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.....