Stimulus and Response and the Three Cup Trick

The most noticeable technique of the left in recent times is a distraction one. An egregious event occurs which stimulates a response which would not have occurred had the initial event not have happened. Then the left make the story all about the poor qualities exhibited in the response and dare you not to make your main priority deploring them on pain of being impugned for heartlessness etc. Like the three cup trick they distract your attention onto the lesser evils of the response and away from the superior evil of the original egregious occurrence. They did this with October 7th and Jason Arday.

The Rapture

 We are blessed in this country that, for a pittance, we have a national broadcaster who provides us with such nourishing fare in the form of BBC Drama while steadfastly eschewing the taking of political positions. It subtly uses the idiom like an expert pianist to pluck our cultural strings and to lead us into good pastures. My fear is that I am too unschooled and obtuse a recipient to understand the fullness and subtlety of the riches on offer, to, shall we say, hear every wavering melody in its full significance. I offer you the characters from THE RAPTURE so that you can assist me by explaining what ingenious semiotics are at work. I know that most of them will have gone over my head.

The feisty female psychologist in a wheelchair 

Her young black female patient endowed with prophetic gifts and wrongly accused of a heinous crime

Her gentle and empathetic support worker, Rafiq, whose alibi is only believed when backed up by a white man

A spooky white Christian evangelist who says he is taking away climate alarm for poor children and replacing it with “hope.”

The fat, white, male psychiatrist who does the bidding of the evangelist and undermines the wheelchair-bound psychologist

A fossil fuel company pretending to like sustainables with a white male CEO

A feisty black female climate activist leader

A wronged journalist working on exposing the Fossil fuel guys

A corrupt MP enabling the Fossil fuel barons for the sake of “growth.”

A black policewoman feistily leading door to door inquiries

Pearls before swine in my case; all assistance appreciated….

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

I have a memory of reading this book decades ago but have recently watched the four half-hour accompanying programmes produced by Berger which brought it back to mind. My impression is that it's very sixties/early seventies in sensibility in that Berger takes the part of a MARXIST MARTIAN astonished by the humanoid creatures he is examining for us. If he had known and understood what he and his fellow creatures were in advance might he have been less astonished? Or does he affect to be nonplussed in order to ' know again' the bleeding' obvious about western humans, as if he has just discovered them in the Brazilian jungle, in order to endow them with an academic mystique concocted by himself? In, for example, his examination of Gainsborough's 'Mr and Mrs Andrews', he declares himself to be terribly surprised to find that we are territorial animals who struggle for success and, when it comes, like to advertise the residential property and belongings it brings us and our families.  His astonishment seems a more extraordinary thing. Similarly, in the case of a mammalian species whose survival depends on sexual reproduction, he is surprised to discover that western art reflects that most women go about with a concern about how they appear to men. Evie tells me that to know this is still true you only have to go to Glasgow bus station on a Saturday night. Then he is amazed at the way in which adverts associate the products they are trying to sell with glamorous people with glamorous lifestyles. Whoddathunk? And he looks like Roger Daltrey but sounds like, if it's possible, an even more serious and portentous Malcolm Muggeridge.

https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=john+berger+ways+of+seeing&ra=m

QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST? David Byrne at Edinburgh Playhouse

I was delighted and excited to pick up a late resale ticket on the day of this concert from the 'Who is the Sky' tour. That spoof Madison Avenue voice, a shock of white hair and the Norman Bates mien and 74 year old David Byrne was on stage at the Edinburgh Playhouse 50 miles from where he was born! A photographic tableau vivant behind him and surrounded by no less than twelve musicians and dancers, like Byrne himself, all sporting orange jump suits, and gyrating groovily across the space. It was a pot pourri mishmash of the Playschool Teletubbies, old Benetton ads, that Jaguar advert that almost finished the company off and the inside of Doc Brown’s head from Back to the Future. It all felt very modern with no drum kits, just four percussionists wearing their electronic drums on their hips on shoulder straps. Byrne fades in and out of a stage choreography which he has described as 'democratised' because it makes prominent at different times other musicians. He treats us to his trademark, appealingly Wordsworthian, childhood wonder and his Gregor Samsa-like bafflement on encountering that human condition thing. And, as you’d expect, musicianship of the highest order and highest discipline was a delight. The classic songs that I knew, And She was, Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, Life During Wartime, The Road to Nowhere and Psycho Killers were all performed with a tight swagger and arresting visual interplay between the onstage complement and the video backdrop. I'll just mention, and you will be staggered, Dear Reader, that, completely unexpectedly for an American Rock musician living in New York, Byrne felt moved to communicate his political credentials to us! Imagine my wonderment! The word FASCISM was given a prominent namecheck in connection with footage of Italians singing to each other from balconies on Liberation Day during Covid (there were a strange number of references to the Covid era). David explained for us that the liberation was from Fascism that happened in Italy don’tchaknow? He told us that showing kindness and love is the most punk thing you can do at the moment and the way to ‘resist.’ There followed footage of clumsy ICE myrmidons clutching vainly at a wacky young fellow on a strange bike-like contraption running their gauntlet and getting away. We cheered. Oh how we cheered! Then he asked us to guess which member of the band had a degree in Astrophysics and took delight in inviting a black female to step forward and give us a twirl. We also learnt that four members of the roadie crew were home-schooled but were marvellous anyway. And, finally, a hoarding reading ‘MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN!’ was projected. Which brings us back to the Teletubbies mentality and the infantile packaging. Did I discover that, appealing as the music is, it is really the juvenilia of a 75 year old man who is still producing it and that this was the answer to Qu’est-ce que c’est? that I hadn’t realised until now? Perhaps I'm being too harsh on an extremely talented artist...

Managed to catch a wee video of Psycho Killers. I thought this stuff was the dog’s bollocks when it came out.

The Glittering Prizes - Review

In ‘Alien’ human beings are horrifically subjected to the life cycle of another species in the same way as some wasps paralyse their prey so that they can act as hosts and nourishment for their larvae. In the film the humans are kept alive in a living death as part of a pulsating larder. In recent years the same has been done to BBC Drama. Still nominally alive and on our screens it is no longer an end in itself having been subjected to the requirements of social engineering and political activism. Watching the 1976 BBC series, ‘The Glittering Prizes’, free on Forgotten British Television on Youtube one understands the heights from which BBC Drama has fallen. Lord Oi Oi  invited me to re-watch a series I watched first time round as a 17 year old and to write a review. So here goes. 

I remember being rather dazzled by the often coruscating wit of the piece while being confused by much of the content. I hope I now have a better grasp on the latter. It seems to me that the series was often brilliant. It was a sociological and politico-historical record of the age it depicts. Rewatching it now I realise that much of it  also approximates to televised two-handers of taut Scandinavian drama proportions. This is especially true of Episode 3 where Adam Morris interviews Stephen Taylor (played by Eric Porter), an Oswald Moseley facsimile, who has been frothingly washed up on the shore by the tide of the Second World War like our own Ezra Pound.  In Episode 4, a brash and successful Australian from their Cambridge days (are there hints of Clive James?) exposes a prig who has needlessly subjected his family to penury by working in a rural Reform school for pious and high-minded reasons. This has real psychological and moral depth and the complexity and subtlety of the relation between the two men is very satisfying.

The series is flawed by certain contradictions though. The author, Frederick Raphael, was born in Chicago to well-off Jewish parents. The British father’s job with Shell Oil brought Raphael to Putney when he was seven just before the War. The boy was educated to a high degree at Charterhouse and Cambridge. It is fairly obvious that the series is a working out of autobiographical issues to do with Raphael’s Jewishness and the Cambridge milieu he swam in. Adam Morris, excellently portrayed by Tom Conti is his alter ego. The wit is Cambridge razor sharp but erring on the side of being over self-regarding. It seems there is nothing you can’t be ironic about and this fact becomes one of the problems Raphael struggles with; where is real seriousness located? Does real seriousness exist? Is it embarrassing to believe that it does? As an atheist Jew in an observant family in the swinging 60s how do  Adam and Raphael (presumably in the same predicament) address the issue of their Jewishness?  

These two problems come together at the beginning of Episode 6 where the wit is so sharp it cuts itself. Morris, now a successful author, addresses the small audience of some kind of Jewish society. He radiates heartless anti-Zionist contempt towards the audience, even to an elderly Auschwitz survivor, criticising them for their selfishness in demanding a homeland for post-Holocaust Jews while not demanding a homeland for Gypsies who also suffered in the Holocaust. The audience sensibly argues that the Jews have an ancient history in Israel and a religious culture while Gypsies do not. One could point out to Adam something that he seems to overlook, that Gypsies, by definition, are travellers without a homeland; a strange thing for one so clever to overlook. Then, later in the same, final, episode we discover that Adam carries around a photo of a Jewish schoolboy in school uniform with his hands up as he is being herded by Nazi soldiers. Suddenly seriousness intrudes and the constantly scathing and subverting ‘wit’ evaporates.

 

I think the problem was that Raphael was too 20th century and this made him conflicted. The wit is a simulacrum of the fierce adherence of the 20th century to a fashionably absurdist (Modernist?) outlook that undermines simple things or feels guilty about them; a clever, distancing wryness about them must not be abandoned. In spite of this his success, his happy marriage and his pleasing bourgeois life-style overwhelm him in the end and he has to embrace the lovely simplicity of it all. In spite of himself and his guilt in doing so, he is compelled to look on creation and say that it is good, even in reverse in condemning the Holocaust without reserve and exhibiting an allegiance to his lineage. He accepts his Glittering Prizes no longer able to be ironic about them, distance them or subvert them. He has overcome his guilt about his ‘privilege.’

As a footnote one has to say something about the treatment of women in the series. Raphael comes across as still being a 16 year old boy obsessed with hooters and apparently unaware that a person is attached to them. We constantly get the boys’ locker-room perspective on the matter. A Sociology lecturer casually tells a female student, mid-seminar, that her nipples are excellent before continuing to discuss time and motion studies while the student in question doesn’t bat a mascara’d eyelid. A brilliant academic, now turned alcoholic considers the lack of her cup-size a problem of greater proportion than her unfaithful husband and attempts to strip off in public. We even have a protest led by another female student who goes full topless for us. Women are completely sexually compliant and un-protesting (in spite of that protest!) as they might be in a 16 year old’s fantasy. It’s very seventies in this respect.

Pensées

Rationalist Law originating in the Enlightenment human mind has been made the Prime mover of reality rather than something that responds to reality. It has usurped creation. This is why our ability to govern is paralysed; it is hog-tied in Gordian knots of human thought. 

The opposition are at war with any cast of mind that believes it belongs somewhere or has an identity even though such things are required to frame the parameters of the human mind. 

Rationalist technocracy cannot allow common sense reality because it posits an alternate reality, one that only exists on a circuit board.

Technocratic Alienation

One of the glories of the Metaphysical poets was the association of their sensibilities. Eliot lamented a dissociation that he detected occurring after their reign in the literary world in the 17th century. This disassociation can perhaps be explained by the division between the rational and mathematical side of our nature from the rest of it - the aesthetic, the emotional, the ethical - caused by Descartes. All of the latter were in some sense demoted by the prioritisation of reason and even Maths as the sole detector and mediator of truth on which reliable knowledge could be founded (it is interesting that this heralded the period of philosophical alienation where we were dislocated from the physical, ‘noumenal’ world unable to prove that it exists). A dislocation was created in our nature between the human and the scientific side which alienated us from ourselves. We still still see this dislocation in our relationship with technology which can often demote or reduce the human in an insulting way. “The computer says no." Winston Churchill said we want scientists on tap not on top. He was Boris Johnson's hero but, in spite of this, Boris abdicated his over-arching humanity and wider vision than the purely scientific one in favour of the rule of scientists during the pandemic.

Eduardo Paolozzi’s take on Blake’s ‘Newton’ outside the Scottish National Gallery

The Triumph of Determinism

Does the direct real-time feed from a Labour  focus group on "what went well" to the nano-bots that were injected into his bloodstream mean that what we are looking at when we watch Keir Starmer is an actual AI Embodiment of a focus group speaking its words to us like a body-snatched replicant? Is this a horror story worse than Frankenstein or Alien in that all traces of a human consciousness have been replaced by circuitry without our knowledge? Is he just human reduced to mouthpiece for the data that streams through him - "5000 extra appointments in the NHS, the highest rate of growth in the G7...."? Is the real Starmer experiencing the horror of being one of Bacon’s Screaming Popes? After he is deposed will he, waking in a rest home in the Surrey countryside, need to be rehabilitated by being taught how to be a human again?

Human AI

I watched the interview on the 6 o’clock News last night where Chris Mason asked Keir Starmer for his reaction to the fact that he is the least respected PM in history. Starmer’s style in his response (and the style of Reeves and Phillipson) is to project contentment and satisfaction with what he’s doing whatever is happening and to act like an affectless human pianola spewing out ready-made sound bites that will read well in the press. He’s like a human version of AI.

My friend asked his phone the question ‘Is Keir Starmer an android?’ and the AI feature gave this helpful answer…

“No, Keir Starmer is not an android; he is a human politician and lawyer who has served as the Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He has been described as having a robotic demeanor by some critics, but this is a metaphorical expression of his political style, not a literal description.”

Controlling Meaning

Are the Culture Wars about more than the control of the narrative? Perhaps they are about the control of MEANING and interpretation, things that distinguish human beings? The creation of meaning derives from the motherboard of the one doing the creating.

Disallowing Learning

In the latter stages of my teaching career, I noticed the greater and greater tendency to disallow the teacher-learner dynamic on the grounds that the superiority implied meant that it was a kind of “punching-down” oppression. It became more and more fashionable to make a public exhibition of one’s humility in learning, Rousseau-style, from the children. Of course everyone learns stuff in whatever profession they are in so teachers would always be learning things (and sometimes from interactions with children) but this doesn’t justify disallowing the process of teaching. I wonder if there is also now a tendency to disallow the idea that there is a reservoir of wisdom in age in spite of the fact that a definition of wisdom might be the accumulation of knowledge from time and experience?

Malice v Stupidity

 More on MALICE v STUPIDITY. “Let’s rub the Right’s noses in diversity.” Philip Gould (Tony Blair’s SPAD). In the immediate particular this is malicious but it was only said because, in the general, it was believed to be morally justified (it was done for the educational *good* of the Right) for a dangerously stupid reason. The justification was founded on the assumption that, regarding immigration, the Right is devoid of “compassion” which is immoral. This is a stupid and self-righteous idea and a dangerous one if it contributes to the delegitimisation of the Right and the destruction of democratic two-sided conversation. To believe in malice in the general *and* the particular is harder in the West. It is easier to believe in regarding the Russian Revolution as, because of personal matters like the execution of his terrorist brother, figures like Lenin were fuelled by hatred of the establishment and the aristocracy. In the cases of Gould and Blair I think they would be paralysed without a sense of moral justification and horrified by the idea of acting out of naked malice. Especially in the case of Blair with his messianic bent they *had* to feel a sense of justification.

Reality as Given

 If you unburden the human mind of the centrality with which Enlightenment Descartes invested it in Cogito ergo sum it can relax and cheerfully and gratefully accept reality as given.

FRANKENSTEIN- GUILLERMO DEL TORO

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was really a dry run for Bladerunner and the expectations that we now have of artificial intelligence. And as with those fears the whole thing is based on a problem. That problem is that it is perfectly obvious that, if we are still in the dark about the actual nature of human being 300 years after René Descartes was dissecting corpses vainly hoping to find the location of the soul in the pineal gland, it cannot but be impossible to replicate such a creature. In spite of the best efforts of the neuro-scientists, we still simply don't know how free will, human selfhood or intelligence are instantiated. This leaves the AI worriers, Mary Shelley and del Toro with a paradox; if you are suggesting that it is hubristic, not to say impossible to create what a creator God or Evolution (tick box accordingly according to your beliefs) somehow delivered how are they going to create a notional creature who is supposed to have been created by a hubristic Enlightenment scientist who got above his station? What on Earth will that “creature” be like? Guillermo del Toro seems to adopt the Mary Shelley version; a sweet and guileless amalgam of high-minded Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage who just wants a friend. If you can willingly suspend disbelief over this insuperable paradox the film, as with the book, is tremendous High-Romantic fun. There is the killer line nicely delivered by the Monster in the film to Victor Frankenstein – “You are the true monster” because his hubris, in trying to replace God or Evolution (tick box accordingly according to your beliefs) is the real moral monstrousness in the story. The Heath Robinson, mixed grill appearance of the monster created suitably mocks the comical pretensions of his human creator. And there is a lot of fabulous architecture of the High Gothic/Art Nouveau comic book, dreamscape type we expect from Del Toro. There is an extraordinary Gothic tower perched on the edge of a cliff which doubles as Frankenstein’s lab and reminds one of Gotham City and an electricity sub-station at the same time. There are shades of Jekyll and Hyde in old style Victorian dissection theatres in Edinburgh and there is even a fine dash of Pre-Raphaelite-ism in the spectacle of Frankenstein’s prospective sister-in-law, played by Mia Goth, perched in the corner of a coach in a cloud of turquoise muslin like a sitter for John Everett Millais. Oh, and there are obviously AI (is CGI passé now?) deer and wolves which seems appropriate somehow. And I can tell Gerald Sholto, who loves Mary Shelley’s closing sequence, that this version begins in fine rerum.

Making Windows in to Trump’s Soul

For members of the animal kingdom ‘making a living’ is an imperative. If they don’t they ‘make a dying.’ An osprey has to catch fish, a sheep has to shave the grass and a human has to make a living wage or a profit, the latter being true because we flatter ourselves if we think we are not members of that kingdom and that, therefore, we are above such imperatives. We are thrown into this dynamic situation merely by being alive and have no say in the matter. From here it’s a short step to Adam Smith’s view of economics; the self-interest of individuals, driven by the imperative to survive, creates markets where prices are naturally lowered by competition to the good of all. So far, so Darwinian. And of course ‘self-interest’ has nothing to do with selfishness which is a different and moral issue which only arises much further downstream of all this. The former is something we have no say in. Take an interest in yourself and your family or die. It’s a bit like putting your own oxygen mask on first in an airplane so that you are in a condition where you can help others.

All of the above inevitably creates societies where businessmen and women, some more ‘successful’ (in both Darwinian and financial terms) than others. Human societies being what they are – social, those businessmen will also be involved in political nexuses. Business and politics cannot not interpenetrate as humans can be many things at once. The result of this is that those of other economic persuasions than the Adam Smith ones will always level the accusations of selfishness and corruption against the conservative businessmen who might accept the Adam Smith analysis. And, human nature being what it is and free will being what it is, there will be a proportion of successful businessmen who can justifiably be impugned for those sins. You could even extend this to say that whatever the proportion of the whole number of businessmnen are involved, it might be the case that a similar proportion of the transactions of most businessmen might be impugnable on this basis because the businss world is tough and Darwinian. But this occurrence of sin is no higher than that of other sins in other spheres and is not due simply to the fact  of such people being businessmen. There is nothing inherently wicked about being a businessman. It is merely evidence of general human fraility and susceptibility to temptation. There will be some truly reprehensible characters in the business world but the majority of businessmen will be generally good people out to make a living.

 

Donald Trump is a Republican businessman who, true to that caste, is pretty unashamed of and even celebrates that métier and that milieu. From my humble position I’d guess that in his sharp-elbowed and unforgiving world he has done some shady deals but that they would not entirely define his character. They are more a testimony the world within which he has chosen to operate. For those on the left, however, the mere fact of operating in that ‘capitalist’ (a word I choose not to use personally as it seems a prescription coined by Karl Marx precisely to demonise the operations of the world of normal trade) milieu as a player means that he can only be completely selfish and corrupt.

When Trump pulled off his extraordinary Gaza deal and gave hope to the whole region for some time in the future with the wider plan of the Abraham Accords with the assistance of the leaders of several Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey there were voices on the left who presumed to make a window into his soul to such an extent that they could confidently pronounce that it was all down to venality and vanity; he wants to make money out of the deal and he wants to be lionised by the Nobel Peace committee for bringing it home and that’s enough to sum up and dismiss him. No room at all was left for there being space left in his soul for a real desire to stop a long-perpetueted massacre.

I’d suggest that there certainly is room for that but that there might be something else in addition. Once the influence of religion died in the West its citizens were left with the problem of how to navigate the moral world. Many have solved this by setting up new ethical religions. They do this by choosing figures on the opposite political side to themselves and then creating new demonologies around them. In these demonologies the normal complement of flaws that all humans have are magnified until they are turned into pure demons a priori of any argument or of any action they might take. From these created moral triangualtion points on which they entirely depend whole moral landscapes are created. This means that, because the created demon is needed  for purposes of navigation, no action of Trump’s can ever be allowed to testify to anything other than the irredeemable purity of his wickedness. If is allowed that any action of his is motivated by anything else the whole moral shebang collapses. So we can be certain that whenever they look into his soul after any action they will always ascribe to it the basest of motives.

So what is the good motive I detect, apart from the genuine desire to stop the killing? As I mentioned earlier conservatism and conservative economics have long been demonised to the extent that the creed has been all but delegitimised on moral rather than intellectual grounds. Just look at Theresa May caving in and cravenly apologising for the Conservatives being the ‘nasty party.’ This demonisation of the right of the healthy political tension that has, until now rescued us from civil war, is what might be seen as risking plunging us into it. If you disable one side of the debate you remove the possibility of rescuing ‘jaw jaw’ and only ‘war war’ is left.

For some strange reason, in spite of his general isolationism, many on the left level the accusation at Donald Trump that he is a warmonger, something else that conservatives are supposed to be. What better way could there be to publicly rehabilitate conservatism morally than by deservedly winning the Nobel Peace Prize? It may not be simply a question of vanity or that favourite word which the left always apply to him; narcissism. There may be more to his character than meets a superficial survey. Humans are always more complex than their caricatures. It may be that, by receiving personal applause he is inadvertently achieving a great deal more; possibly the removal of conservatism from the demonologies. Or it may be that he knows what he is doing and we underestimate him….

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/maybe-trump-actually-knows-what-hes-doing/

A Cognitive Insult

 The depth of execration directed towards elected politicians in our time is explicable by the fact that they are the visible embodiment of the viability of a cognitive model that threatens the credibility of the model of the other side. In that sense, their continued existence is an insult, even traumatic, to the other side’s cognitive model and psychology. The two models are mutually exclusive.

Exhibition After Browning's 'My Last Duchess'

 

The Exhibition

After Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’

I fashioned this exhibit from a black

I found in York. He’d guessed he was held back

by light-skinned guys, resentful of his skill.

He showed my indignation – how it will

burst forth, to best advantage, for a cause.

The female piece beside it drew applause

for such unselfish dedication to

a sex that isn’t mine, revealed how true

my understanding of predicaments

like theirs, the championing and keen defence

of rights too long denied. A cripple served

me best as centrepiece. It was observed

how delicate my sensitivity  -

indeed, some branded it my ‘love’  - can be.

Regrettable all that – you know he died?  -

but the response I made’s my perfect pride.

Let’s pass beyond the Palestinian suite

to where an inspiration had me treat

the homosexual crew  - a chive crostini?  -

the subjects purged from Navy posts so meanly

provided my sad theme. My future plans? -

the gender freaks excite me and the bans

they’ve placed on their shenanigans – a vein

that’s ripe for exploitation. I remain

alert to all the goldmines and rely  

on those especially that might supply

injustices that I can care about.

When is your tribute programme coming out?

Voyelles - Arthur Rimbaud

 Vowels

A Black, E White, I Red, U Green, O Blue - Vowel Sounds,

Some day I shall disclose your secret parturitions:

A - bodice bristled black by shimmering flies’ ignitions 

Around the noisesome evil; fizzing Legion drowned 

In shadows; E - bleached tents and ashen steam’s emissions,

White kings and shivered lilies, ice-fields ironbound;

 I - Tyrian blood like spat contumely that redounds

 From gorgeous, mocking lips with wine-infused contritions;

U -  rehearsing seas’ veridian shudders, clear, divine.

The peace in greensward specked with livestock; peace in lines

Alchemic training draws on brows that books made wise; 

O - highest Clarion thronged with alien stridencies,

 A silence crossed by [Thrones and Principalities]

- O that Òmega, amethyst ray of [His] Eyes!

Voyelles 

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles, 
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes: 

A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes 
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles, 

Golfes d'ombre; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes, 
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles; 
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles 
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes; 

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, 
Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides 
Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux; 

O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges, 
Silences traversés des [Mondes et des Anges]: 
—O l'Oméga, rayon violet de [Ses] Yeux!

D’après Apollinaire

Papa François Premier, crucifixe métallurgique, 

Marteau scintillant des conservateurs partout et du caramel au beurre 

Qui se recroqueville devant votre fléau!

Némésis expert des voitures électriques

Qui croisent les grandes places accablées de la capitale.

Gravez vos antiphones d’intelligence artificielle

Sur les entablatures des temples à la modernité,

Seuls réfuges de la Croyance.

The Biggest Big Pharma Conspiracy?

It is notable in the West that a great deal of money is spent on expensive medical and pharmaceutical treatment right up to the end of life, often when it is strictly pointless. Relatives will expect, demand this or even litigate if it is refused. As a result the legal world may be set up as if the dying have a *right* to more and more useless treatment. The medical world will speak as if there is always another fix and health obsessives will behave as if more and more fitness can stave off mortality interminably. Doctors will sign off the drugs for fear of litigation and, of course, Big Pharma will be delighted to go along with us as the money this generates is precisely what its business machine is geared up for. Even in cases of pain (the opioids scandal) and depression (the over-prescription of SSSIs) we *demand* technological ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ just as we demand consumer solutions to the biggest problem of all - mortality.

But, in all of this, is it a comforting question of perp and victim where we have the high moral ground of victim or are we, rather, talking about a collusion or a conspiracy in wilfully blinking at a mortality we no longer know how to deal with however much it costs us. And won’t all the Pharma execs and their families be blinking just the same and taking the pointless drugs when their turn comes so that they are conspirators on both sides of the fence, also lacking the ability to cope with the ‘problems’? Is this phenomenon entirely driven by the rapacious venality of demons or is that just a simplification that makes the complicated moral ground here easier to navigate?