“England lost to Italy because they’re better than us”

Beautiful women, Elysian landscapes and a cuisine so fine we could offer the menu card of a good trattoria as a message to alien civilisations in space, about what it is to be human. The worn cliches about Italy are facts, and I had a good time finding out that. So if England were to lose to any country in the final of Euro2020, I’m glad it was Italy.

Some Italians I have spoken with are down about their country. It’s the economy, they say. ‘There is nothing in Italy,’ one dejectedly told me at the lunch table, while I was wolfing down a sumptuous home-cooked meal prepared by our dear mutual Sicilian friend. Well, I don’t give a shit about the economy. ‘Have you seen the absolute state of England?’ I should have replied, but didn’t.

“The best things in life are free,” and it’s true. Italy has in spades so much of what makes life good, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. They even have a decent anthem.

Italy’s, The Song of the Italians is lively and boisterous, with a melody which gets the blood pumping as you sing along. You saw its physical effect upon the Italian players singing it before kick-off at Wembley; they were buzzing. Even I, an England fan, was humming it the morning after our defeat, with no bitterness towards the conquerors.

In sorry contrast is our ‘God Save the Queen.’ I do feel bitter when it pipes up. I no longer sing along with any fervour, since it dawned upon me the lyrics are absurd; an appeal to a non-existent being to protect a monarch who is already one of the most mollycoddled human beings to ever live. And that tune. Jeez, what a droning bore.

And then there’s the content and message of the lyrics. Our English anthem is the literal sound of boot-licking. Whenever we sing it, we’re saying we enjoy the monarch’s shoe being upon our neck, or the necks of foreign unfortunates in the way of the Crown’s never-ending orgy of exploitation. More boot, please! we all sing.

So yeah, congratulations to Italy, on winning Euro2020. I’m going to console myself with my go-to comfort food of choice: an XL Italian base ‘Extravaganza’ pizza by Domino’s. Mwah.

Beautiful women, Elysian landscapes and a cuisine so fine an example of what it means to be human, that we could offer the menu card of a good trattoria as a message to alien civilisations in space. If England were to lose to any country in the final of Euro2020, I’m glad it was Italy.

Some Italians I have spoken with are down about their country. It’s the economy, they say. ‘There is nothing in Italy,’ one dejectedly told me at the lunch table, while I was wolfing down a sumptuous home-cooked meal prepared by our dear mutual Sicilian friend. Well, I don’t give a shit about the economy. ‘Have you seen the absolute state of England?’ I should have replied, but didn’t.

“The best things in life are free,” and it’s true. Italy has in spades so much of what makes life good, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches.

The young country with an ancient soul also has one of the best – if not the best – national anthems yet composed. This is another sign Italy is connected to something deep in the beating human heart. You saw the anthem’s physical effect upon the Italian players singing it before kick-off; they were buzzing. Even I, an England fan, was humming it the morning after our defeat at Wembley, with no bitterness towards the conquerors.

So yeah, congratulations to Italy, on winning Euro2020. I’m going to console myself with my go-to comfort food of choice: an XL Italian base ‘Extravaganza’ pizza by Domino’s. Mwah.

Pop music classics and Brexit are linked

Does a link exist between old popular pop music and Brexit?

Well, classic tunes from decades past are still being pumped into society’s collective ear in 2019.

Over time these old tunes have become brain-worms, stuck in the collective consciousness like a long splinter in the butt cheek.

Can you even imagine a world without Sitting on the dock of a bay, Stuck in the Middle, Come on Eileen, Uptown Girl, Bohemian Rhapsody and so on?

I wish I could, but I’m not allowed to. These gold-plated classics never go away because we just won’t let them. The proliferation of ways to hear music that exists today makes forgetting more hard to do.

For example, Uptown Girl (one of the world’s worst imo) comes on the stereo in the coffee bar in Amsterdam which I’m in, and people start humming along and tapping their feet. It makes me feel like a kill-joy; sitting there decoding what this means, while I scowl inwardly at this agreeable tune pumping on the stereo.

‘It’s just a nice song’ is a defence and yes, this is true as far as it goes: most of the classic songs which exist in our collective consciousness are indeed ‘nice’. But there’s way more to it than that. And it’s everything else that’s the problem.

Nostalgia. The root of Brexit in my opinion. Nostalgia; deriving its source from the Greek word for pain. And Brexit sure is shaping up as painful.

It’s nostalgia which keeps old songs recycling around our minds.

It generates a warm, fuzzy glow and we bask blissfully in the old and the extremely familiar. New sounds are unfamiliar and strange, ambiguous, with their meaning not fixed in our hearts and minds. Does familiarity breed contempt? It doesn’t seem to. I wish it would. Nostalgia does the opposite: it creates some kind of sick love, which wants things to stay the same.

It’s one of Brexit’s many, many ironies that it is – on one level – revolutionary. Things are about to change in a major way, if we leave this Halloween.

But to me this means Brexit is just more deeply nostalgic than our love of old pop songs by the pop stars of yore.

Instead of looking back 50-60 years to the hippy / soul man era, the nostalgia of Brexit dives deeper into the past, going back to 1945, then further back to when the Raj existed, India did not and the Queen of England was Empress of an empire which the sun never went down on.

How far does the Brexit nostalgia go? It sure does pass over the 1975 European Communities membership referendum, without looking back.

I don’t know what is the historical boundary of Brexit nostalgia; perhaps its 1707 Act of Union, which created a nation for national identity to be built upon.

It is national identity to which Brexit nostalgia sticks like a bogey on a finger.
But how patriotic is it? Not very, I reckon.

Why? Because like a hurricane churning across the prairie towards your house, Brexit looks is on course to destroy the thing it says it is devoted to. The UK may not survive Brexit, but Brexit says it wants to make the UK great again. Let’s hope it does.

When I say I hate the old classics of pop music, obviously it’s not the whole story. I love some of them. The Joker, Peaches, practically everything by The Beatles, The Kinks; these are songs from that era of the past which I love to death.

When I was growing up, the first band I really was aware of was Oasis – who were backward–looking and proud of it. I grew in subsumed by nostalgia. The whole Britpop was nostalgic by definition.

It’s the same with my position on Brexit; it’s a bit of a curate’s egg.

I voted Remain, but I am so close to being a Brexiteer that I could catch a virulent strain of nationalism from it by being so near.

Deep down, my instincts are uncomfortably Brexity. My support for being in the EU is purely pragmatic. It is absent of all passionate intensity. I simply think being in the EU makes life easier for everyone and it’s the shortest route to the most happiness, for the most people.

This is lazy , I know. And so is nostalgia, which refuses to do any heavy lifting which is vital for progress to happen. It just sits back and enjoys the afterglow.

But this warm, comfortable glow is radioactive green colour – and it’s going to do a lot of damage. We can’t see it with our own eyes, but we can sure hear it: it’s coming out of speakers near you, all day long.

Why I love J.S. Bach

JSB reminds me to keep in my heart space for beauty, always. ‘Music can be of the highest sophistication technically and at the same time totally overwhelming emotionally.’ Some people say JSB music is objective in its deeply mathematical nature and they love that. This misses the point for me. I’m hopeless at maths but appreciate JSB as much as I should appreciate having working arms and legs, but don’t. Experience the John and Matthew Passions: they contain more melodrama than EastEnders and more emotional power than losing the first pet you had as a child. (Add said pet returning home after three nights for added Passion analogy). JSB is so very humane.

This music is the tranquil beauty of a still lake and you can be in it like a fish in water. Listening to JSB is like taking a long dive and coming back up, refreshed; I discover myself, ask questions and locate answers which my prickling skittering overheated conscious mind doesn’t know even exist – the stoopid dumbass.

I find writing effusively is embarrassing usually; that it’s naïve, basic, the sort of thing overstimulated morons do; positivity as a mask for lack of substance. (This is the real key message advertisers and social media influencers accidently convey each time they blitzkrieg our senses). But JSB helps me learn this is black eye-lined juvenilia, that it doesn’t have to be like this; that there’s nothing wrong with true open-heartedness – that maybe it’s the only way to live. ‘Credo’ in the B Minor Mass for instance. The word translates as ‘I Believe’ and the choir sings this at the top of its lungs in what is a couple of minutes of unalloyed polyphonic ecstasy. The voices build upon each other until it’s like the music will lift off into the firmament and float away, unfolding eternally through space-time.

I also can be sure this music is not the ‘sweet commissioned grace’ of a sculptor who’s paid to make marble quiver and transform into soft flesh. Yes, making music was JSB’s job, but into this music its creator poured himself. How do I know? On the sheets on which he composed (JSB’s curved, bouncy inscriptions look like they’re jiving on the page), there is signed in the margin ‘Deo Gloria’, meaning Glory to God. JSB, a devout man, wrote this to mean he believed he served a power higher even (even) than his employer, via his work. Some Christians think JSB can make people start believing in God. Apparently in Japan this actually happened. But I believe you don’t need faith in God to get in touch with the magic. Yes, JSB earnestly believed God made man, whereas I un-earnestly believe man made God. But so what? The object of Bach’s music is you and me; he was a man writing three centuries ago for normal people in a provincial city in what is modern-day Germany, Lucky them.

I feel sorry aliens with differently evolved auditory systems to homo-sapiens because they’re a priori incapable of hearing JSB’s music as he composed it. Those aliens deserve to be pitied. Perhaps this will make us gentler and more careful of them as and when contact happens, so we avoid a repeat of when the Conquistadors sailed to the ‘New World’ and the indigenous cultures ‘discovered’ what they did. Who knows, maybe JSB will breach the human/alien barrier. JSB is already in space, as a recording on a vinyl record strapped to an old-style probe which has gone interstellar. A great JSB adoption could be underway right now on another planet, or maybe Zog and Zwag are rolling on the floor of their moon base, tentacles wrapped over their ears, screaming for the noise to stop. I can’t believe that. Poor them if so.

On this lonely planet, spinning in a cold, silent universe, JSB makes existence extra nice and death an even bigger scandal than it already is. JSB is life, life, eternal life and it’s mine and yours.

Spinning stone circle fake news

Public Relations is usually all about being positive, bright and upbeat because you’re trying to push something into the public spotlight, past a high wall of near-total public indifference.

You want to achieve ‘break-through’ and it feels great when you do. But this is only one side of the game. There is a dark side. Most of the time this dark side is hidden by erm… darkness, in the form of secrecy.

But it exists and if you can thrive in it, then you really earn your corn in PR. When something negative is in the spotlight, or is threatening to cause a stink for your client or employer; if you can make it go away, then you are an expert practitioner.

Of course it’s ethically dubious! There’s big risk too because making things disappear is difficult and they say the cover-up is what ends up causing most damage when – if – it comes to light. Meanwhile, technology means it’s never been so easy to hold the rich and powerful to account; everyone can be an investigative journalist.

Today, it looks like the rich and powerful accept covering things up is hard. So they’re happy to switch to other approaches: obfuscation, smears, deflection, barefaced lies and shamelessness. If the facts are bad, then fight the facts – or find some alternative ones. And don’t apologise.

It’s in the way President Donald Trump lies to voters all day and 40-45% of the U.S. electorate do not mind. We see it in the way Manchester City FC smears compelling evidence by journalists that the Abu Dhabi-owned club broke financial rules designed to make the game more fair.

Some of the world’s most powerful people and organisations face no consequences for the swamps of bullshit they spread in public, in which endangered species like facts and truth drown, like the last woolly Mammoth chased into the murk by a creature with clever tools. No doubt campaigns are being cooked up by PR specialists right now and some of the most devious ones will do really well.

Hats off then to Aberdeenshire Council for not succumbing to the dark side, by keeping things extremely bright and sunny in its response to news a stone circle it claimed was aged between two and four thousands years old, was actually made in the mid-1990s.

The mistake has come to light after the guy – a farmer – who says he’s behind the formation, decided he wanted to unburden his conscience by coming clean about it, or something. No doubt the council’s experts are super thankful.

Note: in this post I’m assuming the council Press Office made the spokesperson’s quote which runs in worldwide coverage of the event because the job of a Press Office is to be the voice of an organisation. Also, the named history expert speaks in a way that’s just like how press officers write when putting words in people’s mouths for publicity reasons. I might be wrong, though.

Basically, the council says getting duped was a really good thing actually because it shows the community is engaged with local history. This is epic reaching. It’s reasoning which reaches past the limit of credulity for a point that’s not within grasp. This story looks less like a case of a well-informed community, than a case of the experts not knowing enough. The fact the council appears not to see the lols in this situation by ignoring it, makes the archaeological error more funny. The council is trying to swap the focus to a positive angle – standard practice – but its remedy is insufficient for the problem.

I spare a thought for Aberdeenshire’s history experts probably left red-faced by having their mistake exposed for all to laugh about. It must be hard to pinpoint when in the past few thousand years some rocks were stuck in the ground. But the community engagement point is weak.

So what might an alternative response be? *Puts on black hat*. Maybe one which ditches sunny optimism and is inspired by black ops the rich and powerful perpetuate! Imagine, the council could deny the new claim about the stone circle’s age, then do a character assassination on the farmer, then deflect by asking how can Stonehenge be real because the technology surely didn’t exist when it was supposed to have been built, right?

This case shows me that you don’t always win in Comms by focusing on the positives; sometimes there’s no choice but to wait for the news cycle on move on. This happens faster than ever. Aberdeenshire Council’s response to its big oopsie shows the limitations of a bright-side approach, but I’m glad they tried it because the dark-side PR alternative is toxic.

 

Awesome Hack to Wreck Your Writing Goals!

Whoever thinks their stuff is worth reading while they’re writing it really is a dangerous nutter.

False modesty: you think you can do it or you’d do something else with these hours you won’t get back.

What is the point of struggling with writing and never writing anything like a great writer writes?

Why don’t you just kill yourself then.

When does watching masterclasses by self-anointed experts start helping me be a great writer? 

You like playing at being a writer more than actually writing because you’re a fraud.

Where do I get the awesome life hack to become a crazy good writer in just 24 hours guaranteed?

Phoney.

Why does reading great writers not make me into a great writer?

Maybe because you’re thick.

How many #inspiring personal testimonies on social media do I read to become a great writer?

The number is unlimited. 

If you have any answers then I’d love to hear them.

…

 

 

Boris Johnson mocks burqas and Liberal Britain gets another kick in the nuts

One of the properly great things about Great Britain is that we are generally opposed to public officials and agents of the State policing non-criminal personal behaviour.

A great example of this is that we have not banned the burqa or the niqab; religious headgear worn by Muslim women. At present, there is no law in the UK forbidding burqas or niqabs in public places. This is because there’s a long-standing general agreement that it really is none of the government’s business to be sticking its nose into the wardrobe choices people make for personal faith reasons.

But as we’ve been learning since what feels like forever, burqas and niqabs actually do cause serious, adverse, reactions in some ‘patriots’. These snowflakes get triggered, froth at the mouth, their big, baldy faces turn red and their heads look like wrinkly, smacked arses. Sometimes, the Stella cans start flying.

So in 2018, it feels like a precious victory for civil liberty and personal freedom that the UK has yet to cave in to the nutty fringe in society, people who want to ban the burqa. This is glorious inaction and it’s in marked contrast to some of our continental – and supposedly classy – cousins. France, Germany, Austria and Denmark all have passed illiberal legislation outlawing the wearing of religious face veils to some degree. Any denial that such law targets religious observance of the Muslim type is undiluted hogwash. It’s perfectly clear what’s going on to anybody with eyes to see.

Laws like this demean the exact values their champions claim they want to upload. They’re bad news because these laws erode everybody’s freedom, whether or not you wear one. Unfortunately, behaviour policing by the State is already rampant in too many areas of UK life, invading people’s personal space. But these outrages don’t justify more outrages. They’re warnings to resist further legal creep into the personal domain we all treasure.

For this reason, it’s something to be proud of that the UK refrains from passing law against wearing religious headgear in public. It shows we have at least a little respect for the civil liberty principle and don’t use the law to harass women for being religiously observant.

So imagine my (complete non-) shock that this hard-earned common decency is under attack, by a man who claims he’s in close touch with the soul and history of the nation. None other than TV personality, power-mad piffle purveyor and banter politician, Boris Johnson.

Click here to read what this self-identifying classical liberal writes in his Telegraph column. Wearing a burqa is ‘completely ridiculous’ and makes the wearer ‘look like a letterbox,’ he claims. Can you believe this is ‘premium content’ on the Telegraph website? You can hear stuff like this for free down the pub. Apparently, the purpose of Johnson’s article was to oppose the Danish burqa ban.

He does call a burqa ban wrong, but these no doubt carefully selected words help erode mutual respect and decency, the stuff we all rely on in order to be ourselves in public. Johnson is politically smart, so I’m sure he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s pandering to a group of extremist voters for his personal political ambitions. This is dog-whistle politics by the man who’s currently favourite with bookies to be next leader of the Conservative party. What a time to be alive.

If Great Britain truly wants to be distinct from Europe, like the Brexit referendum result indicates, then why don’t we stick up for traditions of civil liberty and common decency which our ancestors suffered to establish.

 

Catch 22: In 2018, life is imitating this novel

Look up from this darkly comic novel and you see the world with eyes anew: this is Yossarian’s world, we’re just living in it. Poor us.

From the epic self-regard and obsession with personal advancement which defines our social media age, to the way high-handed unaccountable officialdom defines reality for us, only to deny it with the next breath, to the behaviour of ruling elites comprising people who cut and paste and twist to advance their personal, grasping, agenda – Catch 22 (C22) reminds you that dreadful deeds done by dreary people for laughably inane reasons are nothing new.

It’s hard to believe Joseph Heller’s first novel is 50 years old because it reads so fresh, today. This is a World War 2 novel, but one which treats war unlike any other book or film I’ve seen or read. This highly individualistic vision and the writing which flows from it manages to shine light upon the urges driving our unquenchable thirst for each other’s blood and the deceptions we play upon ourselves and others, in a truly humane way which poses the simple, obvious, question: why?

On the world stage today, old men strut around like tough guys, acting as if they are horny for destruction, while they personally circle the plughole of life due to advanced age. Maybe this is the geriatric raging-against-the-dying-of-the-light which the poet spoke of. In scary times like this, it’s so easy to feel powerless, like a pawn on a multidimensional chess board, at which leaders play whose brains are falling to bits like wet cake from senile or pre-senile decay, against comically dastardly types whose main qualification is a devious mind for knowing people’s weaknesses and the appetite to exploit these weaknesses for cash (hi, tech genii).

At such a time to be alive, we need Catch 22’s subversive, hilarious, spirit more than ever. C22 is a carnival of absurdity and violence, told tenderly and ultimately humanely. I found myself asking, am I a guy trying to get free in this world like (anti) hero Yossarian, or am I a Colonel Cathcart in the making – the human boot upon the head of other men – who has a bigger boot pressed upon his own head? Or am I a victim like the many male and female victims in this novel, who are tossed by events and circumstances beyond their control or understanding?

The writing is strong: when a brothel keeper in Italy explains to Yossarian’s squaddie pal Nately why it’s better to lose wars than to win them, you find yourself starting to question reality. Meanwhile, ‘The Eternal City’ chapter is a powerful depiction of humanity in hell and being pretty happy – or at least comfortably indifferent – about being there. Then to find out from one entrepreneurial soldier why it’s for the common good of the unit’s investment syndicate that he help the enemy Germans to shoot down U.S. aircraft, is to gaze into the moral void of pure commercial logic – the ‘it’s nothing personal’ ethos – in fullest effect. I devoured all this in horrified amusement. It’s so entertaining.

In this way, Catch 22 is like an adult Alice in Wonderland for how it turns reality on its head in revealing, amusing ways. What makes Catch 22’s Wonderland more menacing than Lewis Carroll’s version is that we all have to live in this one. Our problem is that there’s not one mad Queen of Hearts running things despotically, but a whole deck of the fiends at large. Yes, the setting of Catch 22 is wartime, but the themes are all around us today and  they enfold our lives like a sticky web. Heller’s novel makes us notice the threads upon which we can get helplessly caught without even knowing that there is a web.

Sadly, this book may not be for everyone because it is so singular a creative accomplishment. All I can say is that I laughed on practically every page. This doesn’t happen, normally – or ever. Catch 22 as caustically anti-war as Paths of Glory or All Quiet on the Western Front, but achieves its messages using laughs and comic absurdity. There’s nothing else like it. Essential reading!

Mamma Mia 2: booze-geddon in the aisles

Whether or not Mamma Mia, Here We Go Again (MM2) is any good, it does do a marvellous job of recreating in the dark of a movie theatre the experience of being on a sunshine holiday with a bunch of tanked up Brits.

We see this summer’s pre-determined smash hit at an Everyman cinema, which lays on free prosecco as part of an opening night Mamma Mia party for the (mainly female) audience.

What follows is messy, predictable and possibly more entertaining than the actual film. It’s also proof for those who think Britain’s got a problem with the drink.

Is MM2 a good film? It’s hard to say because our view of the screen is constantly interrupted by a group of women in the front row who jump to sing and sway along whenever an ABBA song comes on. They’re on the free fizz like we all are and the determination to have a good time is high, meaning this cinematic experience turns out to be more noisy than Transformers. For the same reason, we miss a lot of dialogue because the on-screen action gets overdubbed by the noisy birds (yes, birds is appropriate here), whooping, hollering and trying to to drum up more audience participation.

‘Woooooooooow!’

‘I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know.’

‘Come on! Dance!’

Just some of the exhortations they make to everyone else, in between taking selfies in the pitch black. I guess these are MM2’s most devoted fans because they don’t take kindly at all to hisses of ‘sssssssshhhh’ from within the darkness.

‘You’re Boring!’

‘Shutyurmouth!’

‘You’re a lezzer!’

Probably there are worse things than being aggressively nagged into dancing to ABBA by a pissed woman, but not that many. It’s a peculiarly British phenomena, this; putting so much effort into having a good time that other people’s good times are put in jeopardy and straining for fun so hard that it risks turning into a sort of mental arm wrestle against the fear you’re boring. I’ve only seen us Brits behave this way.

Back to the movie and the question: is MM2 any good or not? Well, the narrative splits between past and present in a way which is stitched together smoothly. However, these time jumps are confusing by the time you’re on prosecco number six. The disjointed storyline cuts the narrative momentum and makes the action sag, as we bounce from one scene in the present day, back to the past.

The dialogue sounds like they pasted together lots of inspirational web memes about destiny and fate, but I care about the fate and destiny of not one single character. Meryl Streep’s daughter – who’s founding a hotel in her mum’s honour – could watch her Mother Tribute project get blown up by ISIS and then be dragged into Jihadi captivity and I wouldn’t care – perhaps I’d approve. At least it would inject some drama into proceedings.

MM2 is about the songs, not the storyline and maybe this is what makes it boring: doesn’t everyone know ABBA already? Their music’s been part of Western civilisation’s wallpaper for 40-plus years. I don’t get the appeal of singing and dancing to ABBA in a cinema, when you’ve probably done the same at bars and parties for years.

The film is complicit in the audience participation by pausing lines in songs for us to fill in the gaps. And we oblige. This trick is evidence MM2 really is a series of cues for outbursts of karaoke. At our screening, the bits when there’s no ABBA music pumping out of the speakers are rest minutes before the next bout of participation. Sitting there in the dark not joining in, we must look like right sniffy cultural elitists. But we do sing in our seats and that is plenty enough, ta.

Cher makes a cameo which is either a masterclass in actorly stillness or evidence of geriatric immobility. Cher’s huge hair stays still as stone when she performs an up-tempo song and dance number and her hips look like they are being swayed by remote control.

And MM2 is enjoyable: the songs, the dancing, the grit-teethed determination to have a good time, the gratis bubbly. It all comes together for a great British evening out. MM2 is like being stuck at a bar next to a group of birds on a Hen Do as they down a row of shots. It’s loud, messy and fun in that classic precarious way of nights out. If someone kicked off at a fellow moviegoer, it wouldn’t be a shock.

MM2 is a unique cinema-going experience, which doesn’t belong at the cinema really.

‘Phoney Big Karma Police’ – free verse

On Youtube, I saw a bodybuilder warn from beyond the grave: “as thou sow so shalt thou reap!” He was talking about steroids which he took for years, to get pumped. Man-mountain Rich Piana told the young bucks coming up there will be consequences if you juice heavily to get big, to get the girls, to get the medals. Piana died of unnatural causes in his early 40s, last year. RIP Rich Piana: a compelling big lump of bulging eyes, biceps and swollen mass of ludicrous proportions; he was also a very candid person who made himself vulnerable by being so honest in his videos – not an easy thing to do, especially in his profession. Karma, he called it. Rich’s passing confirmed the wisdom of his own words in a powerful, haunting way. 

Or so I thought.

If Karma exists, what about Trump? The oompa-loompa shaded POTUS is a one-man repudiation of karma: he just wins so much by being a major-league arsehole, then he gets to be the world’s most powerful person for a few years. So, where is Karma? From this I wrote a free verse:

Phoney Big Karma Police

The karma police station is boarded up
The karma sirens do not blare
The karma policeman doesn’t use his karma truncheon
Inside the karma cop shop files are not there
The karma patrol walks no beat
Because there’s a new beat in town 
And it’s sending people wild.
 
‘I don’t care’ it says like rock n roll
‘What you think.
‘These are my demands’ 
And then reads them out in time:
Strong borders 
Heavy jobs
Honour restoration
No back-chat
No lip
The beat goes on, goes on like this.

Karma is so elegant and grand
Like a fine rug slung on a creaky chair
What we do and say are transformed
The wise are happy to pay karma dues
But the beat goes on and yanks up the rug.

It’s the end of an illusion.
A list of demands. the beat is here