alchemy...

The thing to always remember is the place where modern western democracy, and an capitalism kept alive by advertizing meet , is political satire and medieval mummer or mystery plays. In politics and business, the great rule of the system is not solve problems that are there, so much as to transmute them into a simple morality play or characture of themselves, and then deal with that image, and never the reality itself. Political parties therefore represent less an agenda and more styles, manners, ways to transmuting intractable problem, by exaggerating certain features, and ignoring others . A characture that can easily be characturised itself, as involving three basic starting points: Does one exaggerate the individual (with the Tories); or the the population taken en mass (with Labour); or freedom and whatever that means (with the Liberals).

The game of the good politician, is the game of the advertizing agent and the cartoonist, it is to take the actual problems and occurrences of everyday, and appear to transmut then to a realm where where everything appears so much easier to understand, and quite probably to resolve....

This game is all good fun as long as a society is relatively stable and complex enough that there is always something else happening in it.

The problems really come when, on the one hand, the creation of a democracy itself becomes the only policy a government is allowed to pursue (by its 'supporters' in the West); as all that such a government is likely to create is the pastiche of democracy, the pastiche of a pastiche and not never the reality itself! On the other hand if there are real problems, say the planet is warming or fascism rising, problems defying simple pastiche and the ethics of Medieval mystery play, then we are all likely to be screwed , one way or other.

It will be, as Marx knew so well, a fine epitaph, ' the system that valued is right to pastiche its over its own truth'....