........................................................................................ - a weBlog by Snowy and me.

Thursday 28 March 2024

Pity Poor Portland, Oregon

It was the first state in the USA
to experiment with reducing racism
by legalising all drugs, in Measure 110
passed in 2020, since the drug laws
were the commonest cause
by which black and brown people
were disproportionately convicted of crime.

There were several reasons why,
for all the wealth and good intent
the project failed; taxing cannabis
raised a lot of revenue that the state
was slow to redistribute in rehab centres
and the genuine medicalisation
of the problem of addiction,
whether physical or psychological.

Then Covid turned society inside out
and upside down by limiting when,
and how, citizens could safely meet
and greet each on the streets.

Isolation amid addiction
increased addiction further,
listen to all the explanations
on BBC World Service here

But what finally did for the project
was lawlessness from beyond the border,
namely from the Mexican drug cartels
flooding the USA first, then the world,
with cheap and concentrated Fentanyl
in quantities enough to destroy all civic reasoning. 

Given how the raw ingredients for fentanyl
come from China I am surprised how little
anyone has mentioned 'the opium wars'.

But then in America, televised democracy
is now the legal opiate of the people, set up
as the longest running soap opera of all.... 

Wednesday 27 March 2024

The Humour Of Queueing

When the British want to humour themselves
about how easily their sense of time gets misused
they say 'I like a good queue, whatever it's for,
the wait makes me feel like I am part of a community.'.

And in one sense that is right thing thing to say,
both communities and queues are made of time,
the hours spent queueing and the numbers of humans
involved are how we explain these things to ourselves.

But the difference between a community and a queue
is that a community has cohesive values beyond the time
spent making said values. And points of view affect changes
in society, where change equates with personal renewal.

Whereas a queue is over for us when we get to the front
and buy what we came to buy/do what we came to do.

In modern corporate Britain there is a clear pride
in not answering the telephone on enquiry lines too soon,
thus making people queue in the comfort of their homes, 
whilst repeating the message to use the web page instead.

My answer to this is to wait for the live human being,
and on the pad I have for recording useful formation,
I count the number of repetitions of the same message
and piece of Mozart and make farm gates, four vertical lines
with a cross bar as I make a mark with every repetition...

It is the patient way of passing the time of day, whilst queueing....      

Tuesday 26 March 2024

Quotidian Thinking

My family rarely said anything original,
that was both insightful and good, 
to prepare my sister and I for adult life.
But maybe they unknowingly excelled
to prepare me early for the jaded life
of a retiree when, as we talked about
how serious problems were solved
by agreement more than disagreement,
we used to say 'Great minds think alike.'
to which Mother always replied
'And mediocre minds seldom differ.'.

Her glass-half-empty thinking,
drained even of the energy of cynicism,
was how she normalised the loss of hope.

I wanted to be an optimist.
Now I am older than four of the five
British Prime Ministers 
since 2010.
Like my mother I find that they have
had far too few ideas between them
for them to be seen as even mediocre.

   

Monday 25 March 2024

The Nuts And Bolts Of Democracy

The international USA based news
is full of 'Trump did this/did not do that'
type commentaries and stories, as befits 
the news cycles where the media so readily
adopts the tone of a soap opera.

How else are they to report a self-made
 'bad boy' billionaire with such a flare
for self promotion? I don't blame them,
though I tire of them reporting Trump
when he announces 'something big',
that becomes yet another damp squib,
to be filed and forgotten, along
with all his previous bankruptcies.

What I find myself less ready to forgive
is how much, whilst they help set up
future damp squibs, the US media ignores
so many of the other, smaller, stories
where democracy has resulted in
a win-win situations, and further ignore
the numbers for November 5th 2024.

435 House of Representatives seats are up for grabs,
as are 34 out of 100 Senate seats, 
maybe 30 mayors
11 state governorships,
 10 attorney generals,
10 state treasurers, 7 secretaries of state 
and hundreds of seats for the 52 state legislatures.

Last but not least, some states elect their judges.

In 2020 an estimated 599 seats were fought over,
and decided, and 24 states held plebiscites
on issues that included decriminalising cannabis for personal use.
 

Whatever the number of seats up for grabs,
and different plebiscites, this time looks like the last, 
the maintenance for the future is what matters. 

Sunday 24 March 2024

Strategic Vagueness

is the modus operandi of modern management
when they need to be seen to be doing something
whilst making sure that they keep the credit
for what they have made somebody else do.

Never is this made more clear than in laws
passed by parliaments that ban this and that
and set severe penalties for the ownership
of what is banned, but then they don't allow
a budget for the policing or inspections
of what they have banned, and still
spokesmen state 'job done', until they
unapologetically admit in interviews
'Oops, we still have more to do.'.

And everyone who hears this
is too jaded and tired
to even raise their eyebrows.

     

Saturday 23 March 2024

Through The Snow-Varlam Shalamov

How is a road beaten down through the virgin snow? One person walks ahead, swearing, sweating, and barely moving his feet. He keeps getting stuck in the loose, deep snow. He goes far ahead, marking his path with uneven black pits. When he tires he lies down in the snow, lights a home made cigarette, and the tobacco smoke hangs suspended above the white gleaming snow like a blue cloud. The man moves on but the cloud remains hovering above the spot where he rested, for the air in motionless. roads are always beaten down on days like these - so that the wind won't sweep away this labour of man. The man himself selects points in the snow's infinity to orient himself - a cliff, a tall tree. He steers his body through the snow in the same fashion that a helmsman steers a riverboat from one cape to another.

Five or six persons follow shoulder-to-shoulder along the narrow, wavering track of the first man. They walk beside his path but not along it. When they reach a predetermined spot, they turn back and tramp down the clean virgin snow which has not yet felt the foot of man. The road is tramped down. It can be used by people, sleighs, tractors. If they were to walk directly behind the first man, the second group would make a clearly defined but barely passable narrow path, and not a road. The first man has the hardest task and when he is exhausted, another man from the group of five takes his place. Each of them - even the smallest and weakest - must beat down a section of virgin snow, and not simply follow in another's footsteps. Later will come tractors and horses driven by readers, instead of authors and poets.     

'Through The Snow'-a short story by Varlam Shalamov from his book 'Kolyma Tales'

Friday 22 March 2024

If Heaven Were A Library

The day of judgement that I would like
would be one where God and his angels
are the great librarians of eternity
who could list for me every book
I ever read, and when I read them.

Even now, I regret how much
I have forgotten about what I have read
from when I started, onward.

For sure, there would be a fair number
of books I would rather forget, and regret
for having wasted my time consuming them.

But for all the junk there are going to be
more treasures that recount the sense
of when grace undercut the pressure
that human life was put under,
not least all the prison literature.

From the hyper clarity of 'Pilgrim's Progress'
to the boredom with himself of M. de Sade
to the writings-on-the-run of St Paul,
to the memoirs of Casanova and secret scribbles
of Soviet poet and writer Irene Ratushinskaya, 
prisons have inspired women and men 
to take up their pen and become authors.

If my eternity is to be a place I cannot leave
then wisdom wrought from similar places,
albeit of more suffering should sustain me.