roulette

there is a strange chirpy imbecility to all predictions about the future, whether they are made by the romans with the chicken guts, of chancellors in the houses of parliament. I mean we all know we make predictions not because we think they will happen (they may or may not), but rather to define a position in past present and future.
We predict the to cap a past, and spin it into a beyond: Pasts are written not at the time or even in the present, but rather in the name of the future we hope will be.
But equally, we pitch the future to talk of the present: The future is the easiest way to describe the current political or social or whatever reality. The future then allows one to navigate what it is here an now; it names the here and now .
Finally in pitching a future, one casts bread upon the water and waits as all gamblers do. If ones predictions actually happen to be right (if the prediction seemed unlikely) the the capital one gains (one way or other) is enormous; and if one s wrong it does not matter much.
The result of source that politics but also economic and auguring in general easily becomes a babble about the future world, and what will be - a politics or a media coverage of delightful fantasy and speculation: The problem of course is that in all this babble actually real problem, become lost or merely just another future that we are wittering about.... A factor that beyond the froth of democracy (as its its assertion is future babble is the best possible), is truly worrying.

shopping around

It is one of those oddities or our current system; At its heart it has a lie about freedom, to which the lie we tell children about Santa Claus is nothing.
And yet these lies are so very subtle.
Take the idea of shopping around.
This is one of those myths - so beautiful as it is impossible.
It imposes upon humanity a task or mission: One must fight, and fight hard not to be ripped off.
Buying anything and everything becomes (potentially) at least is a semi-epic battle, and we all find our place in this war.
There are of course the shopping around heros, who have the time and the mind set to fight and fight again to find the best of bargains. To these 'god like' individuals the world belongs as truly as it belonged to Achilles or Alexander.
The trouble of course is the rest of us as just foot soldiers in this war - the equivalent of the poor souls who the heros of Homer had to whip into war.
And of course whipped we will be (and blamed for our wretchedness), by the system and the laughter of the shopping heros.
Of course one might claim our system was all about freedom while ancient Greece was about coercion.; and yet of course those Heros were free then and now, and the others? us foot soldiers, peasant and grunts? Are they really free born folk, or are they caught in a system not of their own choosing, a system that serves only to blame them for what they cannot be?
Or again we will no doubt claim that at least our system does not kill anyone - our heroism is peaceful:well save if you are an indigenous society or a dweller in shanty town or an orangutan or....
oh well...,.
I am (really) sure we must be better somehow....

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'....

It a tragedy (really)

The magic and the mystery of Gordon Brown is that here is a man who really ought not to be in public. Not because he is a bully, or a bad leader, so much as he is a man who cannot pull apart himselfapart from that being in public. I mean here other celebrities either develope a hard skin, as their 'celeb essence' in which they are in public and keep the their other, their sad, lonely bits elsewhere (in a jar to make stories of perhaps), or else never have them. What they learn very quickly not to do is expose themselves personally and in public. They do not confuse their role as person, or human with their role as whatever they are. A prime minister is a prime minster in a place rather other than they are a human, To stand on a podium and make a speak or be a bully in the whips office or a middle class toff, are then a role, a public guize.

We are all used to this fact- okay we are interested in scandal (well you might be), but even this interest is on the 'oh they have monkey bums to0 )- it is not really interest so much as titilation - it is not the interest one has with ones friends or family of example. it is also a staged thing.

Or again if a leader cocks up up or even does well , they ought to identity that success or failure, as they are as leader - as prime minster, and not a personal thing.

Brown appears incapable to doing any of this.

so here we have exposed for all to see Man in himself - a man complete (the hideous and sacred and hilarious truth of man)- with his sadness and conceit, his desire to do the right thing, and his insistance that he is, and always as. His failures, and his betrayals, of others and others of him. His blindness to other difference from him, and his inabilty to comprehend a world beyond him or what he has always worried about. His incomprehension when the rich clever slick kid gets the girl, and he, with his true heart and bright hopes does not.

He turns everythign into a inner war- a personal struggle, an all too obivous internal dialogue where he is struggling so hard to convince himself that he is okay, and doing in the face of the severest of critics external and internal.

The trouble is of course if you do this then everything becomes political and everything personal. One acts of kindness or the acts one feels were kind or the products of personal pain or fear or whatever being another political foot ball, as of course do all ones doubts and fears. Brown then, as I suspect many bullies have (and never loose sight of the fact in this he is also a bully), has a sign saying also 'bully me' written large upon him. That is, turn all my hang ups and problems into political footballs, and if we do not he of course ensures we must by his own actions. we are all bullies now

This man is not a politican so much as a walking shakespeare or opera tragedy, where all that is at the heart of humanity is being exposed by this sad, morose, awkward man, with his differently abled child, and lost daughter... A play where we all are crowds baying at his failures and chortling at his demise. Tt is not politics so much as a 'drama' and one I for one wish would end, sooner rather than latter, before it break my heart.....

What is government for?

It is an odd question - even order that in a sense in Britian at least the question has become so tricky.

And for three reasons. Firstly it is clear that for twenty years or so government has attempted the strangest of moves. It has attempted to dress everything it did in terms of business and partnerships with others. Government merged with a certain cross (the elites, or the would be elites in a community) . It did so while trumpeting the amount of money sent (as if spending was itself the action - the reform needed), and also claiming any change however small for the good to its credit, while denying every bad. A move that went past cynical to become idiotic, as people are not so daffy that the heavy New labour propaganda ad endless claims to have saved the world was.

The second strategy was that all difficult decisions were put out the endless communities to mitigate responsibility. This might be ok in itself, but it often simply looks like ducking the issue. More hat than these expert are of course ultimately endlessly drawn into the politician arena. The government the sets up it own internal opposition to score points of. Or in effect it rather to obviously starts to wage war of the truths that it itself has caused to be. Commities then either absolve politicians of action, or render politics too obvious to be really effective!

Finally of course there is what government does -endlessly - namely criminal justice and eduction. Both are endlessly fiddled with are reforms follows reform, until everyone is dizzy, and no one can tell which of these reforms are working and which are not..... Government then in micro management and perpetual revolution becomes at best a burden and at worse an affliction.

perhaps there real trouble ere, is that in a media age where stories an pilloried irrespective of the actual facts or at least the subtlies in the arguments, then politicians power lies not in being a government so much as being an opposition. it is as opposing one runs the power lines of a society and makes things happen or not. The trouble with New labour was then it never has looked like a government- more a perpetual opposition - while the tories never looked like taking power until they lost the trappings of power and become also an opposition.

all of which feeds back to that initial question - what is our government for?A question that demands an answer other than perpetual opposition. The trouble of course s, that f we do not have a clear answer to tins question, then the only possible answer it for themselves - an answer that surely lies behind the expenses scandal!

The result was of course that the entire edifices of

It is of course the problem with war...

There are I suppose two real paradigms for war in the modern world and the democracies that bellicosely wage it.

One padigm is of course Churchill with Thatcher as tribute band. All the nation must stop, industrial relation problem cease for we ARE at war. This are is ideally made according to the rules and waged against a state or at least an army. This was of course the war that toppled Sadam Hussien.

The other I guess is Korea with the tribute act of vietnam - the long long bleeding to death of a country sucked into an international war, with invisible foes.

The trouble is that this second war appear, or at least appeared in the nineties to be one one could wage on the cheap, to curry political good will, and claim one was doing something. Old Yugoslavia is the clear paradigm - a heart hearted war, that ground on, but eventually ended, and ended in the result the west wanted. Thousands of 'them' died, and relatively few of 'us' in comparison, and when the war finally ground to a halt, we could declare victory.

This model was (after the grim initial hiccup) the model applied to Iraq. America lost thousands, the Iraqies hundred of thousands, the war ground on , and yet the result eventually was roughly ok (or we could it was) - it was good enough.

Now the real trouble with Afghanistan is that even this war of 'result' seems unlikely to work to be good enough - we are caught simply in a conflict - another tribe or worse the copy or mirrior the the taleban that had an ideology other than tribal politics.

That is there are three sides, the tribes of the northen alliance ho govern in their interest, the Taleban part tribe part ideology, and us, in a state on apparently fairly endemic warfare. The oddity of the situation is then that we cannot pull out without allowing a clear disaster as the 'untribe' of the Taleban gains supremacy and then acts against us. There is no choice. Ir worse a state of endemic warfare is the choice.

This is not then war on the cheap so much as an importing a state of endemic war right into the heart of the west. That is we face the chioce, if we play by Afghan rules we ought to wage true war- a war we might win, but would cost a lot of money, lives and equipment. Or else we go on pretending that this war is like Yugoslavia, a war of attrition to be one in the end.

now it is very obvious to the military the kind of war we are in. A war they understand perhaps rather too well - the trouble is that Brown is too dopey to realize it, and Obama too habitually cautious to decide what to do, or else they are too blinded by their own very cod pacifisit rhetoric that denies we are simply warmongers in a state of warmongering. Trouble is that denial costs us lives - and does not help the those non warmonger afghanistanize who are caught up in the violence,

patina

an old myth - lose the past and lose the present or the right to the future

who do we think we are - heidegger?

The past is always as revealed within the present. The past then is what the present reforges - it is the presents creation of itself in mirror. It is the bottom we make

it covers then a multiple of sins and inaccuracies, imblicities and unjustices - all of which are somehow given value in this all too living past.

The future we want is the justified in the past. It becomes our place our forging ground for that future we feel we deserve. The game of rememberance is never learning. History has nothing to teach- it rather endlessly justifies. We rob the past of that which we feel we need, that which expresses and castrate feeling in the present, wrapping them up in rather vapid passions.

Forget the past - not a your peril but as your power. That is forget that it is the past, in understanding it. Understand not what happened but the uncertianity and other pasts of the happening. the past really remembered in then the hub of uncertainity that allows us to understand fears in the present, and the fear we all have that actually we have no right to a future or at least no ability to command one.

Perhaps then the mantra should be ' Forget the past, in the memory of other resents accorded their dignity, and live in the consequences'-

and perhaps never forget the past as such, but but critical never take it seriously - for that way stupidity lies.