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Monthly Archives: October 2019

Look Up, BREXIT & the great healer.

10 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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BoJo, BREXIT, Cab Drivers, Chinatown, Churchill, Corinthian Columns, Earlham Street, European Union, Firestorms, London, Long Acre, Mercer Street, Old Compton Street, Optimism, Royal Opere House, Seven Dials, SOHO, the London Blitz, Treaty, Treaty of Paris, Treaty of Rome, WW1, WW2

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The sun strikes the Corinthian uprights of Barry’s Royal Opera House building.

And unless the world spins on its axis, gets jolted by a passing asteroid or we find we are  inadvertently sitting on the fault line between two tectonic plates, nothing will change in the nature of how the sunlight falls across these columns from when morning breaks across them to when nightfall takes them back again. [Other than when London’s cloudy temperament muddies the moment.]

To feast on London, to receive her positive charge, is to look up, especially on a crisp blue-sky day like today as the sun fires up the masonry above and around me.

And at no time in recent history do I think we need a little upward-looking optimism.

The art in this though is to prime this upward-looking optimism in ourselves without waiting for anyone else to delver it to our door – especially anyone from our political classes. And there’s plenty to distract ourselves wit is we choose.

To walk [especially in the quieter hours of the morning] past the fascia of the Opera House, to then turn left down Long Acre, cutting through Mercer street to Seven Dials – and then along Earlham Street to Cambridge Circus and to the Palace Theatre in front of you, is to find your eyes constantly being drawn upwards.  

Porticos, balustrades, fascia decorations and old advertisements painted on the walls above the line of shop fronts. 

To cut through to Old Compton street as the collision of scents and aromas rolls up to meet you – of restaurants prepping garlicky delights, bars scrubbing off ale-soaked floors, the warm wrap of air from the Chinese bun bakers, and the beep beep beep of Vans reversing into lay-bys with crates boxes and bags of ingredients and supplies – all mixed with the sharp acrid bright citrus of industrial bleaches and disinfectants slopped into doorways and across the restaurant and bar thresholds. To swim in this soup and yet to look up and watch the light as it crosses buildings [much as it has done so for some hundreds of years] is truly a beautiful thing.

To find a complex yet staggering simple beauty in London, one need only swim in her streets while looking up at how the sun light falls on her building tops. 

To immerse yourself in this continuum can smooth even the bumpiest times and the greatest turbulences out of your mind – like a de-wrinkler for the soul. 

As I walk through the streets I hear people barking BREXIT platitudes for and against. People crouch crowd and squat over their screens sniggering at cruel memes, bathing in podcasts and trading ugly human politic in gif format.

And as these people teem about me, snippets of conversations are scraped. A slathering of WTF! and ‘its all gone to shit’, with a fistful of Keep Calms and a mouthful of ‘They’re all as bad as each other’s.

Off-hand paens to BoJo float towards me as devout van drivers flick a V to both cyclists, foreigners, and ‘the lot of ‘em’. 

Pacifists and anarchists fight each other with words and slogans shouting off the front pages of newspapers as wi-fi-eared drones march ever forwards to the beat of their spotify drum.

London teems with the bleary eyed and the upright, the dishevelled and the dandy, puffer jacketed tourists clutch street foods as TV producers and media types clatter across paving stones vaguely chewing-gummed together. But they are all simply the colouring in. They are the water running through it, human flotsam and jetsam that either surges onwards or washes up at the edges of the streets in cafes and bars and restaurants. The true riches lie above the screen line of ordinary people.

A sharp neon hum over Bar Italia draws our eye to the blue John Logie Baird plaque above it. Twas ever thus. Almost all of London’s most famous sons and daughters are   celebrated in blue and white above our general eye line. And something pushes our eyes up to meet them.  There is an irrepressible something that comes up through the ground London walks on. Something that vibrates up through it. Pushing our thoughts and dreams skywards. And none more so than in Soho. If ley-lines are a thing, then I sense a cluster of them collide under SoHo’s streets.

Theres an over-powering sense of timelessness here. The past and future are one – tied together by the Now. Today is simply a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow. And on we go.

And, in much the same way, so do many of these buildings, enduring as they have always done – weathering the collapse of societies, the chess game of Royal In and Royal Out, decay of Empire, financial crashes and crunches, street riots and both World Wars of course, especially the one that peppered London with every nature and type of bomb, incendiary or otherwise, and on the back of which and calls of Never Again led directly to first the Treaty of Paris in 1951 and the reconciliation of France & Germany as promoted by Winston Churchill and closely followed by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, in which European Union was made material and binding.

In much the same way these streets and buildings have weathered one European firestorm, I am certain they’ll weather this one. And in much the same way that they now simply carry the echoes of the many who lived through those times and whom are now long dead, they will carry the echoes of my footsteps and the noise of our current european furore that echo up and around these streets..  

In the long run October 31st. will be a date like so many others whose import will whither and fade. But right now…

Sticks & Stones & BoJo’s bitter pills.

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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American Rebolution, Bert, BoJo, Boris Johnson, BREXIT, Conspiracy Theorists, East Sussex, EU, Founding Fathers, George Soros, Inflammatory Language, Juwes, LEAVE, Lewes, Mary Poppins, Radicalism, Remain, Ripper Murders, Robert Bowers, Surrender Bill, The Queen, Tourettes, Traitor, Trolls, Trumpeteer, White Genocide, Whitechapel

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So. Apparently bluster, divisive phrasing and inflammatory language do nothing to stoke any kind of aggressive nature, hate or violence against the person or property.

Well that’s frankly bollocks as we all know.

Both sides of this current ugly debate make a lot of decrying their adversaries in the most pestilent terms . The only thing that is slightly disappointing is how easily BoJo can scatter a few Churchillian phrases around the place and get such an immediate and rousingly patriotic response regardless of the veracity of what he is spouting.

It seems you really do just need to walk around shouting patriotic anti-foreigner things and everyone is there flags a waving and bunting a buntin’

Never Surrender. Traitors to a man. It’s them foreigners wot done it G’vnor, and no mishtakin’!’

The language seems to have become a vague collision of Churchillian oratory and some form of patriotic Tourettes as dispatched by what I can only assume to be Bert from Mary Poppins.

It is a short hop from ‘surrender’ language to ‘traitor’ – that ultimate betrayal

[The loose use of the ‘T’ word does though seem rather rich given the Judicial view-point of the Prorogue of Parliament as having required BoJo to ‘sham’ the Queen; surely the only person in pole position to comment on what traitorous behaviour might look like. But I forget. The judiciary are just another part of the Liberal Global Jewish Conspiracy – more of that later]

Traitor is a word that carries. And if you happen to be Jim Cornelius, a pro-Remain Liberal Democrat living in Lewes East Sussex, it is carried on both sides of a brick and hoofed through your window.

Ugly blame games are an ancient human art of divide and rule.

We’ve been using blame, public decrying and propaganda to take the spot light away from the real crooks and miscreants for centuries. And we like nothing more than a highly complex set of adversaries and a complex conspiracy to fuel the moment. The more ridiculous and elaborate the better.

Lewes in East Sussex is traditionally a hot spot of radicalism. From hosting one of the founding fathers of the American Revolution to happily embracing the Anti papist firebrands in support of the protestant Martyrs [we like to burn Papal effigies in Lewes] it is home to some rather punchy political dissent and exclamation.

Traitor Bricks are just one accessory for the discerning Lewes radical. A good old fashioned tin of spray paint is another. Thought the content, as a modern media person might point out, needs a little work. Or does it?

‘FUCK THE EJEWS SOROS’S WHORES AND TRAITORS’

This was emblazoned across a new fence of a perfectly nice house in a perfectly nice road in Lewes the other morning.

Now, once the surprise of what it says wears off and one starts to dissect it, it would be rather funny, if it wasn’t so desperately sad, deeply sinister and a blatant outcome of the kind of divisive crap people are increasingly spouting in the cold light of day.

The current climate has without question let some rather unpleasant people out of their fetid rat-pits of trollery and ugly blame into the waking world.

So lets start with the EJEWS. Did the perpetrator simply miss-spell I-JEWS. Did I miss a new product  accessory from Apple’s Israeli market, available with every new i-phone?

Or are EJEWS simply electronic Jews, like emails are electronic mail. And if so, what are they? Where do they come from? Why do EJEWS exist? And how exactly are EJEWS different to non E Jews? Are they electronically generated Jewish people – like alter ego avatars in Sim City? Or is it the platform name for real jewish people whom exist in virtual environments?

Or are the EJEWS jews from the E.U. or Pro European jews. Simply put, are they jews who’ve moved here from Europe or British jews who voted Remain?

So many questions.

Whether Pro EU, European, electronic, wholly virtual or simply virtual versions of a real person, the one thing we know from this graffiti is that these EJEWS are busy. Boy are they busy. And it seems they are in cahoots with one George Soros.

Now, for anyone not paying attention, George Soros is a Hungarian-born jewish Holocaust survivor who has made billions speculating on the currency markets. More importantly he is vilified by the Alt-Right as being at the heart of the global jewish conspiracy, blaming him in no uncertain but rarely proven terms for everything from the Charlottesville Rioting to Fake Bomb plots against himself and Barack Obama – and whom is presented  in the social posts of one Robert Bowers, murderer of 11 jews in a Pittsburg Synagogue, as the ‘jew that funds white genocide [the global jewish liberal conspiracy] and controls the press’.

So in the heart of an East Sussex town, on a fence are words that echo the disturbing belief system of a dangerous and sometimes murderous cabal, obsessed with some global jewish conspiracy and whom in this time of division feel free to publicly and explicitly conflate it with the BREXIT sentiments and traitorous brick throwing events.

To posit that the two are separate incidents and not linked by any direct evidence would be to deny historic hindsight’s tendency to show us after the fact that human beings act in waves and urges – their sentiment coagulating in emotional clusters of activity that though in some ways seem at the time unconnected prove themselves retrospectively to have been part of there same toxic malaise or momentum.

In some ways the EJEWS piece with its shoddy spellings smacks of the Goulston Street graffito scrawled on  a wall near one of the Ripper Murders in Whitechapel in the late 19th Century. The graffito stated that  ‘the Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’.  Ironically it was written at a time when frankly the jews were being blamed for most everything, and subsequently has been viewed as Anti Semitic propaganda that was designed to stoke ill feeling and create an uprising against the new arrivals.

In much the same way that White Genocide and the Global Jewish Conspiracy is increasingly present in the ghoulish theatrical nightmares of the likes of Robert Bowers in our here and now, so it was in the late 1800s in the East End.

The jewish influx, though seen initially with sympathy due to the pogroms and harsh treatment they had received in Russia Poland and Germany from whence they fled, was soon to be seen, first as a blight, then as both a soft invasion and a commercial coup [Jews were blamed for increasing output and decreasing quality, flooding the markets with cheap shoddy fare to the detriment of older East End manufacturers and producers] Eventually, as the anti semitic sentiment increased and locals became more incensed, the Jewish problem was to be regarded as an affront to all that was truly British and wholly against the social balance and social improvement of the East End. As unemployment rose and housing became scarcer the usual spectres rose up and the jews were blamed for indigenous East Enders increasingly precarious and perilous existence.

John Law AKA Margaret Harkness, in her book Out of Work, put the sentiments of many residents of the East End of London into the words of one of her characters – the wife of a radical carpenter:

“Why should all them foreigners come here to take food out of our mouths…” 

Twas ever thus.

So when BoJo spouts Surrender schtick and fires up the mood against Johnny Foreigner, and when he attaches the memory of the murdered Jo Cox to a successful BREXIT – and when traitor bricks get thrown through windows while troll conspiracy theorists scrawl EJEW graffiti on fences in sleepy Sussex towns, it is time to be alert.

Because we can be sure that those words can become sticks and stones can all too easily. Sometimes murderous ones.

So lets tread carefully and take responsibility for what comes out of our mouths. Starting with our ‘leaders’. And when I say that I mean all of them. Not just the flaxen-haired Trumpeteer.

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