The United Kingdom – so called – continues to stagger towards Brexit. The Government – so called – keeps just “winning” so-called “victories.” Under the so-called “leadership” of Ms May, our incompetent progress towards this terrible mistake requires us to shed our honour, our pride, our connectedness, our contact with reality, our common sense, all our best interests and those… continue reading
Category american election 2016
The Parrot Ails
The Flotsam of Frantic Dreams
We don’t know any more where our lives belong or even where to hide. The walls of home hold nothing up or out and the door hangs slack on the hinge. Where have our lives gone ? I consult the news and the world ended several days ago. Today it’s ending all over again. Where have… continue reading
… High Noon this Easter
Let’s recall the film “High Noon,” that great Western. The outlaw and his hoodlum cronies are riding into town. They want revenge on the sheriff, the keeper of the law. The sheriff scours the town looking for support, a posse of townspeople who will help him defend their community from the outlaws. The townspeople know him well and trust him.… continue reading
The Rule of the Rough Beast
The “Rough Beast” is a phrase from “The Second Coming” by YB Yeats. Written in 1919, it is a poem that becomes more topical with each passing day.
The last three lines of the poem above are a deliberate reference to TS Eliot’s lines from “Four Quartets” – “Humankind/Cannot bear very much reality.”
And the middle section is… continue reading
If the People is Sovereign, Lying to the People is High Treason
As 2016 comes to an end, I want to present an argument which I believe follows from the year’s events. Different elements of the argument have already been touched on here in recent posts. I must begin with language and those first words of St John’s Gospel. In the beginning was [and was always] the Word. This Christmas, as usual,… continue reading
Naming the Beast of the Year
This beast has our country’s contours written all over it. It has leapt from out of the ruins of the city, those hollow squares, and from the great labrynth below ground where the thread got tangled, and from the wi-fi and the wires through which we do not speak but intone like digital toys or just snarl, just howl.… continue reading
Presidential Election Night November 2016
All night, the great tree raged outside our windows. It wanted to give way to the wind, but could not. It wanted to fly over the hill on the wind’s crest lashing our house as it passed, smashing the roof, bursting each window. What agony to be pinned like this, bound by the feet, earth-bound by tendon, tendril, a century… continue reading