My Gloomy Silence

Go all the way back to the very first entry on this blog and you will find the First Rule of Marchant - WRITERS WRITE.

So why the strange silence OG? Has the world slipped into a dull quietude such that the proto-satirist has nothing to say? Well, hardly. But that's just the point - the world is as shitty as I've ever known it, and remember I lived through the seventies.

Lest we forget: the president of the United States of America is alleged to have had extramarital sex with a porn star at a time when his improbable wife (herself what I believe is styled a glamour model) was suckling their offspring. He denies this allegation but so far as I can tell nobody seriously doubts that it is true. In the sordid pit that has become American politics, the truth matters not a jot. If you shout a lie loud and long enough it suffocates all assembled truths. This I suppose is the fetid culmination of 'spin'. Truth is merely an abstract constructed by the powerful.

I am not a socialist (bet that caught you off-guard) but I am a longstanding admirer of the Labour Party. But now this steaming collective of unapologetic anti-semites suggests that I must take seriously as execrable an excuse for a public intellectual as Diane sodding Abbott. I mean, really? And as for Corbyn - well congratulations world you have found the only man (or woman) who might make Theresa May seem competent. And this matters because whilst the reckless sideshow of the Syrian bombings plays itself out there is the lamentable tale of the Windrush generation and their betrayal by the country whose labour shortages they came to plug. A tale that shames the United Kingdom.

I called Syria a reckless sideshow. You can't fight half a war and win. If Assad is to be stopped from killing his own people then he will have to be stopped by force, applied and constant force. That won't happen, indeed I strongly doubt there would be any American public appetite for it. So what we have is a 'strong' western alliance (That is to say the vile Trump, the over-confident Macron and the cowed May) saying in, effect, that Assad can carry on killing people but not with chemical weapons. So that's good then.

Do you know the first thing I do every time I turn on the old computer? I go to the newsfeeds and hope that Trump will finally have gone too far and been impeached. Come back Nixon, your country needs you.

That is why I stay silent. It saves me getting all depressed/depressing.