Skip to main content

Teflon Toryism

We have all noticed this, but somehow, inexorably, we don't stop it - the definition of a dream that is a nightmare: the very financial system that brought the West to the brink of collapse has now generated the crisis-as-excuse (national debt) that leads to the election of ever-more extreme right-wing, libertarian, and pro-capitalist parties and politicians - in the UK, Cameron-Clegg, in the USA, Tea Partyers to the Congress, to thwart the shellacked Barack.  Capitalism perpetuates itself, a cancer.

I offer no immediate or short-term solutions, but it seems clear to me that the only way out of this circular mess is to break the cycle - we need a new system of governance and economic distribution.  Such a shift is epochal - think the Medieval Age moving into the Renaissance, the Renaissance into the Industrial Age of modernity - eggs got broken, millions died or suffered, empires collapsed, whole ways of life became extinct.  That sort of upheaval has to happen, surely, to displace the boom-bust situation we are in, a situation which, like a kid going downhill on a bike with no breaks, has a sort of dismal foreseeable end.  What is also clear, is that all the hollering, writing, speaking out, tweeting etc isn't saving the planet.  The tired litany of global warming, dying species, etc - well, it is tiring, but true.

It feels helpless, but in a big way that might just tip, in about thirty years, into something like a new system.  Not yet.  For now, we seem likely to be governed by pro-money blinkered toffs and jerks.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".