A Cold Rant!

 

 

 

It may have been something to do with the cold, making me feel even more misanthropic than usual, or it may just be the way that my mind works, but I began to think of the Decline of Empires and how values are, well, devalued as a society sinks into the abyss.

     It is, after all, very easy to get into an apocalyptic way of thinking when a pandemic is raging around us and economic disaster is an everyday reality.  People talking of ‘The New Normal’ as if it is just a slight change in the weather, rather than a radical rethinking of the way that we have been doing things.  When you see a film on television and it shows crowds of people jostling their ways around a crowded city; when you see people flocking to stadia or theatres; when you see people greeting each other with a friendly kiss on either cheek – and you think, that is another world, you begin to realize just how massive a change in the way that we behave and the way that we think has taken place.  What we did this time last year was BC – before Covid.  A different world, another country, foreign, they did things differently there.  That is a bit of a mash-up of L P Hartley’s famous opening line of The Go-Between, but it expresses the sense of strangeness that passing time gives, or perhaps demands.

     The true strangeness of our times is that this revolution in our activity has taken place in months, not years.  Even with World War Two there was a sort of phoney war to get people used to the fact that there was a war on.  Yes, there was the air raid warning that went off soon after the declaration of war, but it was a false alarm, my Dad was in London at the time and remembered the sense of, “Bloody hell!  Here we go!” and the rueful anti-climax when no bombers swooped into sight.  London and the rest of the country soon learned the reality of all out total war.

     I am not sure what sort of reality prevails at the moment.  We live a fairly enclosed life, with the occasional sally out for lunch or supplies, but we have not left our area for months, but I refuse to believe that the pelotons of cyclists that I passed on my morning ride along the paseo had dressed up in all their latex awfulness just to ride the few kilometres contained in our town - in spite of curfew being in force from 10 pm on Friday night to 6 am on Monday morning part of which demands that no one moves from their municipalities.

     People are cherry-picking the rules that they want to follow.  The number of cyclists, runners, dog walkers, and strollers who were not wearing masks is astonishingly high.  They want normality to be here now, and they are perhaps used to living in a society where instant gratification is the norm.  Covid breaks the norms, the trick is understanding that fact.

     But, back to the Decline of Empire and the Decadence that is its usual accompaniment.  Britain is a country where the time for sighing over lost empire is so far in the historical past that we should just shut up and get on with living with the status of a relatively rich but relatively uninfluential country.  Our ‘special relationship’ with the USA is a sad self-deluding joke and we belittle ourselves as we preen ourselves in the reflected glory of a richer and much more powerful friend and ally.

     Trump has tested the strength of American democracy and illustrated its weaknesses.  His sad continuing tantrum that reality does not bow to his own sick idea of reality would be pathetic and risible, if he was not the most powerful man in the world with truly frightening resources at his disposal.  This is where the cheap comparison with Hitler in his bunker falls down; Hitler was sending imaginary armies to fight against his inevitable defeat, Trump has at his disposal weapons that make the whole of the arsenal of the last world war look like fireworks.  Trump can send real armies into the abyss!

     Even though he has been defeated, even though he is a lame-duck president, even though the leaders of the world have congratulated Biden on his victory, the Orange Outrage still persists in his presidential petulance and every day he devalues his office a little (and some days a great deal) more.

     But what has really struck me about the grotesquery of Trump’s tenure in the White House is how brazen he has been in rewarding the people like himself, privileged white plutocrats (if he does actually have the money to entitle himself to that title).  He has cut tax for the very rich, he has reduced restrictions of manufacturing, he has opened up areas for mineral exploitation, he has degraded many of the agencies which protect our physical and financial environment.  He has worked (between golf rounds) on making sure that his friends, family and industrialists have all benefited.

     What is shocking is not that Trump has demonstrated no ethical standards in his government, who would have expected him to be anything outher than he turned out to be, but what is shocking is the extent to which he has been aided and abetted to stay in office by those around him.

     When a friend was working, very unhappily, in a school where the owner was making everybody’s’ lives unbearable, I had to tell her the simple truth about the owner, she simply did not care.  To the question which began, “But how can she . . . “ the answer was, “She doesn’t care!”   

     The Republicans in the Senate and in the House have shown that they simply, “do not care”.  As long as they get what they want they can allow the president to do little or nothing as a quarter of a million fellow Americans die of Covid; they can work to repeal the Affordable Care Act threatening to leave millions of poorer Americans without health insurance; they can stuff courts with ill-suited right-wing judges; they can lie; they can be proven hypocrites and they simply don’t care.

     The shocking thing is that it is all so plain to see.  They lie and cheat in plain sight.  They are caught out again, and again, and again.  But they simply don’t care.  Because the people that are suffering are not them.

     The Republicans have allowed a clearly unsuited person to be president.  They have supported him in the face of indisputable facts which disprove his position.  They have been venial and base – and they should be finished as a political party.

     Perhaps they are.  The sick nightmare of the Republican Party that has been formed in Trump’s image is perhaps something that will linger on longer than the one-term president who allowed the absurd parody of self-interest to stand for Republican American politics,

     The truly sad thing about the last days of the would-be despot is that he had the second highest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate and still people cling to his lies and delusions.  There are weeks to go before he finally leaves the White House and the trappings of power are taken from his tiny hands.  God alone knows what mischief he can do in that time.

     And he will be supported by Republicans in both houses, because they do not care.

 New Lockdown, Week 3, Thursday

 

Was it really six months ago that I had my last dental treatment?  I know that the perception of time has been different during the various periods of various types of lockdown, but still!  Six months from November going backwards would take us back to May.  What that when one of my teeth broke?  Time really is tricky nowadays; normal life is like participating in an episode of The Twilight Zone where some clever Sci-Fi writer plays around with the temporal concepts that we take for granted.  Or you could assume that my reaction is one which is quite normal when anyone thinks about going to the dentist.

 

     Talking of which, I managed not to miss the last part of Hostel III.  Try as I undoubtedly did, by ostentatiously ignoring the screen and reading my mobile phone instead, I was drawn to look at the passing action – and was drawn in by the violence porn that makes up the franchise.

     The premiss is that there are very rich people who will pay vast sums of money to spectate at what are live snuff spectacles where, while being served drinks by fetishly clad waitresses (looking, I have to admit like live versions of something from the soft-porn imagination of artist Allen Jones) they place bets on how and how long the death-throws of the unfortunate victims, safely separated from the rich voyeurs by floor to ceiling plate glass – no blood splatters on them!

     Amid the bloodletting, the gratuitous bloodletting, I might add – I did begin to wonder about the attraction of this sort of slasher movie, and especially the elite group with the money to pay to watch such things.

     It reminded me of The Purge where the bloodletting there was to secure the regime of another wealthy (white) group dedicated to the ritual destruction of those deemed surplus to requirements.  It was the emphasis of a wealthy elite travelling in darkened windowed limos, that made me link it to the ‘customers’ in Hostel III, another wealthy elite, rich and depraved.  And that brings us to QAnon, the ultimate absurdity of conspiracy theories with the same emphasis on a seemingly untouchable elite doing unspeakably nasty things.  These films and this conspiracy theory obviously touch some sort of emotional dark fairy tale need in some people who believe that the horrors of the world must be linked to some directed malevolent force.

     Perhaps in previous times this belief could have been directed towards the Devil and Hell – but even there you could say that the creation of the devil and hell were part of the ways in which the previous religious elite cemented their hold over the fearful imaginations of the paying customers in their churches and their religious wealth allowed them to do unspeakable things – one only has to look at the history of the papacy to see corruption and depravity at its hypocritical worst.

     Financial inequality in the world means that real wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very, very few – and that minority has and will always try and behave with the impunity that they believe their money entitles them to.  During the Covid crisis the super-rich have become richer and the inequality is getting gallopingly worse. 

     The poster boy for wealth without responsibility or concern is of course Trump.  He clearly thinks that laws, the constitution and social norms are, as Leona Helmsley said in 1989, “only for the little people.”  And then she was convicted of income tax evasion.  Helmsley’s comeuppance was over thirty years ago, and since then we have had more of the super-rich brought down by sex scandals than by their everyday theft.  Trump paid 750 dollars in taxes last year in the USA and he boasted about sexual molestation.  When is he going to get his comeuppance?  Losing the election is not enough, he must lose money as well, and a prison term would do him no harm!

     QAnon is ridiculous and intellectually insulting, but there is a tiny elite manipulating the levers of government for their own advantage, but they do it in full sight.  Trump promised to “drain the swamp” but stuffed his cabinet with the super-rich and made them richer by his tax ‘reforms’.  He put wildly inappropriate people in government agencies and encouraged them to foster big business, fossil fuels, banks and all the other agencies of everyday life and profit for the few.

     Charles Wilson said in a senate hearing when Eisenhower wanted him to be Secretary of Defense, “What is good for General Motors is good for the country” – and he had millions of dollars in stock in the company.  It is perhaps unfair that that quotation is the only thing that most people remember about Wilson, and it has come to represent a particular view of capitalism in society.  But Trump has tried his best to make the ethos of that disturbing belief true in his so-called government.

     70 odd million Americans voted for Trump, the second largest pool of any presidential candidate – but Trump has never governed for the American people, only for those who are rich, no, only for the very rich.

     QAnon is the ‘bread and circuses’ distraction for those who believe that they are being manipulated by a tiny minority of perverts, so they do not see the Big Money that really does the dirty work.

     The sooner the obscenity of Trump and his shameless supporters are consigned to history the better.  Whatever Biden may be, he has shown himself to be a fundamentally decent sort of human – and I will settle for that for the next four years as a way of recovering from the disaster of the last four years.

When you don't know it's Sunday, its time to think!

 New Lockdown, thrid week, Sunday.

 

 

 

 

In theory this morning, I should have been surrounded solely by my fellow citizens of Castelldefels as I went on my accustomed bike ride.  During the weekends we are legally bound to keep within our municipalities.  Yesterday there was a police control on one of the roads coming off the motorway checking, well, asking people where they were from.  When we were asked and replied, “Castelldefels” w were further asked where in the city we lived.  Having given the answer, we were waved on without further ado or any checking.  To be fair, my car windscreen does have a Castelldefels parking permit, which could have been an indication that we were telling the truth.  Policing of the lockdown restrictions where we live has, you might say, been somewhat unobtrusive.

     Today is a bright, sunny morning – just the sort of day when you might feel like visiting the seashore and walking along our extensive paso.  There were no police in evidence anywhere along my ride at the key points where access roads from ‘outside’ allow entry to the beach area of the town.  And if we are relying on trust for these restrictions to work, then information and graphic videos from around the country and the world show just how ineffective relying on people to do the right thing can be.

     I did note today that although a majority of people passing me were not wearing masks (and I include those with the mask under the nose and one the elbow!) the minority who do wear their masks is slowly getting nearer to parity.  Perhaps by the time the first vaccines hit, we might actually have made 50%!

 

 

 

Cummings fall from grace echoes other ‘over mighty’ counsellors like Cromwell, More and Wolsey, with somewhat less fatal results.  Which some might bewail.  And I think that I will leave the last sentence there with its nice ambiguity!

     Cummings’ influence has been truly poisonous and it is difficult to feel any sympathy from a person who has shown so little in the execution of his duties.  The fiasco of the illegal lockdown trips for ‘child care’ and ‘eyesight testing’ had a direct influence on the way that the restrictions were perceived, and emphasised the ‘one law for them, another for us’ syndrome that is so clearly in evidence here in Spain too with the kid glove treatment of the criminal activities of the so-called king emeritus and his corrupt financial dealings.  At a time where unity of purpose is essential, establishment figures seem to go out of their way to undercut acceptance.

     Cummings should not be the story; Covid and its management in the UK is the essential narrative that we should be concerned with, though Johnson must be terrified that he is going to become the intense focus of attention, and he will have to step up and take some sort of responsibility for the chaos that characterises his method of ‘government’.

     To be fair to Johnson, I do not for a moment believe that he has any ethical rock or ideological motivation.  It is, of course, unreasonable to expect a narcissist to be anything other than self-regarding and as, by definition, he cannot be wrong, he will continue to find others to take the blame for his own deadly incompetence. 

     All Johnson has to do is look over the Atlantic to see a master class in the survival game that he wants to play.  Trump’s reasoning is, “If I am losing an election then it must be rigged.”  Simple, elegant and criminally deranged. 

     This is the game plan that means that the population of the UK has to be blamed for the increase in Covid infection and not the people elected to manage its containment: the greater the numbers the more at fault those being infected are!  There is a sort of evil elegance to such reasoning.  And, of course the PBI not only get to suffer but also get to pay for their suffering! 

     Modern Conservatism to a ‘T’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Daddy, what did you do during lockdown?”

     Yet another re-working of the First World War recruitment poster is an accusation to those of us with time on our hands to think about what we have made of the extra ‘space’ imposed on us.

     I should be writing.  I know that I am merely by keeping this blog up to date, but the writing that I am thinking about is what starts in my notebook and is sometimes worked up into poems.  As I have explained before, my routine has been shot by my not being able to go for a swim and then to have my reward of a cup of tea in the pool café, where I then write in my notebook.

     I know that it should be perfectly easy for me to write in it at any other time – but it just doesn’t work out like that.  So, my writing has been a little desultory.

     I have therefore decided to do something different and (for me) interesting.

     I am going to compile a Catalogue Raisonné of the art works that I own.

 

 

 

 

     Not only is a Catalogue Raisonné something which is necessary for insurance purposes [that sounds a bit forced, but at the same time there is an element of truth to it] but also it will, I am sure, bring to the surface some ‘art works’ that have been unduly neglected over the past few years. 

     What, for example, am I going to class as artworks?  The small penguin figure made by a youthful Pat Giles in Rumney Pottery and bought by me as a present for my grandmother, will certainly count.  But what about the Coty bunny (without the bottle of Coty L’aimant in its little paws) bought as the final present my mother recognized getting from me?  Surely, that counts?  If Duchamp can have ‘readymades’ then I should be entitled to ‘bought objects with emotional charge’ as part of the catalogue!

     From where I am sitting typing this I can see four, framed ‘works’.  The first (and largest) is an ink drawing that I bought when I was a student in Swansea; the second is a page from an artist’s sketchbook; the third an elegant ‘joke’ birthday card where a penguin (a recurrent visual theme in my life) is treated in the style of various modern artists; the fourth is four framed medals of my paternal grandfather from his time in the British Army in The First World War.

     The great thing about a Catalogue Raisonné is that it has nothing to do with monetary worth (the ‘insurance thing’ was just a ploy to get me started and give a facile ‘purpose’ to the enterprise) but the written description that accompanies the objects can hint at the true non-monetary value.

     Then there is the question of my watches – not one of which is truly (or in some cases even remotely) valuable – but they do have a sort of worth and many have excellent design and they are worthy of consideration.

     So, far from being something which is static and visual art fixated, my Catalogue Raisonné will be dynamic, its scope changing with its development and how I look at what I possess.

     I’ve just thought, what about my (pitifully) small number of first edition books?  (Peake, Coward, Huxley) and my older tomes, like Swift – and when I say like Swift, I mean just Swift.  They too have a place.  And it will be fun finding out exactly how the condition of these books is described and replicating the language in my personal catalogue!

     The first thing to do is begin to take photos of what I have and then put them in the inevitable booklet that is my default position when confronted with a visual and writing project.

     I will start at once!