Take for example rememberance day - the day of poppy, cold, mud, and memories of a long gone war. Or better it is the day that the first world war, as symbol of what was wrong in mechanization, what it did for as all, invades consciousness. The point of this invasion is that it hooks opposites and makes then dance on in the other: Youth is coupled with death, purpose with futility, government with cock up, violence with problems with legitimacy, military with civil.
What is formed then is a veritiable saturnalia or hypocritical long faces, and limited genuine misery. The sorrow of people who have lost lovers or fathers or sister of brother, is blended across, orchestrate fed into the brew as that which makes the bitters that lift the cocktail beyond incipid blandness and make it something: misery is turned via the alchemy of the poppy into politics.
And politics here is meant in its real sense- it becomes political. That is it becomes a sequence of arguments, and a capital or aura which carries or are associated with those arguments. The military find a power, as do the politicians and the monarchy in this debate. Misery is then fed into a system of government which insists that we as a country like or at least spend rather a lot of our wars. More than that the act of remembering with its emphasis on repentance finds an attitude a supplication towards in justice that is very discrete. We all know we are so very sorry for our sins - and therefore a carry on sinning. That is we carry on not quite rewarding the wounded enough, and carry one as a small country in appropriate sabre rattling ways. It defines our belief in the military come what may.
Misery and memory become politics, become complex: This is a powerful social f(r)act(ion), for our time - and one that no doubt also confirms the power of the nation sate onto the bargain....
No comments:
Post a Comment