#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.

#102 Memo To An American Police Officer

August 27, 2016

Was there a moment of shock when it came to you?

A sharp intake, the rasping breath of realisation?

Or simply relief at surviving your rookie shifts,

Then boredom and danger cocktailed into queasy routine.

So you wanted to be a police officer.

Protect and serve; defend and provide for.

If it’s not changing the world, you said to yourself,

At least I’ll be putting the bad guys away.

Instead all you Blues were recruited to the war on drugs.

In designated neighbourhoods your new assignment is to enter

As many perps as possible into the judicial process, if only

For possession, leaving little time for traditional policing priorities

Such as catching killers. In these districts nine out of 10 killings

Now remain untried and unpunished, unless you count

The unlawful acts of recrimination which have all but replaced

The intervention of the state in the expectations of local people.

Of the three guys on the corner, you’re the only one

That ain’t got his own. Dealer knows his job. Users, too,

Have a particular role to play. But you’re the little lost boy

Whose dotted line went off in unexpected directions.

Within your ranks there’s a hard core who might have done it

Anyway, at any time. But the not knowing who you are,

Not exactly sure what or who you’re there for

Must have been a factor in some of your folks not knowing

How to react, therefore emptying the magazine as if that means

Rubbing out a few pages instead of tearing into the flesh and bone

Of a fellow human being. Who knows whether all those ID checks would have

Gone so badly wrong if the policeman’s lot had not been re-cast without telling him?

#91 Letter To America: Why The World Looks At You Apathetically

July 14, 2016

There’s this guy coming round one side of the pillar and there’s another guy coming round the other side. The other guy can see the first guy but the first guy doesn’t know the other guy is there. Just when you think they’re doing a Keystone Cops routine, cue plinky-plonk piano accompaniment – there’ll be collisions and custard pies any second now, the splat, splat, splat you hear is the sound of the second guy shooting the first one repeatedly, killing him calmly and deliberately; as if this is a state execution rather than a lone ranger raging against whites and white police officers particularly.

How to read your movements, America? The lightning fast transfer from tawdry to tragic – how do you do that? And back again the other way: from killer-cop/cop-killer pathos to the bathos of men in vests who were never the target, talking too much about how they survived the shooting.

Over the years and down the decades, you’ve made the switch, done the commute so often you don’t seem to notice the distance. Awesome, for example, made banal by you bringing it to the mall. Pathetic, originally inviting sadness and pity but latterly meaning paltry and inadequate. Both pathos and bathos, in other words, now joined together in that bastard adjective of yours.

Never mind if their meanings started out drastically different; it’s not the American Way to keep two words open for business when you can size it down to one. Instead you stick to what Henry Ford would have done.

But his kind of compression can cause compassion fatigue elsewhere. America, the world outside….oh yes, there is….that doesn’t know what to make of you, would hardly know how to care for you even if it wanted to; even if some of your cities were on the point of catching fire. read more

#55 Letter To America

June 28, 2015

There was a white lady of Spokane

Who presented as African woman

The hurt she pretended

As if she had mended

Herself, herself, herself, herself, herself……
Self-proclaimed and self-obsessed, so where did the open-faced girl go – the middle class white kid with room to choose?

Gone away when the ugly world closed her down, perhaps. Or when Rachel Dolezal chose to resign and re-assign herself, signing up to the victimhood newly associated with the confines of the ‘hood, and blacking up to ensure no backing out.

But look at her eyes, mouth, lower jaw – it’s there in the rest of her face as much as thefrizzed up hair and sunbed skin.

All her features – both white and ‘black’ – jointly comprise the face of that general fatalism which now underlies even the most voracious appetite for particular advancement.

Whether for personal gain or the ‘advancement of colored people’, underneath theshrills of advocacy lies a recurring note of resignation.

The fatalist frame of mind is now as widespread as its euphemism, ‘resilience’. General fatalism was the officer in charge of Barack Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney,the pastor gunned down in a Charleston church along with eight members of his congregation. It is the bass line underpinning the President’s second term as well as his rueful rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’.

Though they are not be identified as one and the same, the closure characterising this mindset is kith and kin to the dehumanising condition formerly known as oppression.

Sure, she was fakin’ the black thing. But Dolezal was truer than she knew to the stateof the nation; and closer to the rest of us than we choose to understand.

#51 Resurrection Man

April 4, 2015

‘Sun do shine’, is how one source had it – though the reporter may have been hamming him up to appear suitably folksy. ‘The sun does shine’, is how others presented it – though they may have imposed grammatical correctness in order to achieve political correctness, i.e. to avoid accusations of having made him appear unduly folksy.

Either way, the speaker was Anthony Ray Hinton (59), who came back to life after 30 years on death row for a double murder he didn’t do.

(Two fast food restaurant managers shot and killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985.)

On 3 April 2015, making his way through the media crowd, a dignified black man in a dark suit. We hear the ululations of his mother or sister as she falls on his neck.

But we don’t know which she is. Is she too folksy to figure in the official account? And was it one of those prisons where visitors and inmates mustn’t touch, making this their first embrace for 30 years? No one has found the time to find out.

Having rolled away the stone, releasing Anthony Hinton from three whole decades buried in a five by eight foot sepulchre provided by the state of Alabama, the public gaze has already moved elsewhere.

Leaving Hinton alone to get on with what’s left of his life, perhaps.

Either that, or sending him down again to the place where people are discounted; to thepurgatory which put him in the frame in the first place.

#46 In Brief

February 8, 2015

Glissando More accurately, glissssaaaaando. The sound of Prince Charles sliding and gliding around his words as he has been obliged to step around the everlasting presence of his mother, our Queen. Bending, benighted, bewildered.

Good Life U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, on the podium at the Munich ‘peace conference’, pink-cheeked and aglow with the good life. Never has losing looked so healthy – losing ground to Russia’s Putin, giving ground to France and Germany, gaining ground in health and wellbeing. (Perhaps not the best-ever trade off.)

Good to talk Not caged before burning like the Jordanian pilot murdered by IS, condemned prisoners of Britain’s forgotten religious wars were staked to the ground and consumed by fire (Thomas Cranmer), or drowned in a rising tide of seawater (Wigtown Martyrs). Between two sets of victims, Tudor and Stuart, Shakespeare found a form of words for opposing interests: his Globe, London’s first public sphere. Even now we can hear his joy in staging conflicts in blank verse instead of grisly executions; also his recurring fear of the world struck dumb again, condemned to death screams instead of humanising dialogue.

#40 The President Un-Masked

November 18, 2014

On the top floor of the White House, a darkened room and a hidden painting – ThePicture of President Dorian.

How else to explain the Gray hair and his head otherwise unchanged?

Still smooth as caramel, iced coffee cool; and blue black lips plump as berries.

Those lines a little deeper only sculpt his features more. The something in the way he moves, remains unmoved; years in high office have left no tangible impression.

Yet the stock question – what lies behind the mask? – is not the one to ask.

Whichever way we do things now, it’s not true to the old pattern.

Myth versus reality, realpolitik opposed to airbrushed image – how Quark theexpression, how quaint.

Not even a conspiracy, Obama was ever the icon. As a mascot he will always remain unblemished; there never was another man behind the mask.

#7 History Repeating; Hero In The Hood

April 4, 2014

Second time around, it’s farce. At Fort Hood, a US Army shooter shoots at his own side in a four-minute tantrum. Before turning the gun on himself, Specialist Ivan Lopez chalks up a ludicrously low number of casualties – three dead and 16 wounded; 10 fewer fatalities than the first time this Texas army base became a shoot-to-kill firing range, back in 2009.

As George Bush Jnr is to artist, so the second shooter is to psycho-killer (from photos, only his nose looks like Robert de Niro’s in Taxi Driver – nothing else). If not for previous form – (a) former president with a reputation for poor taste and matching intelligence, i.e. the dumb dauber; (b) the military base already blighted by human tragedy, i.e. uncanny echo – neither one would fit across the Front Page.

Forget farcical: the Fort Hood sequel should be up there, anyway. Not for the tawdry shooting spree, possibly sparked by a dispute about leave days and work rotas among Uncle Sam’s truck drivers; but for the truly headline heroism of Sergeant First Class Danny Ferguson. According to local sources, Ferguson held shut the door which keptthe shooter away from a roomful of innocent occupants – and got himself shot up instead.

He even looked like Tom Hanks, for chrissake.For all we know, Ferguson might have frowned upon ‘chrissake’ for taking the name ofthe Lord in vain; or he may have been a blaspheming sonofabitch. Either way, his courageous action – he chose to go From Here To Eternity – demands hero worship from the rest of us.

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