We compare coats
wear imitations on our feet
and borrow sympathetic voices
for sideshows
until insight is a stranger
and tomorrow but an echo
Sideshow
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Tag Archives: Propaganda
Oversold
Opportunities are not results,
So do not oversell,
For the leverage of your theories
Are as nowt without the actual clout
And where there are made winners,
Are more losers made, as well.
***
”Not enough attention is paid to a similar cliff edge on the other side of the English Channel” – Institute for Government
”Home Affairs Committee raises serious concerns about the Government’s contingency planning for post-Brexit customs operations” – UK Parliament
”It is the UK which is choosing to leave the single market and customs union and that means, by definition, creating a border” – Chris Grey
Excellent reality check: ’A beginners’ guide to trade negotiations’ – UK Trade Forum
***
Lull me a lullaby
Sand in my eyes
Buy me a mockingbird
Give me the sky
Betcha by golly
Wow, build me a folly
Bring me some Kool Aid
Let’s fill up the trolley
Sprinkle the pixie dust
Set up a blind trust
Go short of a picnic
And cut off the crusts
Pipe me a loony tune
Red, white and blue my shoes
Kansas is dying
Jump over the moon
[December 2017]
People get upset
Britain, right now, is a little bit shit
And most of the news is so grim
But people of humour do relish their wit
And relieve themselves quipping on things
They’re clever and silly with memes and fresh banter
So wry in contempt, it can get rather mean
But just look at the farce of the national cantor
And wonder no more that they’re letting off steam
The Bexiteer Right and the humourless Left
Hate the refuge of weaponised humour
But this is the British way civic life checks
Against rumours and bloomers and tumours
Here’s The Increasingly Batshit Story That Eventually Led To Priti Patel’s Resignation
Is this the night of the living dead? No, it’s Britain’s Brexit team
The joke’s over – how Boris Johnson is damaging Britain’s global stature
howls of latent despair
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Neither fish nor chlorinated fowl
Nor maize nor daffodil be spared
”Nothing has changed”
But howls of latent despair
Share decreasing dissonance
Brexit exemption sought for Grimsby seafood trade
What is wrong with chlorinated chicken?
Eye-roll and sigh…
The way the Tories roll
The principle that’s principal
Is risible
Dirigible
The higher ones invisible
The way the Tories roll
Integrity neglected
Law and ethics disrespected
Fact and fiction self-selective
That’s the way the Tories roll
The gap in credibility
Is sizeable
Revisable
And utterly derivable
The way the Tories roll
Logic magic’ly fragmented
Half the party looks demented
Even sound as though they meant it
It’s a leading Tory role
Can’t tell their elbows from their arses
All hot air and whoopsie farces
Sinister, the stink that passes
Whereabouts the Tories roll
Crony ring of tooth and claw
Surviving on revolving doors
And carousels of dizzy poor
Sees Tories on a roll
With patronising platitudes
And breathtaking ineptitude
They then expect our gratitude
Oh, how the Tories roll!
Avoiding liability
Financial incivility
So hostile to humility
There’s no deniability
That Tory heads must roll
For the slope of plausibility
Grows slippery
With trickery
And, trip! There goes fuckwittery
How fast can Tories roll?
[November, 2015 – plus ça change…]
Well done, Homespun
Well done, Homespun
You won
In tongues:
Forked-puns
Unhealthy sums
Ten times the burden on our young
Top-table crumbs
Fair-weather chums
New depths to plumb
The right to be somebody else’s never-setting Sun
No actual benefit – zip, nada, none
No fun
No fun
No fun beneath
Your unopposable thumb.
Heartifice
A Brexit-deep state of mind:
Heartifice, by design.
Truth be told, a waste of time
When fiddled faith says
”This is fine.”
Brexit: it boils the blood
You know what makes me the most angry about Brexit, right now? That 17,410,742 people who spouted ill-informed crap throughout the referendum campaign and, afterwards, claimed that they knew what they were voting for, are still spouting ill-informed crap and claiming that they knew what they voted for, even though they failed utterly to base their opinions on any fact and despite the mounting evidence that no one knew or fully understood what leaving meant. And especially when the Brexit pushers admit, daily, to still not knowing the answers to the most basic questions. Christ! Most of them are not even asking them. They are just doubling down on hopium, hyperbole, denial and censorship. It’s all they have.
What makes me so furious is that, even if they genuinely thought they knew exactly what they were voting for then, they bloody well don’t know what that is now. And, if they did not realise what they were voting for, they bloody well should do, by now – chaos, isolation, ridicule and diminution.
People who refuse the responsibility of keeping up with developments that are a direct consequence of a decision to commit a collective act of national self-harm, that they deliberately and knowingly made but have continually refused to ask pertinent and intelligent questions about or accept readily available truths and very strong evidence: they have no fucking right, whatsoever, to their vacuous “will of the people” “respect democracy” “enemy of the people” “you lost, get over it” “stop talking the country down” bullshit.
Yes, I know that most of those 17 point blah blah million voters lead busy lives. So do most of the voting population. I know they only have time to grab a bit of broadcast news, watch a debate or two, skim a newspaper, check what Facebook thinks. But this only makes their arrogant certainty look more dumb and more irresponsible: what the hell makes them believe that they are properly informed and what the flaming holy heck makes them assume that all expertise, common sense, honest resistance and challenge is not informed but based purely on some bizarre unpatriotic bias? How the fuck would they even know? Jumped-up cretins. Brexit: it boils the blood.
[Sorry: perhaps I should have warned about the fury before ranting but a sudden need for catharsis beat me to it.]
People can make-believe of anything
People can make-believe of anything: an idea; a time/place; a person; the worth of Brexit. It might be founded on sheer strength of feeling or on the perception that a logical position is providing a complete picture. Checks on reasoning are subsumed into the comfort of confirmation bias. It becomes a feedback-loop of superiority and victimhood, working as a shield against all opposition.
The greater the investment in a position, the greater the requirement for its justification and, the more one justifies an investment, the more one becomes consumed by the need to. This is an ideological dependency developing a religious-like zeal for its own protection. Seeing is believing where believing is seeing: these are now the same thing. Chicken and egg. It doesn’t lead to truths, except by virtue of coincidental overlap – luck – or by lessons learned through the observation of its example – judgement.
And because the cold, hard truths of Brexit are self-evident, either you admit your error, to yourself, at the very least, or you double down and brazen it out, in the hope that denial will buy time and yet save your face. Thus, through fear or cynicism, you set yourself to the mission of converting and recruiting others because, well, safety and righteous correctness in evangelical numbers, right?
Brexit Park and Ride
Mockumentary
Just got real
In parallel feels
The faithful sides
Take park and ride
Raise monuments
To the far out right
And the left behind
In the unthink tank
All the windows stream
Insidious steam
Can’t see where they’re going
Only where they’ve been
Where jump the shark
Is a tie that binds
The hungry heart
With a flaccid mind
Where infotainment
Is a civic blind
And a cold hard truth
Is a hot rewind
The Brexit bus
Is a dream mis-sold
To fools who believe
There’s a road of gold
And, as foretold,
Has nothing to do with
Taking back control
As the bus careers
Through its own manholes
juxtaposed 