William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
  • Dear Diary
  • About Us
  • Back Stories
  • Read My Shorts?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are we now?

5/10/2017

0 Comments

 
If democracy is the "least worst" system of government, why does it disappoint? Why do we care so much? We know these people. We know they're fallible, self-interested, out of touch with their own lack of stature. They have the lack of humility to talk about humility [I've just switched off the radio] while not hesitating to use their electorate-given right (sic) to meddle in all our lives. They're naive, unworthy, and we know it. And yet when they fail, we react with indignation, as though we've been let down by the people they promised to be, rather than the people they are.
     That's it, isn't it? "Humankind cannot bear very much reality," as T S Eliot put it, see below, and we're complicit in the forgetting of the gap between promise and reality, until reality bites back against the rhetoric and we know ourselves. We're angry with ourselves for - as the song puts it - getting fooled again and for letting ourselves get fooled again. Fooling ourselves again. It's the self-knowledge that hurts. Not so easy to forget that both "Thatcher" and "Blair" (just surnames - think about that) both won landslide victories. Most of us - most of our parents - voted for them. Winning at our expense, with our "blessing", is hard to forgive.
     There's a quotation - quote - that goes around, although I haven't seen it lately. "No-one pretends that democracy is perfect and all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill, speaking in 1947. Well put together, and you can just about hear him pause to let the amusement ripple through his audience. Churchill was Prime Minister through the Second World War, and then, at the brink of peace, he was ejected in favour of Clement Atlee - in a landslide, 393 seats to 197. I remember relatives speaking of betrayal, but the historical record suggests that "the British people" had had enough of war leadership.
     I think about the wisdom of the electorate, and now I'm starting to think that politicians describe who we are. Maybe not in the indecisive decades, when nobody really wins big (and the wisdom of the electorate is to limit the power of political leaders), but whenever there's a properly decisive swing in one direction or another - that's who we are, because we're susceptible to that particular set of promises at that particular moment. We were "Thatcherite" once, then after a brief interval we chose "Blairism", and right at this moment we're dreaming of "Corbynism" while not giving anybody enough of a mandate to do anything. We were in a "We shall never surrender!" mood in the early stages of The War, then we gave Atlee and his government the mandate to set up the National Health Service.
     We kind of know, don't we, that Jeremy Corbyn isn't going to deliver Utopia in this green and pleasant land? No offence to the man, and that isn't a reason not to vote for him, but he isn't. He's human and so are we. Perhaps "Corbynistas" are letting themselves believe in a prospect than is greater than is achievable, and perhaps that belief is a measure of the scale of the eventual disillusionment - but no matter. Whenever the next landslide comes, whoever is elected leader, it will indicate the promises - the dreams, perhaps - that we want to follow.
     And after the dreams, we'll wake up. Again.
     But I still haven't answered my own question. We know all this. We know who we are; we know who they are. What is it in us - that we let them get to us?

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T S Eliot (Burnt Norton, 1935)

Picture
There was a book, warn't there, and then a television series, called The Glittering Prizes? Frederic Raphael. I forget whether any of the characters went into politics, and I can't quite remember whether any of them ended up disillusioned. But I'm sure it all turned out happily in the end.

Doctors train for years. More lives are lost to politics than to medicine. And yet when politicians fail, we don't haul them up in front of the political equivalent of the General Medical Council. But they do get their reward.
     There was an elderly politician, decades out of power, writing the other day about what "we" (sic) "must" (sic) do. Sigh. Such people are occasionally awarded the title "national treasure", as though age and familiarity matter more than promises not kept and harm done. Younger politicians - literally, if there's a propitious conjunction of gender, image and photo-op - come to sit at their feet. But they're entertainment by then; at best, they make credible space-fillers in political magazines.
     "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." So said Enoch Powell. But - really? Political careers do end in failure, of course. Sometimes - not in this country - politicians die at the hands of other politicians. More often than not, though, the reward for seeking the power to intervene politically in the lives of populations - is irrelevance. We must, must we? Thanks for letting us know.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

    RSS Feed

    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

    Picture
    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


    There's a picture, it's just loading...
    You found me!
    Welcome. Thank you for coming. But am I the right
    William Essex? Click here
    to meet some more.



    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

    Picture
    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

    Archives

    May 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011

    Picture
    Out of print. Sorry.
No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.