Political Stuff

     Greed & Mean-Spiritedness Are Boring

Every time

any government

anywhere

brings up the idea

of raising the minimum wage

bosses’ mouthpieces squeal

that it’ll put ’em out of business

and make workers lose jobs,

and they get red-dress economists,

people with degrees

who’ll say anything

that anybody who pays them enough

wants them to say,

to tell the newscasters

the same crap,

and it never happens,

businesses thrive and create more jobs,

but that doesn’t stop ’em.

The Nazis called the technique

The Big Lie,

and it it worked real well for them, eh?

Of course, the whole thing

is ugly and stupid and predictable and boring,

but it’s the pointlessness of it all

that makes me turn it off

and go pour myself a drink.

                    Huh. Ponytails.

I cut off my last ponytail about a dozen years ago.

In 2k3, I think it was,

so that part of our recent national cause célèbre

didn’t make me feel threatened at all.

What did strike me – and I do mean strike me –

with unresolved outrage deep down in my soul

was the part about ‘horsing around’.

Just horsing around. A bit of banter.

These are variations on the mantra of self-justification

spewed out by bullies everywhere,

with unconvincing displays

of injured innocence with just a touch of nobility:

‘I had enormous fun using my superior power

to torment you, you lesser being,

which makes it okay, because, well, I had so much fun.

Wassa matta, can’t you take a bit of fooling around –

a bit of teasing?

Can’t you take a joke?

Sheesh!’

It doesn’t matter if it was only fun for the bully,

and not for his or her victim,

because the bully matters and the victim doesn’t.

Bullies are the source of all evil on Earth.

This is personal.

   Government Credibility

If Prime Minister Key

were to tell me that the sun’s shining

I’d grab my brolly

and open it before going outside.

               Demilitarised Zone

I saw a TV news story

about that endless crap between Korea and Korea

and one more set of what the reporter,

who was from Argentina,

called, of course, ‘high level talks’

in Panmunjom, on the border –

the thirty-eighth parallel and all.

The camera zoomed in

on the actual border itself,

which at this key spot

is composed of a long and narrow

storm drain with horizontal grating.

I wondered in which direction,

north or south,

the rainwater drains

when indifferent nature

drops it there.

                   The Monarch

Okay, so Her Majesty Betty Windsor

is a teddibly nice and ridiculously rich old woman

in an absurdly bizarre situation

involving numerous people doing hideous things

in her name.

         The Lesser

From what I can tell,

Barack Obama is probably

a truly nice person,

but his job is to hold together

a hopelessly corrupt, cruel,

destructive, and hypocritical system.

He also seems to be intelligent,

so he must know this;

he must know this,

mustn’t he?

              Death by Artillery Fire

I’d been avoiding the news for years,

but I opened the door to my office

to drop off some clothing

on my way to the shower,

so I heard the newsreader 

saying from the safety 

of her bland, educated, slightly lilting Kiwi voice,

“… killed by artillery fire …”

as I dropped off my gear and closed the door.

She was clearly unconcerned

about the possibility of artillery fire

someday causing her demise,

and apparently unconcerned

by the horror of it causing

the recent demise of others.

I could say the same for me

about one of those two propositions.

            Choosing Sides

Maybe it’s media manipulation,

but reports of deeply divided societies

often make me end up preferring

one of the factions involved,

even though it’s really none of my business.

One seeming oddity

is that in the case of Venezuela

I favour the underclass majority

to the upper-middle-class protesters,

but in the case of Thailand

I favour the middle-class protesters

to the underclass majority.

Maybe this is because

from my disinterested perspective

I see these divides not in terms

of rich versus poor

or left versus right,

but in regard to my perceptions

of relative honesty and integrity

versus corruption and cynical insincerity.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Maybe it is media manipulation.

         History Class

As I ground my way

through the campfire stories

that passed for history lessons

when I was a schoolboy,

I tended to buy in to the narrative

that the whole run of affairs

consisted of a series of conflicts

between good guys and bad guys,

and that the good guys generally

won in the end.

Now, of course, I know

that the history of nations and states

and kingdoms and empires

and republics and other organisational forms

of dominance and oppression

has always been a matter

of bad guys against bad guys –

and guess who always wins?