Life today

I have just been listening to the afternoon play on Radio 4, not only because it was a dramatization of part of Muriel Sparks’ life, but also because I caught on a trailer for it, that it was about disinformation during the Second World War in Britain. 

     With a bump I was taken back to a library book I took out when I was in school and the name Sefton Delmer came back to me.  It took a bit of Google searching, but the title of the book that I read (I actually recognized the cover!) was called Black Boomerang, written by Sefton Delmer the head of our black propaganda efforts during the war and published in 1962, so I was remembering a book I read over half a century ago.

     Although most of the details of the book are long lost to my retrieval system, the name of the author is something that has always stayed with me, together with thoughts about the morally ambiguous basis for black propaganda.  I have used this concept as something that linked usefully in to my work in school with media, advertising and indeed literature in the ways that all of them attempt to persuade and convince.

     The Radio 4 play was a fairly insubstantial piece of fluff, but it did raise a number of interesting ethical dilemmas and, although the ending of the play was flip and facile (even if it was true, which given the subject matter of the play etc etc) but has provoked me into writing.

     It has been famously reported that when Sir Strafford Cripps found out what Sefton Delmer was doing, he wrote to Anthony Eden the Foreign Secretary and said, “If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I’d rather lose it.”  Perhaps, even at the time, this attitude was considered a trifle precious, after all we were fighting ‘total war’ that seemed to justify anything – and against a foe whose moral worth was demonstrably low.  But, and there is always a but, if you lose your own moral standards in fighting someone with low moral standards how are you better than they are?  The ends justify the means is Machiavellian, literally!

     And the times in which we are living make you wonder if the pioneering work of Sefton Delmer in the black arts of information manipulation are not now the normal way that all governments behave – but openly and with a complete lack of shame and a totally confusing acceptance of fabricated lies are truth and reality.

     The present governmental attitudes towards information about the Coronavirus (or ‘Caronavirus’ to the idiot in the White House) have much more to do with presentation than reality.  We expect totalitarian regimes to hush up, massage, lie, obfuscate, whitewash and bluster – but these techniques are all too familiar to the degraded governments of the part-time British Prime Minister and the full-time American golfer.

     Given the state of truthfulness in the political world today, perhaps I should re-read Black Boomerang to remind myself of the techniques that are being used on me today.  If you are interested, then all of Seton Delmer’s books are available on-line at psywar.org.

In spite of the fact that I sometimes use the weekend to justify laziness in getting up, today I got up for my early morning swim and was rewarded with a lane of my own (eventually) and a well-deserved cup of tea outside (in my coat, obviously) afterwards.

My post-swim cup of tea and notebook use produced further ideas for the recalcitrant poem, or maybe another completely different one.  I will try and mash the concepts together and find out what happens, though I think that I have a title.

     For the first time in my life I actually thought about the phrase, “Now then!”  And wondered why its contradictory nature had never struck me before.  It can be used in different circumstances and could mean anything from “Steady the Buffs!” to “That’s enough of that!” to “Just wait until you hear what I have got to tell you!” to “Don’t be nasty” and so on.

     I liked it, when I thought about it, for the way in which it links the present to the past in an easy colloquial phrase.  And ambiguity is always stimulating! If you are interested in further discussion then I suggest you look at the site https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24882/the-origin-of-the-phrase-now-then

I will, however use the phrase in my own way!

My zest for lino cutting did not win out against tiredness and bed last night, but I might be open to doing a bit of artistic slashing this evening. 

     The major problem for me with this new/old hobby is that I never can find enough free surfaces to allow the prints to dry before I make other cuts and prints. 

     I think that I will have to ‘prepare’ backgrounds so that I have a ready supply of treated pages to use at leisure. 

     Well, it’s worth a try and, as I always say about my attempts at things artistic, “What have I got to lose but my self-respect”!

All Brexit Eve

Loping towards the burning fires fuelled with the broken hopes of gullible voters, the knuckle dragging denizens of comfortable wealth look towards their warm future with undisguised relish as they realize that, once again, the people who could have made a difference have, once again, voted against their own interests and allowed the arrogant, the privileged, the entitled and the callous to do what they do best: gloat.

As with virtually all aspects of Brexit, the idea that today is the eve of something tangible is actually as diaphanous as the reality that the Liars’ Liar paraded during the election campaign.  There will be no real Brexit tomorrow.  Things will go on going on and little will actually be settled.  The only actualite will be the issuing of a “celebratory” 50p piece (without the Oxford comma) which at least gives we Remainers something concrete to spurn!

Meanwhile, whatever the tousled-haired tosser says, the interminably sad saga of Brexit goes on.  And on.  And on.  He might be able to ban the word itself from the discourse of government, but Brexit is yet to be achieved.

Amazingly (or not, if you have been following the tortuous and torturing progress of the Conservative Party throwing the country under the bus [the one with 350m quid on its side] to persevere its existence) we still do not actually know what has really been decided and we still have no confidence that we will depart with a comprehensive deal.

At least in Spain we Brits think that we have some sort of deal which allows us to sleep at night, with pension and healthcare taken care of – unless things fall apart, and we do eventually crash out finally and catastrophically.  For we people, Brits living in Europe (or rather The Rest of Europe as Britain has decided that it is not part of the continent on whose shelf it is perched) we have another eleven months of uncertainty as we see our futures in the hands of the third-rate chancers that now govern us, being used as bargaining chips in what will surely turn out to be a depressingly one sided negotiation.

I don’t want this to turn into yet another Moan from somebody who has still not come to terms with the result – though it is difficult (if not impossible) to get the sense of unreality out of one’s mind.  The British electorate have done what they have done, for whatever reasons and we have to accept that the system by which we are governed allows this travesty to happen.

It would be easy to roam around Cassandra-like bemoaning the horrible reality, but one has to try and fine something positive to take from the debacle.

I once asked my mother whether she had considered that Britain could have lost when she was living through World War Two and she replied that she never, for one moment, ever considered the prospect of defeat.  I pointed out that there were times when the situation of Britain looked dire and the German military machine looked unstoppable.  She accepted that there had been bad times, but, as she put it, “I always knew that we would muddle through!  Eventually.”

You could, of course look at that sort of attitude as one of self-delusion – but she was right.

I have often thought about my mother’s attitude during the bleaker times of the on-going process of Brexit and thought that the British do seem to have a sort of ability to “muddle through” and “make the best of it” no matter how negative things look.

I do not wish my country ill.  I want the country to prosper.  I want a decent NHS and education and transport.  I want full employment and so on.  I have absolutely no desire to see my country come to harm just so that I can point towards the architects of the chaos and say, “I told you so!”  That petty triumph will mean the defeat of so many who are less able to defend themselves than the comfortable hypocrites of the Conservative Party as they carefully move their wealth off-shore or to EU states so that they can buttress themselves against the storm that the self-inflicted harm of Brexit could bring.

We might have made things more difficult for ourselves, but those are the obstacles that we have to surmount.  And I am sure that we will.  We will find a way to play our part in the continent of which we are, self-evidently, a crucial part.  But, just like Universal Credit, a reasonable idea badly administered will have casualties.  People will die, as they have done as a result of IDS’s botched fiasco.  But the casualties need to be limited.

I feel resentment and anger about what is going to be done in my name.  But resentment and anger are negative and the division that has and will rip the country apart must, somehow be overcome if we all are to prosper.

I will be nauseated by any celebration of the dark day that Brexit signifies, but more important than my disgust is my willingness to work to mitigate the effects of the policy and to remember that a country is composed of more than Guardian readers. And listeners to Radio 4. 

And that is something that I will have to accept.  All societies are plural and diverse.  Let us hope that the obvious talent and enterprise of our country can show a way to bring us together.

I wait to be convinced.

Not knowing is the worst!

I have no idea what’s happening!  No, really!  I know that the world hasn’t ended because I am still here.  And, thanks to the wonders of the internet radio and (praise be!) Radio 4 I know that the Blond Buffoon has made his first Brexit speech in which he managed to do a very convincing vocal impersonation of The Donald by using sentences composed entirely of unrelated phrases and dismissive waffle.  What a repugnant, self-seeking, condescending apology for a politician he is!

           

            The Donald has some sort of reason for his putrid existence, as he is the logical outcome of the Republican excoriation of every breath that Obama has taken, irrespective of any logic or ideology – apart that is, from the pandering to the lowest possible common denominator of prejudice that they could find.  I am not sure that the previous sentence went any logical way itself, but in its own befuddled way it does at least express my sadness at what the party of Lincoln (whose speed of rotation in his monument must be approaching the speed of light at the moment) has created.

            But The Blond Buffoon is an entirely different creature.  I assume that his hair is natural (at least in its colour) but the buffoonery is entirely intentional on his part.  He is no fool.  He is capable of writing a mean sentence.  He has a sense of humour.  And he wants, oh how he wants, to be Prime Minister.  I don’t for a single solitary second believe that he went through anything even remotely approaching ‘heart searching’ to determine what position he should take on the question of Britain remaining in the EU.  The only thought, no, the main thought in his nasty tousled head was what would bring him closer to his main goal in life.  He has reasoned, because unlike The Donald he is capable of that, that opposition to British membership of the EU is likely to play best with the voters in the Conservative Party whether or not the UK votes in or out.  He has calculated that even if the vote goes against him, he can take the wishes of his discredited party towards his ultimate goal.

            The Capering Clot’s jovial mask slipped when it turned out that he (oh, sorry, not him, just one of his most trusted advisors) told senior officials in the London Mayor’s Office that they had to support his point of view or shut up!  It was, of course, a “cock-up” as he described it later, when the instruction had been discovered, using what he thinks of as the language of the common man, the man in the street (not the woman of course, they are only good for bedding and betraying) to show how blusteringly funny and out of character it all was.  Not a bit of it!  That is the man.  The privileged autocrat with the excruciating fractured conversational line of filler-filled marshmallow ideology to deflect opprobrium.

            You may wonder why this vitriol towards The Beast of Boris.  The answer is prosaic: Toni is visiting his family and I have not turned the TV on.  I am not sure that I know how.  I mean I know how to turn the television on, but not to get the programme that I want.  There is also a way of getting the language into English, but the complex button pressing to get that to occur is beyond my thumbs.  The end result is I have no idea what Spain is up to.

            You rarely hear anything about Spain on the national news on Radio 4, though I think the recent occasion of the Infanta (the sister of the present so-called king) being cross examined in court and, in answer to the questions that she deigned to answer, lying her head off – I think that made the news, and I think that Brits actually got to see pictures of her in court looking uncomfortable.  

As she should.  

But, apart from the more garish and outlandish elements in our news, the day-to-day corruption and the fact that we do not have a government are not deemed newsworthy.

            I can’t really blame the news outlets, because saying, “Oh, the Spanish Popular Party (Conservative) seems to have another case of corruption where their politicians have been stealing from the public purse!” is rather like saying, “Oh, IDS has told another corpse that it is fit for work!”  They are both so common that they are hardly noteworthy.

            But, there is a gleam of hope for Spain.  The right ‘lost’ the election and the ‘left’ won.  But the parties on the ‘left’ still have not agreed to pact – and time is running out before the so-called king has to declare another general election.

            There is a simple solution, and one in which a start could be made to try and rectify the terrible damage that PP has done to the country during their time in power.  But the two parties cannot agree and so, day by sad day, we march on to the unpredictability of a second general election.

            Even my OU studies are not helping, because I have now arrived at that part of the course where our thoughts have turned to Renaissance Art and Death.  Looking at various representations of the Danse Macabre, I feel like photocopying a few of them and sending them to the politicians who I feel are hindering the formation of a new leftist government.  Time is fleeting!  Get on with it!