE

He's nice, he has egalite to a fault, all this inclusivity horseshit  -Stephan Fry- "If you're white and privately educated and you start talking about the virtuosity of western enlightenment, then it sounds as if you're basically grinding a boot into the face of Muslims and the third world."- what if you're not privately educated, but poor, white and self educated ? What if Fry himself hasnt considered perhaps that we're doing them a favour too.?
Look at it from their point of view.  Being from somewhere without welfare and seeing a country with welfare as well worth joining because its a better standard of living; its aspirational and we all have a tendency towards the honeypot, especially if we have no honey. They see the welfare card as some inexplicable pipe-leak worth imbibing (and that's its intention, a kind of bait) while going on with ones usual business - one cannot expect people to softly  change, or choose our customs, and to be better than they themselves already think they are, thankyou v.much.  its sinfully optimistic and vestigially condescendingly presumptuous to do so.
The only outcome of extending ourselves to the full letter of all liberal possibilities, of sharing as much as possible via taxes is that we'll spread too thinly, perhaps to the point of implosion. This is obviously happening in all "1st world" countries. Implosion being the loss of identity to the abyss of global culture, which is to say, any culture but this one, all those countries outside of our amazing liberal European playground empire, who all appear horrifically blase about liberal directives, you know - human rights, not too mention gay, animal, women's rights (and our true born natural liberals, T. Benn, M. Thomas, J. Pilger, H. Pinter never fail to criticises firstly the wretched annuls of imperial America and Europe's sanguine envelopment in it)*.

The paradox is we have so much concentrated here in the first place because we did exactly the inverse to begin with.  Yet no one but the most zany conservative at the excessive fascist end of the right wing is suggesting we
(in full fascist excess) return to the closed-rank racialist colonial capitalist piracy of our preceding centuries.  Yet it can and has been(?) argued that the real cream of the colonial era is only really being reaped now (the lower echelons haven't had it so good). That is the only justification for sharing with the third world victims of our conquistadors - because we are still milking them with our byzantine trade constructs continuing to befuddle and systematically fleece those underducated (unschooled in economic & legal jargon) natives of our planet.  This is the authentic grand crime which no amount of welfare, liberalisation or inclusionist politicking here in the European Union of Nations will remedy.  Its welfare and overpopulation on one hand and a spade on the other,  to the one who is down in a dark deep hole known as elsewhere, being encouraged to dig himself in further.

*The crime of the U.S. and its military is perhaps the desire to replicate, rather than import a totalitarianism, contrary to the academic intellectuals belief that we invented it.  Eastern nations have always had the air of monopolizing despotism not too mention cultural exclusivity - e.g. Japan, until the late 19thC banned all foreign influence vehemently and they were imperialist, not the conquered.

Fry Link:
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/sep/12/stephen-fry-interactive-show-profile

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