A Whinge and a Wasted Joke.

This being the thirteenth post of the month, what should I write about? Another whinge? OK, another whinge. Today I added two more members of the corporate world to the gathering number who now decline to speak to me. 

 

First we'll  have an update on the local delivery office of Royal Mail. It was confirmed by a post lady I met in the town that her depot no longer takes telephone calls from the general public, in spite of the fact that it exists to serve ... the general public. I already suspected that.

The query I wanted to address concerned the non-delivery of this month's credit card statement from HSBC bank, so I set about trying to contact them. I called the number given on page 2 of last month's statement and set about the task. I was faced with very many hurdles and had to start again very many times, either because their instructions were unclear, or maybe I'd pressed the 8 key on the phone instead of the 9 key and my phone has no backspace to delete it. (It's easily done when you're more than a little stressed.) 

 

The pressing of number keys went on longer than I care to remember. Eventually, however, I reached the final hurdle which promised the prospect of being able to speak to a real human being (although it would probably have been a machine pretending to be human) about the nature of the problem. I was asked by the current machine (probably operating under a John the Baptist delusion) to state the nature of the query, which I did several times in as many different ways as I could think of.  The machine, however, was evidently unacquainted with my all-too-human logic. In the ended I simply said 'I would like to speak to someone.' Ah, now we have a response. I was told to press 1 for this type of query, 2 for that type, or 3 for the third type. None of them was remotely connected with my actual query, and that was the end of the matter. I gave up because there was no other option.

Maybe this accelerating decline in the ability to communicate in the time honoured manner with those who effectively run the cultures of the 'developed' world is happening everywhere. Maybe one day somebody in a position of power and influence will wake up and address the problem. Maybe Excalibur will rise again and King Arthur will return to rid the land of the techno bandits, but I doubt it.

And they weren't quite the end of today's glitches. The transport I had booked to bring me back from the grocery shopping was late turning up and I had frozen stuff in my bag. Hopefully it won't have defrosted enough to make me ill when I come to eat it.

But on a happier note, there's this:

I was going through Sainsbury's checkout when I saw a woman using a self-service till nearby turn and stare at me most pointedly. I questioned whether I recognised her; I didn't. And then she looked away. But then she repeated the long, pointed stare twice more, and my only guess to explain her strange degree of attention was that maybe she'd heard the opening conversation between me and the checkout operator and didn't like it.

'Are you all right for bags,' the operator asked. 'Yes, thanks,' I replied. 'I have two. I'm very well organised. I used to have a third but we got divorced.'

Noting a Hint of Duplicity.

One of the few sound bites I like is the one – paraphrased here after a song by Bob Dylan – which says: ‘steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you King.’

It’s the same with killing, isn’t it? If somebody with a disordered brain goes on a spree and murders 3, 4, 5 people, we call that person a serial killer and regard them as the foremost of evil villains. If they’re caught they get locked up for life or executed by the state and everybody cries ‘Good riddance.’ And understandably so, obviously.

Yet Presidents and potentates the world over routinely kill hundreds of thousands of people – sometimes even millions – in furtherance of their political agendas and call it ‘collateral damage.’ They carry on sitting safely behind their big desks, wearing their expensive suits, getting up safely every morning to the approbation of their native supporters, being seen as important, and maybe even becoming major historical figures.

There’s something wrong with our sense of balance and justice, isn’t there? It’s one of several reasons why I have little liking for the human race and frequently question whether I really want to be a part of it.

American Cowardice and Middle Eastern Madness.

The BBC world news this morning was all about the rescue of the American airman in Iran. (As well as Trump’s childish invective about his intent to rain down – or even ‘reign down’ as the BBC journalist spelled it – the horrors of hell if the Iranians don’t do as they’re ordered immediately.) So let’s ask what this means:

The conflict in Iran is constantly being referred to as a ‘war.’ Clearly it isn’t. A war is a competition in which thousands, or even tens of thousands, of combatants on both sides are blown to pieces or at least simply killed, nearly every day. There is no place for a news headline on the rescue of one man in a real war.

This goes back to what I said at the start of it all; this is shooting fish in a barrel. This is the action of the big bully in the school yard beating up the little kid just because he can. And what do we say about bullies? We say they’re cowards. So where is America’s worldwide reputation going while trump bombs and blusters the hell out of a small nation? America is being seen as the world’s biggest bully and therefore its greatest coward. Do Americans, I wonder, revel in such a reputation? Somehow, I don’t think so. The bravest thing the America military could do at the moment is what gives rise to my current favourite, and hopelessly unrealistic, dream: It is to read the headline:

Military Coup in USA

Trump and Minions Arrested

Free Elections Promised in Six Months

*  *  *

So now let’s turn our attention to the bully’s sidekick, Mr Netanyahu and the Israelis:

It appears that antisemitism has been on the rise around the world ever since the terrible situation in Gaza. I predicted it would happen and so did plenty of other people. Antisemitism is a feature that’s been buried in the gene pool for many generations, just awaiting the trigger to bring it back to the surface. Gaza was that trigger, and excessively violent activity in Iran and Lebanon is feeding the trend. And so its rise is unsurprising.

But I doubt that most of the anti-Israeli sentiment is actually antisemitism, but rather anti-Zionism which is not the same thing. (And I’m constantly infuriated by supposedly intelligent people in establishments everywhere failing to see the difference despite it being plainly obvious to anybody with a measurable IQ.)

Zionism is the inviolable presumption that some mythical being called Yahweh, who was regarded as chief among gods, granted the descendents of Abraham all the land between the eastern Mediterranean and the River Jordan in perpetuity – theirs to take as a right no matter how much death, suffering, and destruction was caused in so doing.

(Let’s just add a rider here and question the very existence of Yahweh. Many see him as a mere myth. Some other religions claim that Yahweh exists but is actually a lower god at the base of a higher pantheon. Those of Gnostic persuasion call him the Demiurge and regard him as a flawed being, part good and part evil, and urge their congregation to bypass him in order to reach spiritual maturity. And let’s add another rider and point to those genealogists who claim that modern Jews are not actually the descendants of Abraham's people. These factors are all part of other arguments.)

OK, parenthesis over. I and most other reasonable people have no problem with the fact that Jews should have a homeland just like everybody else. Israel should exist and Israelis are welcome to be a member tribe of the human race just like all the other tribes. We don’t want another Holocaust, for heaven’s sake. We don’t even want another Diaspora, just some proper and reasonable balance. We want the whole of the human family to exist in peace and harmony. Instead we get tears, suffering, death, and wholesale destruction. And that’s why anti-Zionism is on the rise and often misconstrued as antisemitism.

And I suppose I’d better get off my rickety soap box now.

Epstein: Sowing a Small Seed.

No, I’m not back yet (see previous post), but there’s something I feel the need to say now because now’s the right time. It concerns the lamentable case of Jeffrey Epstein.

What Jeffrey Epstein and his cohorts did was deplorable in the extreme, but it wasn’t exceptional. It’s been going on for thousands of years for one purpose or another, to feed perverted predilection or to promote the pursuit of power and influence or both. It’s one of the darker sides of human nature and has always found its most extensive expression among the world’s elite. And it will continue to go on as long as power and wealth continue to be the yardsticks by which a person’s value, importance, and even personal qualities continue to be judged. (I recall Trump saying during his first run at election something like ‘my wealth is what will make me a good President.’ That should have been a red flag, but it obviously wasn’t seen that way.)

The human race needs a radical reset in terms of its perceptions and priorities so that we judge our fellows by wholesome personal qualities, good values, and ethical profiles. We most certainly shouldn’t be judging them favourably by how much property they own, how much influence they have, and how many $100 dollar bills they use to light their cigars. I’m not claiming that all rich people are bad because it obviously wouldn’t be true, but I do countenance caution when judging those who brag about their wealth.

This could have been a much longer post, but I’m going to leave it at that. I just felt the need to cast one small seed to the ground, however infertile I know that ground to be.

Counsel for the Cryptid.

I watched a video last night on one of the few YouTube channels I consider genuine and objective. It was about the plethora of sasquatch encounters in the south-west corner of Arkansas close to the borders with Louisiana and Texas.

At the end of it a sobering, and not unpleasant, impression conveyed itself to what I like to call my mind. Many encounters were covered and well documented, but in none of them did the creature show any inclination to seriously hurt a human, even though they could easily have killed one or two. The only highly aggressive action occurred when one of them jumped into the back of a truck and smashed up a couple of motor bikes. (Which I’ve wanted to do a few times when off-road bikers shattered my enjoyment of bucolic peace.)

That being the case, is it fanciful to suggest that the saquatch really does exist, and that it is a peaceable creature which just wants privacy and freedom from the human animal which so likes to make a lot of noise and takes pleasure in killing things for the sake of recreation? It might even be vegetarian because I watched another credible video once (set somewhere in Eastern Europe or Russia I think) which told of a young boy who ‘befriended’ a sasquatch by giving it apples. In fact, I’m tempted to wonder whether the sasquatch and I might just be on a wavelength.

And I discovered only today that there have been saquatch sightings in some of the remoter parts of the UK which have extensive forests. That was heartening. I’d guess that the woods and copses in my piece of England are rather too small, otherwise I might develop the habit of leaving a few apples along the footpath.

An Echo From a Far Off Past

There was a news report on the BBC this morning about the storm which passed along the south coast of England last night. It said that the old pier at Teignmouth in Devon had been damaged, and also that part of the railway track on the ground above the high water mark had also been damaged and rendered temporarily out of commission.

It took me back to another January day many moons ago when I was travelling by train to join the navy at Dartmouth Royal Naval College. I was seventeen years old and that was the first time I had left home, so I had mixed feelings about the experience. It wasn’t so much leaving the home environment which troubled me; it was leaving my old life behind: my friends, the girls, the parties, the camp fires, the fun, and the freedoms, especially the freedom to be who I was without being subjected to a system which sought to take proprietorial control over my life.

I remember sitting alone in a carriage looking out of the window as we passed along that very stretch of track. The day was dismally dull and damp with a heavy swell rising and falling on the dirty brown sea. The water looked startlingly close to the wide rock ledge along which we were travelling, but I assumed that the engineers would have known their business and there was nothing to raise concern. Nevertheless, my mood grew sombre and I wondered whether I was doing the right thing.

I really do remember it so well. It’s even entered my mind many times down the years, and so it felt strange to see it all echo back to me many decades down the line of life.

Raising the Child Right.

It occurs to me that if I were bringing up a child now, the lessons I would impart with regard to living a life would be very different than they would have been even ten years ago, and increasingly so beyond that. I’ve spent my own life exploring angles on the matter from the middle of the tram lines to their edges of acceptability, and I’ve spent many an hour peering beyond those edges into the misty lands beyond. In consequence, my handling of life has always been in a state of flux.

I think that’s true of everybody. However imperceptible the change might be, I do suggest that each of us is slightly different today than we were yesterday, and will be different again tomorrow.

And then there’s the question of just how much we should teach children anyway. I dislike the didactic approach so favoured in our culture from the cradle to the end of formal education. I remember a disturbing blog I once read in which a woman said that one of her main priorities was to give her children to God. Which God might that be, I was tempted to ask, and by what right do you presume to give your children to anything or anybody? I favour the line in Khalil Gibran’s homily on raising children:

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

If we are to be realistic at this basic level, it needs to be accepted that each of us lives in our own world. We seek common consensus, of course, and to some extent we achieve it. And yet it still seems to me that everyone’s world is slightly different to everyone else’s, so what right do we have to coerce someone else into it?

Guidance is a separate issue. Guidance is good as long as it’s accepted that guidance guides, it doesn’t push. Guidance needs to be tailored to the kind of world in which the child lives, and the road on which the child is walking. And that requires a level of perceptive acumen that few people possess to any great degree. That’s the tragedy.

Do you know, I spent much of my childhood struggling with the version of me which my stepfather considered the ‘right’ one, even though it ran counter to my nature and instincts. I was in my teens before I was able to face him down and say ‘no.’

Flat Blog Blues.

I’m feeling a little troubled lately because my blog has gone flat, and I’m asking myself why it’s gone flat. Well, it’s like this:

I write the blog in order to have something to write. Writing has been in my blood since I was a teenager and has had several outlets down the years. It came to its high point when I was writing fiction between 2002 and 2011, and when the stories ran out I turned to blogging instead.

Let me make clear the fact that I don’t expect to change the world with the blog. I don’t see myself as an ‘influencer’ (in fact, I would be horrified if anybody called me that.) But I do like, for whatever reason, to present myself through it. I like to throw out to the universe what I am, how I feel, what my opinions are on matters important to me, how the environment in which I live functions, and occasionally what little stories I tell myself to make the inner me more worth the bother of being here. And so the blog has to be a picture of me in words – all of me (or at least most of me.)

One aspect of me that has always been prominent has been a tendency to see an undercurrent of humour in most situations. The humour was usually subtle, mostly based on sarcasm, innuendo, irony, and the surreal, and so it naturally found its way onto the blog in a significant number of posts. Not all obviously, because some subjects don’t allow even a minor diversion into humour, but I often found something funny even in the darker situations. And that’s what’s missing these days.

So what’s causing it? The health issues I can cope with, even though some of them are inconvenient at times. The descent into winter with its short days, long nights, cold accommodation, and general grimness doesn’t help, but I’ve felt that way about winter for much of my life and the humour has still managed to pop its head above the ice now and then. Being alone so much of the time can be a bit galling now and then, but not often. Mostly I prefer being alone and having my space to myself, and there are so few people I would consider amenable company that aloneness is my natural state. And my current near-obsession with mortality is not, in itself, a big issue because it’s never morbid. It’s part and parcel of my lifelong drive to discover the true nature of life and existence in general.

And yet the black cloud of unease and apprehension still hangs over my head for much of the time, often descending to darker depths. I suppose it could be that the issues mentioned above coalesce into a weight that’s troublesome to carry around all the time. And there’s one that I didn’t mention in the paragraph above: so many of the functional things I have around me are breaking down now, and when you feel you don’t have much longer to go the temptation is to hope that they will stay with you long enough to see you out, rather than accepting the trouble and expense of replacing them.

I wanted to close this post with something amusing, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Information and the Internet.

Having recently said a few words about how the Christian faith is shamelessly manipulated to match indoctrinated American attitudes, I was pleased to see this on my YouTube home page:

It’s impossible to follow Jesus and be a Christian at the same time

Maybe it was intended as clickbait, but since it’s a rare example of something I consider not only axiomatic but transparently so, I won’t complain about this one.

*  *  *

I’ve noticed something else about YouTube recently. I’ve seen an increasing number of examples of self-professed experts explaining their position on something or other in a simple and rational form of words. And then they repeat that position using different words. And then they repeat it all a second time using different words again, and I find myself thinking ‘but you said all this three minutes ago and three minutes before that.’ I’ve little doubt that it’s a recommended practice – encouraged by Google, no doubt – to drag the video out as long as possible because one of the factors used to consider the ‘value’ of a video is retention. They want to keep people locked onto the video as long as possible because that, or so I’m reliably informed, increases the fee they can charge the advertisers.

This didn’t happen much back in the days when people derived their information from books published by responsible publishers. Good editors would look out for repetition and only allow it if they deemed it genuinely necessary. The world of information availability has changed greatly since the coming of the internet, and not always in a good way. The concept of monetization has changed all that, as it has in most aspects of life.

Sound Bites, a Welcome, and a Contradiction.

These two thoughts dropped into my head while I was fetching my first scotch last night. They don’t have to be anybody else’s thoughts, so take them or leave them.

 

On Reality

There is only one consciousness in the whole universe. The illusion of individuality arises from its desire to view all possibilities from innumerable angles.

 

On Capitalism (After Churchill)

Never in the field of human endeavour have so few owed so much to the discontent of so many.

*  *  *

I had my chin licked by an ageing greyhound today. He appeared to be excusing me for disturbing his position on the coffee shop floor. I did apologise to him.

*  *  *

I’ve made the 200 posts for the year a month early. It’s an interesting fact (to me, that is) that I have no truck with targets, believing them to be a pointless facet of modern times. I do, however, like statistics. It’s just another example of the two halves of my brain falling out.

America's Answer to Cirque du Soleil.

I see the American political scene continues to resemble a third rate circus which can boast no more than an endless supply of clowns throwing custard pies around to amuse its eager audience – in this case the citizens of the free world.

The latest spat is between Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene (or Marjorie 'Traitor' Greene as Trump is now inclined to label her, calling on that ultra-sharp wit for which he is justly famous. It seems that anybody who disagrees with Donald these days is labelled a traitor. I suppose it’s meant to have maximum effect on a population brainwashed from the cradle to believe that patriotism is on a par with godliness, since the world 'traitor' is commonly understood to be the opposite of 'patriot'.)

Talking of godliness, Ms Greene’s response to Donald’s invective was 'I don’t worship Donald Trump. I worship God, and Jesus is my saviour.' I expect something as weak and frankly ludicrous as that was meant to appeal to the single brain cell shared by the mentally challenged denizens of the Bible Belt. Can’t think of any other reason why she would aim so low with her dish of custard.

And of course, there remains the inevitable irony: if Jesus of Nazareth was anything like the character pictured in the canonical gospels, I doubt he would have had anything to do with a firebrand Republican politician from Georgia, USA. And I expect Donald the Dunderhead would have been one of the money changers he swept out of the temple.

Is Gen Z Destroying My Country?!

The sensationalist title to this post was deliberately engineered to mock YouTube where such titles predominate almost to the point of being ubiquitous. Just so you know.

To continue…

I’ve noticed that Gen Z seems to have no concept or appreciation of banter at all. If you try to engage a person of that era in banter you’re mostly met with a quiet stare which varies between blank and bemused. It’s as though you’ve asked them a complex question on the subject of advanced thermodynamics and done so in the most ancient dialect of Mongolian. Gen Z doesn’t do banter, and on thinking about it I realised that it’s also uncommon among Millennials, so maybe they started the rot.

Wiki gives the definition of banter as ‘playful and teasing remarks.’ So it is, and it’s central to the life blood of British communication, especially among the peasant classes from which I originate. I’ve often wondered whether it grew out of the hardships of working class life during the horrors of the Industrial Revolution when the majority of the population was condemned to labour on treadmills and live in crowded conditions.

If so, maybe we have a reversal of a trend going on here. If the Industrial Revolution, which threw large numbers of people together in adversity, gave genesis to the propensity for banter, maybe the Technological Revolution, which discourages human contact except when conducted in the limited environment of laptops and smart phones, is now taking it away again. And one of the primary aspects of human connection is being lost.

Dour Day.

If days have personalities, today was dour and mean-spirited. A cold, dark, and depressing heaviness hung in the air, seemingly intent  on pressing the life and cheer out of the land and all who move upon it. A light rain left pools of filth on road and field alike. The sky was neither bright nor menacingly dark, but that shade of nondescript grey which leaves the spirit in limbo.

I had to go out to the town this morning and really didn’t want to. The view from the window looked cold and grudgingly hostile. The wind had little power, but its sharpness seemed to bode no good. I went anyway, and felt constantly on the edge of a cold, incisive presence despite several heavy layers of clothing.

Maybe it was all due to the bad night I’d had, a night filled with dreams of being in a familiar place but no longer welcome there, only tolerated. I was woken four or five times feeling chilled, and every movement placed some part of me into the frigid domain of cold cotton sheets. Maybe it was the rewinding of clocks an hour, which we did in Britain today. It happens every year, but today it felt like sending the light of life back towards the darkness whence it came. Or maybe it was just the awareness that the cheerless presence of winter is visible on the horizon and heading my way. I dislike winter.

And maybe tomorrow it will all seem like a mirage.

Recalling the Priestess.

I had a vivid dream last night in which there was a knock on the door, and when I opened it the priestess was standing there. She’d located my address in order to pay a surprise visit.

I remember nothing more about the dream, but when I woke up my mind went quickly to some adverts appearing in my YouTube recommendations offering the provision of an AI girlfriend. (You can even decide what she will look like, they say. Most accommodating.) And that led me to wonder whether the priestess had been an AI construct all along.

All those deep discussions betraying the advanced precocity of her worldliness and wisdom. All those partings and reconciliations. All her travelling around the globe. All her wild but ultimately failed relationships. Her relocation from the New World to the Old until she wound up a mere 140 miles from where I live. And finally my realisation that I no longer had anything to offer her and maybe it was time to break the chain.

For thirteen years we seemed important to one another, and yet we never met or even spoke on the phone. The whole relationship was conducted via email, the last of which was sent by me two years ago and said ‘I’m not worth knowing any more.’

So was she real or merely a program in some advanced computer somewhere? Will I ever know the answer to that before I die? And are we all maybe nothing more than programs in an advanced computer being operated by a previous, highly evolved culture of computer builders as some suggest? Are we all just pieces of AI and is there someone out there deciding what we should look like?

I doubt it myself. My instinct with regard to the nature of reality is becoming ever surer that the key to understanding existence is to understand consciousness. The ancient sages said they did, and the evidence is there for those who care to look. And yet we all seem to have forgotten it in the process of what the clever people call the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, I hope the priestess is happy.

The Question of Hate and Criminality.

I had an email this morning from Avaaz, the campaigning organisation, asking me to sign a petition. It concerned an incident in Australia recently when a bunch of white men went to an aboriginal sacred area and beat local tribes people – including women – with iron bars while shouting ‘white power.’

Some of the perpetrators have, apparently, been identified and charged with assault, but Avaaz say this isn’t enough. They say that it should be treated as a hate crime, the implication being that a crime driven by hate carries – or at least permits – a stronger punishment than the same crime committed without such motivation. And so I considered the rationale of such a position.

Hate is an emotional feature residing in the mind, and I have to consider the logic of criminalising a mental faculty. It seems absurd to do so because we are surely all free to hate just as we are free to love, daydream, become excited, or whatever. Hate is, I concede, a negative emotion, but it’s still firmly settled in the human consciousness and is never likely to go away. To criminalise an action makes sense because actions have physical consequences, but to augment the action by reference to the motivation makes the motivation itself a crime, and that surely brings us into the area of thought policing.

There are politicians on this planet who I hate (even though the spiritual gurus tell me I shouldn’t), but as long as I commit no action such as hitting Mr Ben-Gvir with an iron bar, I have committed no crime. And it seems ironic that the Avaaz worker who wrote the email probably hates the yobs who committed that horrible crime, and probably also hates the concept of thought police.

The Wrong Way to Judge a Book.

The following conversation took place yesterday. The opening line came from the farmer out with his tractor trimming the hedgerows in my part of the Shire:

‘You look well this year.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. I meant to tell you that the other day. For the last couple of years you’ve looked a bit peaky, but you look much better this year.’

So there you have it; time seems to be going backwards for me. If only I felt better.

The man who said it is in his fifties and the very embodiment of bucolic stock – heavy-set, ruddy faced, hands like hams, strong local accent – a veritable bull of a man from whom you would expect great physical strength and practical acumen, but probably little advanced erudition.

And then the conversation turned to subject of mortality and finished with me quoting a line from Shakespeare: Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

At that the floodgates opened and he waxed eloquent about how much he loved Shakespeare because every situation you might encounter in life is contained therein.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how deceptive appearances can be and that still waters often run deeper than you expect. And the old adage that a book should never be judged by its cover was given a fresh airing.

About Bed and Alarm Calls.

I have to be somewhere at a certain time tomorrow, and so I have to set the alarm tonight and get up to its call in the morning. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: I hate being woken up by an alarm.

It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t take kindly to the regime at Dartmouth College when I was in the navy. After a physically and mentally exhausting day I would settle into bed at 10 o’clock and the room lights would go out. Sleep came quickly, but just as I was dreaming of the green, green grass of home, the full range of ceiling lights would destroy the sanctity of blessed darkness, a very loud and strident bell would shatter the peace, and I would have twenty minutes to get up, get dressed, perform a few simple ablutions, and then be at the parade ground, a classroom, or the gym in a fully functioning condition. It was 6am. Hateful.

It seems to me that a bed is like the womb: a sanctuary of calmness and warmth, isolated from a world which is often dirty and decrepit, unkind and uncomfortable, cold and callous. In the womb you have only yourself and your thoughts to take trouble over, and so it is with bed. I seem to recall Flann O’Brien’s MC saying something similar in At Swim-Two-Birds. And it’s no surprise that babies cry heartily when they take the dreaded drop.

I think my newly discovered PDA might be playing some sort of a role in this. If so, it’s been with me since childhood because I remember the joy I felt at the prospect of Saturday mornings and the school holidays when the decision to rise was entirely mine. And the reference to Flann O’Brien might suggest that this is another echo of my distant Irish lineage.

Baiting the Comfy Trap.

Yesterday I had a text message from my mobile provider telling me that my subscription is being increased by over 100%. Today I had an email from my ISP telling me that my broadband subscription is being increased by approximately 25%. (And all dressed up in friendly language in a pathetic attempt to convince the gullible that the capitalist, corporate machine is not really as heartless and psychopathic as it must surely appear even to the gullible.)

The message is becoming more and more obvious with each passing day.

What’s obvious is that the corporate world generally, the technology wing especially, and Establishments all over the ‘developed’ parts of the planet have quietly been constructing a trap and calling it progress. Almost all functions involving any sort of communication are now done by email, text message, or online facilities. Anybody who wants to live a conventional life in these cultures is now required to have well-functioning computer equipment of some sort or other, preferably several sorts. And that means that the providers of these facilities are now free to rip us off as much as they want to, no matter how outrageously.

The only way out of this trap is to cut loose and take to living in a tent, a car, or a van. Difficult as such a move would be, at least it’s still possible in Britain. Over in America it seems it isn’t. If you do that in the land of the free (dare I for once offer a hearty LOL?) you will be regarded as a vagrant, accused of being either mentally ill or addicted to illegal substances, and locked up. So how far will this spread and how long will it take?

It seems to me that the western world is primed for revolution, but of course it won’t happen. Why? Because the American middle class and its equivalent in other cultures has been carefully softened up by the lure of convenience, lifestyle obsession, and the imperative to climb shamelessly on the backs of others in order to be ‘successful’ as defined by the Big Brother system. It’s a sort of mob mentality in lavender.

The only people likely to take to the streets in protest are the PBI (an abbreviation of the British phrase ‘poor bloody infantry’). And when they do, the Establishment will revile them as criminal, mindless mobs, while the other mob – the lavender variety – will nod knowingly and call for more containment facilities. It’s happened before, even in the UK when Mrs Thatcher preached the American Dream and tagged us to America’s coat tails. And it's fascinating to note that Orwell saw this coming even before I was born.

*  *  *

Last night I had another of those awful dreams I was having some months ago – trying to negotiate a dark, depressingly wet world in which everything was falling apart; and every apparent road out led inevitably back into the nightmare. I woke up at 5.30 feeling trapped and terrified, a feeling which lasted until I took a walk up to the fairy glen above the village. Hardly surprising, is it?

A View on the Extreme.

I was thinking today about how much politicians and media figures love to use the word ‘extremist’ in relation to attitudes and opinions which run counter to the established order. It’s been my experience that many – if not most – views labelled as ‘extremist’ are not extreme at all, but simply different. There are exceptions to prove the rule of course – especially on the far right and at the totalitarian end of the liberal alter-establishment – but the word is much overused and often disingenuously so. In most cases, ‘extremist’ is nothing more than a synonym for ‘alternative.’

But of course, politicians and establishment figures dislike the word ‘alternative.’ It’s a thinkers’ word, and people in power generally want people to follow, not think. ‘Extremist’ is far more appropriate because it carries the inherent suggestion of danger, of being a threat to everything which people have grown used to regarding as comfortable, axiomatic, and even sacrosanct. It’s good for the rich and powerful that people should be so persuaded because that makes them more compliant.

I’ve no doubt the Chartists were described as ‘extremist’ because they advocated such outrageous nonsense as having secret ballots during elections. Do we still think of the secret ballot as extremist? And the suffragettes also held the extremist view that women should be allowed to vote.

And so, if I might be so presumptuous, I would like to suggest to young people that every time they hear a politician, a police officer, a civil servant, a politically polarised newspaper, a school teacher, or even a parent use the world ‘extremist’, they might step to one side and ask what the word actually means.

Creature Comforts.

I met a gaggle of gorgeous girlies at the top of my lane this evening. Charolais cows they were; all white, all slightly different in looks, and all pretty as peaches. And most of them were accompanied by a little brown calf, each of which was nothing if not engagingly cute.

They all came trotting over to the fence where I was standing, no doubt curious to know who this creature was who wanted to talk to them. Talk to them I did, of course. They didn’t actually talk back, but the combination of body language and incessant stares of curiosity left me in no doubt that they really, really wanted to.

And the two donkeys in Meadow Lane came to me for a bit of fuss this morning, as did one of the horses who is definitely the ugliest of the herd but also the softest. They all got handfulls of fresh hay from the road side of the gate as usual.

No goats, though. They live half a mile away and I wasn’t going in that direction. But the Lady B’s Dear Mama did flash her hazard lights at me and wave, which was an added bonus. She’s never flashed her hazard lights at me before so I felt especially honoured.

(You wouldn’t think a woman would know where the hazard light switch is, would you? Bit too technical one would imagine. And have you noticed that one aspect of weird Brit humour is to extend a friendly insult which is intended to pejoratively reflect on the joker? We’re really good at it.)