Prayer Before Birth by Louis Macneice: a guiding light in a mad world

The world is going insane, the Tory narrative has set like concrete, the far left has lost its marbles along with its principles and judgement.

Never mind the empty left rhetoric, here's my favourite poem that's been a guiding light since my teens.

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis Macneice

Blood money: the new £2 coin celebrates Kitchener and World War 1

The new £2 coin — such an ugly thing in so many ways. This government glorifies something recognised as a catastrophe, an unprecedented horror where millions of men (lions led by donkeys) died at the Front. World War I wasn't the war to end all wars (otherwise it would just be "the World War") but led to World War II where tens of millions more died.

Lord Herbert Kitchener — whose visage graces the new coin — was an Empire administrator, overseeing the crushing of nations for Britain's wealth, and was in charge while the first concentration camps were used against Boer civilians in southern Africa. (Jamie at Blood & Treasure says second, the first being in Cuba.)

From Wiki:

Court martial of Breaker Morant
In the Breaker Morant case several soldiers from Australia were arrested and court-martialled for summarily executing Boer prisoners, and also for the murder of a German missionary believed to be a Boer sympathiser, all allegedly under unwritten orders approved by Kitchener. The celebrated horseman and bush poet Lt. Harry "Breaker" Morant and Lt. Peter Handcock were found guilty, sentenced to death, and shot by firing squad at Pietersburg on 27 February 1902. Their death warrants were personally signed by Kitchener. He reprieved a third soldier, Lt. George Witton, who served 28 months before being released.

Lovely man. Yes, let's have this hero on our cash. Sort of fitting, really.

"Legalised mass murder", said Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier from WWI. A savage imperial bloodbath, says Seumas Milne:

But it does no service to the memory of the victims to prettify the horrific reality. The war was a vast depraved undertaking of unprecedented savagery, in which the ruling classes of Europe dispatched their people to a senseless slaughter in the struggle for imperial supremacy. As Lenin summed it up to the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu in early 1917: "One slaveowner, Germany, is fighting another slaveowner, England, for a fairer distribution of the slaves".

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen.

Let Blackadder have the last word.

The Red Dagger by Heathcote Williams: what the power elite do when the poor play up

Part 1 of The Red Dagger, a fascinating history of the poor from Heathcote Williams. When the power elite clamped down on the masses, Wat Tyler led a challenge and was martyred for it. I'm not saying we're heading back to feudal times, but …

Narration and montage by Alan Cox.

Culture & politics attacked by plutocrats and oligarchs nicking our stuff

Wake up. Take the red pill.

Government spinners appear to be borrowing from Dr Who's The Silence. As soon as you look away, you forget them and what they're doing. For everyone looking away from the main action in the current catastrophic reshaping of our society, I'd like you to know that we're being attacked on a cultural front as well as economic and political.

Greg Dyke, former Director General of the BBC and one of the few bosses with any sort of old fashioned integrity left, warns that BBC "Trust" Chairman Lord Patten is a busted flush:

"The BBC is very good at regrouping and sustaining itself. In the end it has the support of the country and it always has had. That's why Thatcher never took on the BBC – because it has the support of middle England."

Tory Lord Chris Patten has presided over the Savile scandal; allowed Mark Thompson a destructive free-hand, manipulating a lurch to the right (enough of the militarised drama and content, already); turned a blind eye to unearned pay-offs to BBC management including a million to outgoing deputy Director General Mark Byford to which he wasn't entitled; and blocked publication of documents relating to the corporation's £100m Digital Media Initiative (DMI) fiasco. Excellent facilities including the iconic TV Centre with its rich history and state-of-the-art studios are lost while workers are crammed into inferior facilitates at the new Broadcasting House and transport-guzzling Salford (thanks to New Labour for initiating that move).

It's as if the malign forces now in the ascendent wish to decapitate us and separate us from our memories of the long post-war period in Britain when the mass of society enjoyed unprecedentd access to education, health, housing and jobs, when pride and confidence was standard. It wasn't perfect: there was racism, sexism and all sorts of phobias but it was something British society was building on. There's an intensifying agenda at work attacking our cultural memory in order to ease the take-over by the Super Rich. One tactic has been to pick off the weak men who used their star power to abuse children but strip the events of context that might shed light on the power nexus (Margaret Thatcher, health minister Edwina Currie and so on) that created the opportunities. Who next — our rock gods?

While sex offenders and expense cheat politicians should certainly be held to account, one wonders why household names from showbiz and Labour politicians dominate the lists of shame. Where are the swinish Tory grandees? What about the seriously rich and their little perversions? Money can buy anything and insane amounts purchase insane fantasies. Did the horrors of the Jersey boys' home and Elm Guest House move to superyachts and private islands — decadent settings for degenerate lifestyles made possible by taking our assets? It's a logical link that if the class at the top has no conscience when it comes to cutting us loose and destroying lives in order to acquire even more wealth, that they'd exhibit no qualms of conscience when it comes to gratifying other needs as well.

Does the system really care about Stuart Hall and Jimmy Savile abusing children? It didn't during their reign. How many knew about the abuse at the Haut de la Garenne home on Jersey? Who gave Savile a free run in Broadmoor? Justice for the abused victims never seems to touch those holding the keys and hosting the dinner parties.

Like the NHS — privatised by MPs, ministers and Lords with financial interests in its destruction — the BBC is another one of our institutions established in kinder, more democratic times, whose days seem numbered. Just watch the looting and pillaging taking place at the top. It's everywhere. To have rail companies who already make 147 per cent PROFIT each year demanding even more from working people is a vivid illustration of the dynamic at work.

Unfortunately, while Greg Dyke may be one of the few remaining good men running things, Marx was right and the capitalist system is a juggernaut whose inbuilt dynamic swallows everything by brute force.

I'm not surprised the Centre For Economic And Business Research (CEBR) and their media shills are supporting George Osborne's austerity for the masses, tax cuts for the very rich. The economy would indeed look wonderful, a perspective dependent on an exalted position, if you suddenly ditched the civilians and nicked all their stuff. Where's Labour's instinctive rebuttal of this garbage? Is this yet another Tory narrative they're allowing to set like concrete?

Here's a nuanced and intriguing warning from Michael White (not someone I'd nornally quote) that we dump our politicians — our last defence against the feral elite — at our peril:

"For all their (much exaggerated) faults, elected politicians in a country like the UK are still a barrier that protects us from the rising power of unaccountable oligarchy and rampant plutocracy which clearly threatens the democratic gains of the last 200 years. Who do you think whips up much of the voter anger against MPs? Why, the oligarch-owned press whose owners and their lapdogs rail against wasteful use of taxpayers' money without paying too much themselves – even as they seek to persuade us that plutocracy is good for us all. Check out Priyamvada Gopal's excellent piece about the cult of the super-rich."

Michael White was a New Labour enthusiast who often facilitated them in the pages of the Guardian but a thing can be true even if the freshly awakened White says it is true.

Listen to the lively discussion on Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge Resonance FM radio programme about the Super Rich with Aditya Chakrabortty and Kate Belgrave for more on the self-indulgence of our masters.

We should keep our eyes on the Super Rich and watch out for the smoke and mirrors used to divert our attention from the all-out frenzied thieving of everything that was publicly owned. After criminal activities and staggering incompetence by A4E, Serco, G4S; aggressive tax avoidance strategies employed by some of our biggest companies; the emergence of forced free labour and zero-hours contracts; the explosion in food banks, how can any intelligent person with any ethics, integrity and basic fellow humanity, continue to champion the upward suck of our assets, wellbeing, our culture and our planet?

Stay awake. Happy new year.

Aditya Chakrabortty's Guardian article on how champagne-swilling councils are selling off our housing to developers.

John Kampfner on the history of the super rich.

Amazing video of Morgan Freeman painting over 200 hours

Artist Kyle Lambert used 285,000 fingerstrokes on an iPad to produce a portrait of Morgan Freeman.

George Orwell on the final Madam Miaow Resonance 104.4FM tonight at 5.30pm

MADAM MIAOW'S CULTURE LOUNGE 8/8
News, music and poetry
RESONANCE 104.4FM
Presented by Anna Chen
5.30-6.30pm Tuesday 3rd December 2013
LISTEN LIVE: http://resonancefm.com/listen
OR CATCH UP ONLINE: https://soundcloud.com/resonance-fm/sets/madam-miaow-says
(To listen to Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge series on Resonance FM for WINDOWS, download VLC media player)

GEORGE ORWELL: A LITERARY REVOLUTIONARY?
Guests: Professor John Newsinger and Paul Anderson. With Charles Shaar Murray.

The final programme in this year's series of Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge asks if George Orwell was as much of a right-wing anti-socialist as is claimed. Think you know the answer? You may be surprised.

Far from being turned off the necessity for revolution, John Newsinger makes the case in his book, Orwell's Politics, that Orwell remained truer to his progressive politics than the Stalinists who viciously denounced him.

In the year that the vast scale of covert government surveillance has been revealed, sales of Orwell's 1984 have shot up 7000 per cent. His X-ray vision is proving even more relevant in these turbulent times than we imagined, so it's vital to understand what it was he was saying.

Also in the studio, helping untangle the myth from the man, is author Paul Anderson, former editor of Tribune and deputy editor of the New Statesman — both publications for whom Orwell wrote — and who edited the book Orwell in Tribune.

With great themed music and lively discussion.

We're back next year. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful festive season.

George Orwell: a literary revolutionary? — 5.30pm Tuesday 3rd December
Listen live
or afterwards
listen online

Previously …
https://soundcloud.com/resonance-fm/sets/madam-miaow-says



How the CIA funded the Halas Batchelor animated cartoon film of Animal Farm.