William Essex
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18/4/2017

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That's interesting. I've now spent several weeks putting out a piece every Saturday on the macro-dramas of that week. Trump, of course; Brexit, of course; Gibraltar, not quite of course; United Airlines – oh. How surprising was that? Exactly? Redundant emphasis word to ram the point home; tell me exactly how surprised you were that the operational ends of big corporate entities - the over-mighty subjects of our day - don't invariably follow through on the love and attention exhaled by their marketing departments.
     My numbers went up, if we're interested in numbers, but only because I semi-accidentally hit 'share' rather than 'don't share' with one piece, and that put it out on Facebook. But the main takeaway from all that incredibly hard work (it's a given these days that we all claim to work “incredibly hard", right?) was … how very quickly everything submerges again. Remember Gibraltar? There was talk, a fortnight ago, about going to war with Spain over the Rock. Now, there isn't. [No, please, I don't have to mention the UK general election yet, do I?]
     Nothing goes away – in the real world, Gibraltar's still mentioned in the EU draft; that carrier group is getting ever closer to the Korean Peninsula, or maybe it's arrived; the good doctor is still recuperating – except that it does go away. It's all still happening, nothing has happened to make any of it less (or more) panic-worthy, but the butterfly mind has moved on. There's footage to share on every one of last week's big stories – even helicopters circling round the carrier fleet now (then), filming – but the novelty's gone. We were really, really bothered; now we're ... not.
     Life is a box set. Yes, there's a cliff-hanger at key moments in every episode, where the ad breaks go, but there are also the flat bits that follow. Occasional story-lines do endure beyond a single episode, but the detail gets lost: that vote last year has given us a homogeneous mass of “brexiteers” around whom the assumptions coalesce into a form of truth: they're disaffected manual workers with limited education and strong views on immigration. With the detail goes any sense that there might be more to know.
     To borrow from Andy Warhol, it's as if we've adapted to the news cycle by taking everything seriously for fifteen minutes. Which is not the same as realising that it's really real. Maybe there's a group of scientists out there who could do a study on the panic-centres of the brain: our grand(?)parents responded to the Cuban Missile Crisis with this little grey bit here, and to the bit where Gary Cooper goes out alone in High Noon with this highlighted orange bit here. But we spark up the same pretty pattern whether it's the tree collapsing in Avatar or Trump dropping that bomb (remember?). It's as if there's the real world, in which things happen, and there's the expression of human nature that we mistake for reality.
     Shall we try to explain this by imagining that we're animals adapting to an environment? Look around you. It's not just trees, buildings and building sites, advertising, crowds of strangers and traffic noise, it's 24-hour news, pervasive storytelling, too many inputs. It's everything including the "tone of voice" of the news. Everything is serious and everything has an equal weight. [I know; I'm continuing the theme from last week.] We've tuned ourselves into a mass - panic? hysteria? - into a mass *something genuinely felt, genuinely depressing/alarming but also fleeting; there'll be a word for it soon, probably long and composite and not in English* that feeds on whatever happens to be happening at any given moment. It's as temporary as fight or flight. We're already wired; we're taking another jolt from whatever headline comes next. Not the same as reacting appropriately to a surprising event. It's an adaptation to something pervasive in our environment.
     The cumulative element, the build-up in the collective unconscious, is a function of that erosion of detail. We're left with an accelerated heart rate and a non-specific sense that everything's going wrong; that life's out of kilter; even, perhaps, a sense of grievance - a sense that there's an enemy. If there are “brexiteers” messing up the country; if (in that recurring but odd choice of verb) the EU is going to “punish” us for voting to leave; if Trump's every move is axiomatically bad and the adherents of a certain religious tradition are all terrorist sympathisers; it follows that there are “bad guys” working against us.
     The picture is simplified: where there were shades of grey, there's now black and white.But who are these bad guys? In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti writes: “It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.” That kind of enemy arises from our reaction - from the way we have adapted to the world around us - and is not some kind of a bizarrely omni-competent malign entity who has somehow contrived every news headline of the past month. We don't have enemies because we have enemies; we have them because that's how we see the world.
     We're okay. We're still here. The sky outside the window is overcast, which messes up my punchline, but the tulips are in bloom and the birds are flying. If not today, then some other time, the sun will come up, and my various screens can all be switched off. Chop wood. Carry water.

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Comments
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    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.

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    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    This site is updated weekly, usually on a Friday although I might change that (again). I write it because (1) I like writing it and (2) I like having a deadline. More often than not, it works out as a commentary on the week just passed*.
      There are no ads, no pop-ups and no tricky business with cookies. I don't take money for my own opinions. [Except when they come out in book form.] I write this for myself, without a set agenda, on any subject that catches my attention. If you're interested enough, it's not hard to work out my interests. Not impossible, anyway.
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    There's a page for this, 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.


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    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.

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    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.)

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    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.

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    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.


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    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.

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    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.

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