#79 This Be the Panama Papers

April 18, 2016

This Be the Panama Papers

by Henderson Downing

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the cash they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By lawyers hiding coins and notes,
Who hid their shares and all they earn,
enough to buy you extra votes.

Man hands on property to man.
Amnesia deepens like offshore wealth.
Salvage your reputation if you can,
And publish your tax returns yourself.

(With apologies to Philip Larkin.)

#78 Kim Versus Cameron In The Ring Of Truth

April 12, 2016

‘Admit anything you safely can…deny everything else…and you’re all right.’

(1) Trippingly off the forked tongue of Harold Adrian Russell Philby, also known as Kim, thereby concluding his address to the assembled bureaucrats of the Stasi, also known as the East German secret police.

Philby, formerly a high ranking officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Converted to the Communist cause in the 1930s (greatly Depressed decade of disillusion with capitalism), for decades he routinely passed on top secret information to Moscow contacts.

He lived a further quarter century on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where he was accorded privileges pertaining to a KGB officer but also regarded with suspicion. Some of Kim’s ‘comrades’ saw him as a turncoat who had never fully turned.

Beginning his speech with a True Brit bit of self-deprecation (no public speaker am I; my whole life spent avoiding publicity), Philby’s speaking voice is the baritone of Britain’s ruling class (pater governed millions as district commissioner in India, before ‘going native’ and turning to Islam). Frequently fruity with occasional Noel Coward cadences – syllables rising like soufflés above their stationary function.

But for all the variations, gradations between sonorous and sylph-like, Philby’s delivery remained consistently theatrical, deliberately demonstrative – until the final four words:
‘And you’re all right’.

These words are lighter, less commanding. Not propelled as in previous pronouncements but drifting like smoke in the direction of Philby himself. As if in that moment he is talking mainly to himself, reassuring himself or trying to that decades of double cross could not have been all wrong.

But jaw muscles tightening, fidgety fingers more mouth-hiding than chin-stroking; such involuntary gestures mirror his private uncertainty. read more

#77 The Ones That Got Away

March 25, 2016

(1) Salah Abdeslam, captured in Brussels four months after terrorists killed 130 people in Paris.

Pizza en famille for the Belgian-born French national of Moroccan descent.

Italy-Belgium-France-Morocco: already enough national toppings for a Multicultural Mega-Feast. But instead of Buy One Get One Free from Boy On Moped with cool box for pillion, it was the Brussels robocops who rang for Salah Abdeslam, pinned him down and delivered him into custody.

Nearly as many days on the run as the number of people killed in the shooting-and-bombing in Paris on Friday the Thirteenth (November 2015).

Salah of the somewhat salacious mouth – small but full. Intelligent eyes, don’t you agree? Looking at that photo – if not issued by Europol, we’d most likely say ‘metrosexual’ and move on.

So was it sexy, trafficking a carload of suicide bombers before divesting yourself?

DNA of your sweat matching moisture in the bomber’s vest subsequently found abandoned. How did that happen? Instead of going forward with the backpack, did you back/drop out at the last minute, shrivelled and incapable, wracked by failure to fulfil your god-given destiny?

Or maybe-just-maybe you were humane enough to be horrified at the death and destruction already wrought upon others?

Secretly, you might have planned it that way all along: double agent known only to himself; loyal only to your own narcissism; keen to betray as many people as possible.

Every which way, surely some sort of Gethsemane around midnight in Paris; through the wee small hours a Jacques Brel of a night of soul-searching, while you tramped the streets of the eighteenth arrondissement, waiting for a car to pick you up at 7am in Boulevard Barbes, and on to Belgium.

And is it true you didn’t tell your friends at first, then threatened to blow up their car when they demurred at driving you to Brussels? read more

#76 Into the Valley of Spin

March 23, 2016

Cannon to the left of him. You don’t care about the disadvantaged. You were part of the Tory cuts.

Cannon to the right of him. You don’t care about the disadvantaged. This is a plot against the prime minister and the chancellor and really about Europe.

Cannon to the front of him. We don’t appreciate your holier than thou tone. We want your reputation, your name.

Into the valley of spin rode the 1 – the other 599 nowhere to be seen.

Moving straight ahead, trotting. Calmly: this is about social reform. I have no personal agenda. I haven’t spoken about Europe for ten years. And again, and again. Same message. Keep on going.

And then just before ten, interview finishing. The charge of sorts really begins. Fear, knowing the end is near, pushing him out of his normal timbre, his comfort zone. You cannot have my name it is all I have. Voice quickened, intense. Not found so much in the transcript but in the voice.

The rhythm of a flat out gallop.

Care

“I care for one thing and one thing only.”

“It is that the people that don’t get the choices that my children get are left behind.”

“I do not want them left behind.”

“I want them given that opportunity, and everything I’ve tried to do has been about that.”

Passion

“What I am passionate about is getting that reform done so society is reformed,”

“so that we have more of those people who’ve been left behind brought back into the sphere and the arena where we play daily but they do not.”

“That is my frustration.”

Pain

“It’s not easy. It’s painful to resign.”

“I don’t want to resign, but I’m resigning because I think it’s the only way I can do this”

Gallop stopped by Marr, cutting in, asking another question but also telling him he’s there, stopping him running on, taking a wrong step and falling flat on his face. read more

#75 Letter To America: Wrestling With Trump

March 13, 2016

From Shoreditch to Sevenoaks, from cool young things in edgy East London all the way home to their suburban mums and dads in cosy Kent, British citizens are horrified at the prospect of Trump for President.

Not that they are unduly exercised by the plight of the American people. Through their horrified expressions they are sending themselves a re-assuring message; signalling that their own life world is wholesome enough not to admit Donald Trump – neither to Shoreditch House nor to the golf club.

‘Only in America,’ they say. But ‘America’ here means that country of excess which is populated by excessive numbers of working class people. In this context, the familiar bits of business to do with Anglo-American misunderstanding, e.g. the one about two cultures divided by a common language, is really more to do with traditional middle class disdain for the working class, especially when the latter is apprehended in the vicinity of the polling booth.

Thus the spectre of Trump now haunting Britain’s middle classes, is drawn from their recurring fear of the masses, currently personified in the Middle American masses who seem to have fallen in love with him.

Accordingly, in the case of Trumphobia versus Trumphilia both sides are largely mythological and partly pathological.

But to those well-versed in the ‘morbid symptoms’ of capitalist society, this is a familiar pattern – as old as Antonio Gramsci’s original use of the term, not far from a century ago.

Moreover, repetition of the familiar tends to provoke a correspondingly familiar response, such as: where there is bourgeois myth, let there be left-wing demystification. But at a time and in a place where the value of ‘fictitious’, i.e. mythical, capital, is higher than that of the ‘real’ economy, setting the matter straight by means of an age-old reality check, is likely to prove…unrealistic. read more

#74 Zaman’s A Man For All That

March 12, 2016

BBC News 5 March 2016: ‘Turkey’s biggest newspaper, Zaman, has condemned its takeover by the authorities in a defiant last edition published just before police raided it.’

Cocaine? Line of white…helmets snaking across the foyer of the publishing house, copying by chance the curved balcony of the floor above, thronged with journalists, modernists.

Only for a nano-sec, sickened journos look down on the white line of primitives looming up at them.

Under attack from the state – these innocent men, embarrassed by naked power.
Younger than the old West, men in suits, no ties, bound to ideals; dressed to go argue, drink coffee with John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre.

How quaint is their personification of progress.

Outside: shaft of watery light canons into crowd of protesters.
Splits the people like an axe.

Retreat: clustering like cattle, women in frumpy coats and floral silk headscarves; bovine and Bette Davis, both.

Runaways listing like penitents burdened with sin. Under the eyes soft skin itching until teardrops explode.
Please accept my apologies for such an undisciplined description – it’s the teargas talking.

Doffs his gasmask, offs his helmet, riot police leans in like a courtier to the stricken lady looking up at him.

Pain in her face in place of petticoats and pleasantries.

Zaman‘s a man for all that.

https://soundcloud.com/risingeastpodcasts/zaman-notw

#73 Warehousing

February 26, 2016

(1) Permanent Warehouse of Souls

On 25 February Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras spoke out against ‘the transformation of our country into a permanent warehouse of souls’. In the wider context of vastly increased migration into Greece from the East, Tsipras’ comment was directed specifically at European heads of state continuing to ‘act at summits as if there is nothing wrong’ while tightening border controls along routes into northern Europe – effectively demobilising migrants and turning Greece into the European Union’s storage bin for refugees.

Upend the marathon road north from Athens to Macedonia.
Raise it and plane it to the perpendicular.
Now it’s one long tall shelving unit of previously scattered souls,
Scanned and ready for despatch; if only we knew where to send them.

Heads in a noose because really what’s the use; or perhaps half-grown men, migrants from Pakistan, half-hanging themselves in order to gain our full attention.
Near-suicide – noted.

Note the consistently quiet desperation of migrants crowded into Athens’ Victoria Square. Whispers and murmurs building occasionally to bouts of ululation, before subsiding again.

Looking down at those uninvited beach boys,
Who paid good money to have themselves washed up on Mediterranean sand,
Some hard-pressed Greeks can only hear this sound wave as bar-bar-barbarism.
And who can blame them?

(2) Life and Soul of the Warehouse

‘Wandering around for 10 hours scanning and stowing items really does eat away at your soul.’ This former warehouse worker at Amazon’s Dunfermline depot reports ‘long hours with depression guaranteed.’

Surely preferable to the threat of deportation, as above; although another Amazon ex-employee declares she would ‘prefer to starve rather than go back there again’. read more

#72 Man’s Incredulity To Man

February 15, 2016

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than Man. Look at him crossing the cruel sea, riding the very waves that used to engulf him. Six hundred metres down, behold countless acres of natural gas beneath the sea floor, now measured and piped ashore thanks to his wind-swift thinking and unmatched dexterity. Man’s boundless energy…creates more energy.

So burn, baby, burn. And light up the whole town.

#71 Anthem For A Boy Soldier

February 7, 2016

Did he die like a lamb? Six months ago, having fought ‘like a miracle’ when his home town in Afghanistan was besieged by the Taliban – so says his uncle the pro-government militiaman, boy soldier Wasil Ahmad was feted, garlanded, photographed carrying a taped-up, hand-me-down AK47, and widely shared.

Does this mean Wasil was also fated, set up, all but sacrificed to the Taliban? Who came like priests only completing the ritual when they duly shot and slaughtered the wee boy walking unwillingly to primary school in Tirin Kot, capital of the southern province of Oruzgan.

But reports of Wasil Ahmad’s death may have grossly exaggerated the distance between his chronological age – 10 – and the paramilitary shoe-size he’d already stepped into.

Despite comments to the contrary in Western media, the police uniform which the boy soldier appears in, was not too big for him. In those photographs, widely shared, his head is not too small for the matching helmet. Eyes, nose and the set of his mouth are in proportion – well-balanced – with the rifle sitting comfortably on his arm.

In August’s local hero pictures and again in what appears to be a photo of his body shortly before burial last week, this boy’s countenance seems equally untroubled.

Strange to say but perhaps there’s less to be frightened of at 10 years old and under – before Consequences kick in and we are drummed with uncertainty and impermanence.

What simple innocence (we think) we hear in ‘Once In Royal David’s City’ – twilight on Christmas Eve and all things safe and sound in the voice of a King’s College chorister. But what if boyishly unadulterated is also supremely implacable; not only guileless but remorseless, too?

As death itself; meanwhile so pleasing to behold you cannot help but liken the boy to your own son to have and to hold. read more

#70 Love In The Time Of Zika

January 31, 2016

[dropcap]In[/dropcap] Catholic Brazil, rather than Ave Maria, a new lyric:
O Microcephaly, What are you doing to me,
Now you’ve come in to my family?

Boy looks at baby, protectively; guardedly.
Infant body shapes the arms enfolding it – the way they do.
And how do they do that – giving purpose to those long gone without?

In the elder brother’s nostrils – how handsome is the olive boy, how flawless,
Both the smell of newborn and the fumes of his own fear.

From a certain angle he could tell himself it’s just that the child’s cheeks are puffed out.
Swaddled in protective gear, the mutants are the fumigators, spraying the whole town!

But you have to crane your neck to get that; Really this is shrunken baby brain and cranium to match.

Kid Brother’s no Dizzy Gillespie; instead a casualty, likely of the Zika virus, which sounds like rum punch, a type of music or maybe the marque of a car, which it is – Tata Motors’ new hatchback launching in February, if you only change the ‘k’ to a ‘c’; thought to be key in the surge to 3893 cases of microcephaly reported in Brazil since October 2015.

Certainly a lifelong burden and maybe a kind of calling for this poor family.

Unwanted but not left unanswered.

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