#123 Psalms for the Signing of an Executive Order on Immigration

January 29, 2017

(1)

Let us pray on his behalf, O Lord, since he does not know the extent of his weakness.

His is the Power. With the stroke of a pen. But the President’s signatures are as overstated as his blow-dried yellow hair.

With twirly curls and BIG LETTERS, the President writes upon the world the way a child places himself in it (The White House….The Earth, The Solar System, The Universe).

All the while pouting, droopy-eyed, for the cameras, as young women pucker up and glare down for endless selfies.

He knows (or shows) it not, O Lord, but this is Old America weakened by 60 petulant years of never having to grow up.

(2)

If given to prayer, I would……

For the Iraqi interpreter who was allowed in eventually. Having clasped the many hands of Uncle Sam’s finest, then clapped in irons at JFK.

For the medical student and her tight-lipped smile, hardly daring to believe, not risking anything as her father made it through Immigration on a waiver.

For the wizened old Muslim man barred by riot cops from handing out free pizzas to airport protesters (‘pizza pies’, as New Yorkers continue to say, native or not).

For the known unknowns, prevented as of 4.42pm EST Friday 27 January 2017 from showing their face in the American West; and all the unknown unknowns, who now will never even apply.

#122 Donald’s Day Dawning and the Closing of the American Century

January 20, 2017

Piggy eyes but that’s too easy. For starters, try,

The President’s Elvis hair, much like the Chinesey he’s squaring up against,

Length as in Presley’s comeback TV special (1968).

There’s pantomime of Gary Cooper’s bootlace resolve – you wish

Often the Mighty O made of thumb and forefinger: pursing his lips – but not,

Touch of the Midnight Cowboy that Clever Susan would have to Tag as Camp.

Maybe Donald J. is hardly describable this way. Likely it’s not

How his features open out to say, I do declare.

Instead their constitution is the closing of the century

This time refusing America’s Fate Again, of ‘manifest destiny’.

America First, he’s repeating, meaning

At last America is just…America; nothing more.

#118 The President-Elect And A Divided America

November 13, 2016

Baby, bawling. Head half-hidden by the hood of an old-fashioned perambulator. Hard to tell whether that’s a bonnet on its head, or a helmet of flaxen hair.

Closing the door of the sweetshop behind him, the boisterous child is suddenly cowed – all but bowled over. So much to choose from, so many decisions to make, so high the shelves; and how on earth do I climb up there? Turning around for advice, the ‘child’ reveals himself as a wizened old man.

And on Main Street, coast-to-coast protests after the presidential election result was declared….

Unlike Hillary’s, Trump supporters wouldn’t know how to make individually hand-written placards which nonetheless retain enough regularity to remain respectable.

Trump supporters might not know how to write lines as good as this: respect my existence or expect my resistance.

Trump supporters don’t seem to have such a highly developed sense of entitlement. If voting patterns had been reversed so that their candidate won the popular vote but not the electoral college, would they be out on the streets insisting that Clinton cannot enter the White House because she is ‘Not My President’?

Plump Trump supporters don’t know how to be Divine; they are merely fat.

Flashback to before the election….

Many who said they would be voting for Trump, also said they did not think he was fit to be president. In one poll (for what it’s worth), two-thirds of sort-of Trump supporters went on to contradict themselves in this way.

To paraphrase: rather the Monkey Man than being made a monkey of; again. Not bad from the Middle America that doesn’t know how to do irony; allegedly.

No doubt there were other factors involved, some of them unsavoury. But there is already enough here to suggest it is their consciousness that needs addressing, rather than dumb-ass stupidity. read more

#116 Ping Goes Presidential Poll

November 5, 2016

Besides the unexplained ‘ping’ or ‘hum’ coming up from the seabed off Canada’s Baffin Island, as voters go to the polls to elect the forty-fifth president of the United States, the American political class has been forced to listen to an unprecedented pinging noise given off by its disgruntled electorate.

Strange noise trumps known facts; ‘post-factual’ Trump, strangely effective presidential candidate.

The inexplicable noise issuing from underneath the Fury and Hecla Strait between Baffin Island and the Canadian mainland; the sound and fury rumbling up from scorned American voters, understandably heckling all who’ve sailed so long amid the self-serving currents of mainstream politics.

Scaring away the wildlife; spooking the Washington highlife.

Not that the baffling sound of Baffin Island Sound needs a conspiracy theory to explain it. We just haven’t worked it out yet. Not that voters haven’t worked out Donald Trump yet. Just that many of them want this on record: we the people find the American elite more unaccountable than he is.

#112 Hurricane Donald

October 15, 2016

‘Down below, pull the handle.’
Sounds like tomcat Trump’s instructions to his latest puss.
But, no – it’s TV host Billy Bush having to show The Donald how to get off the tour bus.
Easy to laugh when man makes mockery of Man.
But how did that part of us he represents,
Wherefore we doth protest so much, ever get into this parlous state?

Is it that storm force winds have whittled us down to who we really are,
And all that Maketh Man is merely Mannerism? If not,
Then what turned Youth into this cartoon? Pop-eyed and bulging,
Beaverish with a Roy Orbison comb-over, every woman his Mighty O.

Even the apology ’s another mockery in the making.

They’re building a water city: criss-cross canals and houses light as boats.
No, this is one of those towns in Haiti with names like French perfume,
Smelted down by hurricane winds and tides.
Timbers no tougher than the lattice on a loaf of bread,
Ramshackle houses that were bound together somehow,
Now raw and open like patients etherised on operating tables…..

Or America exposed, Hope abandoned, talking pussy and showing all she’s got.

#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

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