Exceptionalism

Subject: Exceptionalism

Exceptionalism, that belief that has so tainted mankind is still alive and well.
In the case of Jerusalem the Jews a chosen people, the city a chosen city and the land Palestine a chosen land all based on the belief in each being exceptional, more than just special but chosen by God as the founding place for the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and the Muslim faith and is destined to be the final place on Earth when god returns to issue his final condemnation of mankind's evil with the Apocalypse.
A melting pot of ideological connivance, the source of so much disharmony and hatred it is amazing that the players in this mystical bonanza are all meant to flourish from the same God as revealed to Abraham.
The complexity of the historic story of a town situated in a dry Spartan landscape burnt by the sun, not astride an ancient trading route nothing to suggest it had any of the brilliance of Athens, Rome, Constantinople and yet Jerusalem was the crucible of the major exportable religions. The impact of its religions has been both traumatic as well as  a yardstick for something which the secular world still grapples with. The faith of millions of people are tied up in the story of this city, and its political contrivance to plead, not only its exceptionalism but to export its message to the four corners of the world.
With the exception of China, a closed region for many millennia and the strong hold that Hinduism has in India, the monotheistic concept of one god was unique in Abraham as was his instruction to live in the "Promised Land" Canaan, the land of Israel.
And so bequeathed, this Spartan land with its equally Spartan city, Jerusalem was to grow and became the focus for that other alternative premise. That not only did we prosper from Darwinian development but were also blessed with a patriarch who would care and look after us, even after death.
Given the prospect of a good life with a good outcome we seem to have pretty much reneged on the deal and especially insofar as the very religions which were primed to spread the word but have been at each other's throats ever since.
If ever there was a focus of man's inhumanity to his fellow man it has to be the continuing rampage across this barren land which continues to this day. The Israeli contempt for the Palestinian, his cousins in terms of his geographical history but clearly despised as the events showed last week in the cold blooded murder by the Israel soldier of a Palestinian laying on the floor incapacitated with a bullet and yet deemed by the soldier to be worthless. The instant protection of a pardon by the Israeli Prime Minister showed the depth of the contempt and how far this nation, promised so much has fallen even one supposes in the eyes of God.

The truth sits elsewhere

Subject: Truth sits elsewhere.

What sort of mental process goes through the brain of a politician who willingly presents them self in front of the television camera to either lie or obfuscate in response to a straight foreword question. For most of us lying, avoiding the truth is difficult, we show all kinds of discomfort as we lie since we know from childhood that to tell a lie is deceitful, dishonest, underhand, scheming, conniving, none of which we would like to be known for and yet the politician not only relishes the tag but makes it their main professional armament.

They sit and tell lies without a twitch and stony faced. When presented with the truth they are quite prepared to keep on telling the lie without any shame, it's as if their job has turned them into something else, less human less courageous, a lesser person in the chain of humanity and the goals we are all supposed to live by.

The business of politics seems to be the business of persuasion no matter what and I suppose I shouldn't deny them a place alongside the secondhand car sales man or the person selling windows, they are also taught to lie to make the sale but somehow we expect more from the politician and it's a barefaced secondhand car salesman who would continue to say there was nothing wrong with the car if it belches smoke or sounds like a grinding machine. And yet the politician does that day in and day out he carries the deceit to new heights, he is unabashed at facts which show his last comment spurious he ploughs on with the line the party is pushing at this moment as if he has received a tablet from god. The face belies little of the torment, since if he or she are human they must wish at times to throw up their arms and say "yes I am wrong", but when if ever have you heard them say that ?

Is it any wonder the political class are held in such low esteem. Is it any wonder that we despair when we hear them mangling fact which effect us materially, knowing as we do that there is nothing we can do to change this farce which is portrayed on our screens daily. A farce is meant to be humorous it is couched in such a way that the language and the characters are distorted and we know it is a farce. But the political farce is for serious, its actors take themselves very seriously indeed. They lead a nation into war, they make decisions which effect us all. They are given the pomp and circumstance, not to mention the pensions, that ordinary people would cry for. 

The Prime Minister (the liar in chief) is respected and adorned with high office. They are listened too with anticipation, they know the truth, they have to hand the statistics and the power of the Civil Service at their disposal to route out the truth, but what do they do, they stand at the dispatch box and lie and then their acolytes line up to praise them on their perfidy. 

What a sorry state we are in as we weasel our way through the important questions about the state of the nation. "Yes we have just increased the budget on secondary care in the health service but after many years of cutting back the budget Minister but we are woefully short of money to run the service. Yes but I have explained, we have increased spending this year. But Minister that only partially offsets the cuts of the last 5 years. But we have increased it this year". Pause whilst the impasse filters through to us all, he is not in a position to acknowledge the truth since the truth is a matter for the party and sits elsewhere.

The beauty of a smile

Subject: The beauty of a smile.

The beauty is in a smile. The same person grimaces and you immediately know to adjust your own projection (that's what we do) to suit the needs of the occasion. People with a sunny disposition take people with them, who can disagree with a grin, who can overcome a peal of laughter with a serious debating comment, who would want to douse a happy person with your own reality.
The importance of the visual signal is possibly more important than the verbal message. For one we take what people say with a pinch of salt but rarely disbelieve the smile or the laugh  but then that is exactly what an actor does for a living. Of course the actor is in the business of creating a Dopplerganger, they have a storyline to follow and the character they depict is plastered all over the billboards.
The politician on the other hand has storyline which flows from a need to manipulate our minds for the purpose of their being installed into a position of power. No one would suggest that the actor wants to influence for power alone. Other than perhaps Ronald Reagan, the actors mental process is the artistic representation of a fictional character, in fact the more zany the character the higher the kudos for the actor.
But in our ordinary life we judge others on how 'they' act, specifically towards us, and in which the most defining feature is the face.
The face doesn't tell it all but it sets the mood for any discussion we have. The smile softens the whole process of assimilation, it assumes there is a caring interconnection based on the assumption that through the other persons apparent  happiness, we are invited in and not shut out. From then on anything can happen but it will be most likely be a positive interaction.
So today when you meet someone, even someone you are sceptical about, smile and you will be amazed at the result.

A trip to Swansea

Subject: A trip to Swansea.

The wet streets of Swansea reveal once more this city perched on the sweep of a curved bay backing onto hills and valleys, dividing the place up into the posh and the less desirable at the whim of geography.
When you enter the better off parts of London they stretch into the distance, the post codes giving the house prices a mounting preposterous value where a single garage can cost hundreds of thousands to buy.
The landed gentry have always enclosed themselves with walls. The huge houses, sitting amongst cultivated gardens and an artificial lake have that sense of unreality. How can any one family live in and need so much space with an the added sobering reality that the upkeep would send many a person quite mad as Spring approaches and nature try's, once more  to reassert its control. The eternal weeding out of what comes natural and its replacement with the artificial, man's enormous ego at work once again.
Swansea has no clearly identifiable estates or houses which one would call magnificent instead it bleeds the classes into each other as it were a delta blessed with that most natural flank, the sea. That's not of course to say one can see the sea. For large parts of the day its, 'out there' somewhere. There are no Atlantic rollers crashing in to reveal the seas power rather a timid, insipid tidal flow which comes and goes like the repetition of a good clock without cause or to make much of a fuss of.  The town council have, probably with this passivity in mind, flanked the bay with wide path along which the strollers stroll and the cyclists ride their bikes each oblivious of the sea. There are no whales spouting in the bay, no dolphins, no seals, no penguins only the gregarious sea gulls waiting to snap up the discarded chip.
Of course there will be the outraged local who might take umbrage and demand I mention Singleton Park and the gentrified housing close by and, not far away Cwmdonkin Park mentioned by the Welsh bard, Dylan Thomas. But there is nothing to match the Royal parks in London,  the mansions at Audley End near Safron Walden, or Harewood House in Yorkshire (where they do have penguins) or the many other stately pads around the country which were built to house our aristocratic masters.
Swansea is not famous for its town-centre either, no architectural wonders, no centres of excellence, no historic buildings other than fragments of a time when the Welsh were more warlike and castles were built to either keep them in or keep them out.
That's not to say the centre of town doesn't have its quota of lurching semi clad girls and incoherent young men roaming around on a Friday or Saturday night. The bars and the bouncers sit, cheek by jowl down Wind Street, music cascading from open doors onto the street from cavernous buildings which look as if they served a different era and a different purpose and add a certain sobriety to a very un-sober street. A narrow passage at the end of the street called Salubrious Passage, leading to Salubrious Place has a distinctly Dickensian feel to it, and I wouldn't venture down it late at night if only, to avoid stumbling over some drunken body.
There has been an explosion of small cosmopolitan restaurants. From the ubiquitous Chinese to their neighbours the Vietnamese. Japanese sit side by side with Italian and French cuisine and one is spoilt for choice as each business is fully aware of the competition from this less than well-healed town where many seem to be on part-time odd jobbing work and some neighbourhoods have a bad name. To counteract the lack of prosperity the jaunty Welsh character makes a very pleasant change from the, aren't I so sophisticated English. Their welcome seems genuine and friendly, the atmosphere in the pub (other than the city swill) is often laced with music, particularly jazz where the "older" performer still strums his stuff and the night is a deafening, foot tapping limited conversation event and no worse for that.
Of course a mile or two outside the town is the gem of the Welsh countryside. Narrow roads leading to quaint villages and more castles. The sea and the estuaries dominate the route and one is forced to do detours of many miles to get to the other side. The tides come in flooding the fields leaving the sheep stranded but safe as the moon experts its pull and we are reminded of the nature of all things, not withstanding our own bloated self importance.

The importance of our health system

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Subject: The importance of our health system

A dose of nasty tasting medicine works wonders. When I was small the medicine of first recourse, if I complained of feeling ill was a dose of "Fever cure " a Quine based fluid which tasted nasty. You had to be sure that you were ill, there was no avoiding the nasty taste and school wasn't all that bad after all.

And so it is with everyone, make them face the unimaginable, and they are forced to  consider their values and how important these values are or how much you are prepared to forgo something.

The crisis in the NHS has I believe been brought on by the government to test our collective metal. First it was an ongoing cut back on the funding as part of George Osborne's book balancing exercise, then the Jeremy Hunt
confrontation with the junior doctors and now the slanging off of the GP. It's as if the government were prepared to risk a breakdown of the medical system in order to create a privatised system more in tune with modern day capitalism where people are evaluated against the backdrop of a balance sheet. 

The effect of pushing people to the edge creates a current of energy in which people consider their role in the organisation and wishing to save it, combine creatively to find ways to make it better. There are always ways to improve any large organisation, especially one which has no overall CEO, no defined product range other than a wish to provide a service for sick people who are at their most vulnerable. 

The sheer volume of folk who pass through their doors with a range of critical urgency and an ill defined spectrum of outcomes make this a business like no other and therefore to use the tools of the balance sheet seems inappropriate to say the least.

A nation which values other people who are ill is a nation with compassion and given that our capacity to have morality and ethics as part of our make-up we should move heaven and earth to keep alive the Attlee governments awakening, after the trauma of Second World War, that we have to be more inclusive with our people and show them the compassion we expect from our own family. 

The stress on our hospitals and General Practitioners is a fundamental reflection on what we have allowed and contributed to within our society, worshipping the lowest price and therefore the lowest unit cost, loosing sight of the inherent value behind everything.

The political connivance between all parties to move from direct taxation and hide the cost of services in oblique ways, putting the cost on the consumer, knowing full well that this slight of hand removed the onerous weight of being taxed on the income you earned to what you spent, knowing full well that the expenditure of a family with children would absorb pro rata much more than taxing the income prior to the individual receiving it. The idea of increasing "income tax" to cover the cost of the NHS and hypothecate the tax so it can not be spent elsewhere, is the only solution in the long run but perhaps it is right that the system needs to be shocked into a mode of self analysis   otherwise the same old, same old continues and no matter how much is put in, still more will always be needed.

Our health is the most fundamental and important thing we have. We can cope with everything else.

Post code liberalism

Subject: Post code liberalism

Is it time yet to declare liberalism dead. Has the urge to be fair, generous, kind, just and truthful come to an end in a surge of rational practicality and are our own problems far more important than the problems of others.

Donald Trumps capture of the rust belt vote or the Brexit result would seem to suggest that the voters have had enough of giving and now want to be recognised as having needs.

There is no doubt that the political class take whole swathes of their own electorate for granted. The assumption that (as it used to be) cheap fags and beer was enough to keep the masses onside whilst the real work with the poor and disadvantaged in other lands, was the aim of a liberal society. 

Of course the make up of our society has changed immeasurably and many of those disadvantaged foreign people now live here as being British. It's also interesting how many of the people who have escaped their own national poverty are the first to pull up the drawbridge and claim we are full.

The question we must ask is, is Liberalism an intellectual pastime only to be practised by the middle classes who having found "sufficiency" can spin a little largesse in the direction of the unwashed majority in far off lands, knowing that this might act as a salve to their conscience. 

Conversely these same middle class people resent the poor unwashed variety in their own country. They happily demonise them. The politicians who are made up from this middle class 'thought speak' assembly in Whitehall, hack away at the few props in the welfare system which make life passably bearable. They find nothing but contempt for our own brand of poverty  whilst eulogising the under nourished, under educated people who's faces light up our TV screens with painful pleading looks and a call to donate. Donate donate is the mantra but not for our own undernourished, listless disheartened folk who can also claim, as a person living in Lagos, that it's all down to a post code lottery.

How many middle class people understand their advantages flow from their own post code lottery and the positive advantages, nay surety of "the good life" it brought them. Oh no we had to work hard they say. My University "education" was no gimme and the "job" was demanding, it meant I had to make "choice's". The assumption that education, a job and choice are on the table for all, that the feral societies in some of our inner cities are so by choice is one of the greatest lies of the 20th and 21st century. The assumption that people chose to live the way they do in the drop out estates is criminal. People are conditioned by their environment just as much as the middle class are conditioned by books and the school they attend, so are the drug addicts and the unemployed.

So if "Liberalism" is to survive it better switch its gaze closer to home otherwise a Donald Trump will come along and capture the glassy eyed electorate, first to capture power and then to turn us all into Disney characters a hotchpotch of the surreal, the cat and the mouse where only the mouses hole in the wall offers any proper security.

A trip to Blackpool

Subject: A trip to Blackpool.

There was a time when 3% devaluation was seen as a disaster for the credibility of the governance of a country and something to be avoided if not ashamed of. Chancellors of the Exchequer the nations accountant, would do anything to avoid a devaluation and if and when it came they saw it as a personal failure, even a reason to resign.
The secrecy of deliberations surrounding the possibility of devaluing your currency was Machiavellian it was thought that the event signalled a "run" on the currency and further pressure to devalue more. This of course was in times of "fixed exchange rates" when confidence in holding your currency and Stirling was a major world currency, was part of the national psych.
Today we are in very different times. The pound has depreciated by roughly 20% since Brexit was announced a few months ago its a trend which has continued for a number of years now and it has dropped again this morning. The currency is no longer in the hands of the Chancellor but rather a creature bound by the whim of the market. As the market defines our economic health and sustainability the currency is allowed to find its own level. It could be argued that no matter how ugly the Europeans are to us or how damaged we are in not being able to sell into their market the pound will equilibrialise the situation, falling as far as need be and making our exports so cheap, no one can afford not to buy from us. Of course as a counter our imports will go up by the same margin and since we import more than we export these days, something has to give. If it's only strawberries in December then it's no real loss but on more crucial imports like the oil to feed our power stations then the cost to each household will be significant. If our overseas jaunts have to be curtailed it's not the end of the world and a cheap currency makes it attractive for people from overseas to come here and so perhaps we become a theme park, a sort of dynamic Madam Tussaud's.
The reality is that we made a decision 30 years ago to get out of manufacturing and instead play the roulette wheel of international banking. In which not only did we decimate whole regions of the country to the scrap heap we experienced the inevitable banking crash of 2007, virtually bankrupting us. Only the massive printing of currency (quantitive easing) and the near suicidal decision to hand the cash back to the people who had gambled it away in the first place so they could refuel their passion, has meant we are desperately at risk of becoming a larger version of Blackpool.
I liked Blackpool as a kid. It's endless arcades, slot machines, wild rides and sticky rock but, as Corinthians 1 reminds us  "when I was a child I talked like a child thought like a child reasoned like a child. When I became a man I put those childish things behind me".
Today Blackpool is in my eyes, tacky and exploitative, largely out of date, offering a cheap one night thrill, perhaps the simile to our national condition is not so way off the mark after all.