After trump and the UK Referendum, the FN in France and Wilders and the Alternatif fur Deutschland and on and on. And then South Korea?!

trump is clearly the pus finally coming out of a broken and amoral politics and neoliberal economics. But they are not the same. American political practice - constitution, electoral college and the shell parties which mean nothing and then try to mean something. And the most polled political system couldn't see it coming until the moment of impact.

The ethics of maintaining a broken system because anything else might....

The complete vacuum of political action - a rectangle of people at a road junction in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the almost "moral rearmament" tone [...we have to change], the completely empty faces of the apparatchiks behind trump as he explained why he had settled the fraud case against his "university", the third division fuckwits he has disinterred to be Attorney General and head of the CIA. 

Bankrupt and failing, listening to Twitter feeds and believing nutjob talk radio and farcebook and Hillary only lost by 0.00001% and now Amerika is in trouble [aka "waiting for a message of some kind"].

The political system has collapse and been replaced by performance. 

A mass movement to oppose trump?
In a heavily armed political structure?
Where diversity and process can stop the force of gravity?
And no one remembers ........very much.

And the pronoun problem : WE or YOU.

Empty Saturday

Empty as in devoid.
Neighbours are heading for Florida in August, barely anyone visible. A Sunday pretending to be otherwise. 

By 1PM, stunned people try to drive cars, but little has changed. 

More distant neighbours are getting work visas for the US and will disappear.

I'm sure the light changes at this time - August and a long way north - there's a catch in the light, an angle, a temperature, a shadow. 

Just a sense of time passing further away.

Bookface

I've avoided BookFace for a while, about a month. It's now peppered with "suggested pages", ads and nonsense. The nonsense is mainly human created, trivia dug from the trivia mines and "shared". Selfies, the red hot news that America is a shit hole run by racists and at risk of electing one as president. A thin spray of helpless references to conflicts we can only experience in nightmares or in 12 second bursts on BookFace.

And endless yakking and holiday snaps and phone videos.

And then I find that a real human being who I actually know [not virtually] is leaving and going to Ethiopia and has invited me and many others for a farewell drink, tonight! As in TODAY! Lauren Elliott, maybe 24, going back to Ethiopia for the 3rd time. 

Young people! I wish I was 40 years younger, I honour and respect them for actually doing and not just wishing.

Paradox.

Hospital

Hospital

I've been three times in the past 3 weeks, more than for decades. Last week I tripped and fell on our allotment, a short and clumsy pirouette into a gooseberry bush and onto scaffold boards. 

Cuts to my head from the gooseberry thorns, skin ripped off my arms by the boards. And a chance to lie in the contents of the water butt for some extra muddiness. Jill took me to the Minor Injuries Clinic at the main hospital. 

I was patched up, given antibiotics and a tetanus shot. I walked out with renewed faith in the NHS and in the human race. Today I went back because the arm wounds looked a bit odd. We sat waiting while Sky News reported on Syria, men running with body bags in shrieking heat, kids running after parents. No one looked at the camera.

It was the Oh Dear moment again, the helpless passive observer distracted into someone else's misery. 

The report ended with Kerry and Lavrov doing their statesmen dance in front of flags in a cool dry dust free unbombed room surrounded by journalists and a small army of minders. The definition of helplessness is to be dependent on people like Kerry and Lavrov to solve  Syria. They will only ever solve their version of the problem; the mild embarrassment of people being destroyed wholesale by assorted psychopathic organisations, from Daesh to the Syrian State via the Turkish State and the Russian State and the Iranian State and the American State. With my mild discomfort and slight worry and tiny wait, we watched until we couldn't any more, moving across the waiting area so Sky News was just a silent pale blue wash over the wall.

Driving home in the pale northern drizzle to coffee and a cigarette, and the opportunity to comment on the barbarity and waste, and to never appear on Sky News while not looking at the camera.

Checking the phone

Checking the phone

I've found myself checking the phone, pointlessly. I look at a news feed in fear, of another atrocity, hoping to be relieved of having to worry that it's going to happen. The filtered instantaneous written and fact checked; the "How has .....affected you?" column.

And the phone stops ringing.

Two days later, you notice it's on silent. 

Small scale creeping nonsense.

a small patch of a very large surface

How can you write on a small patch of a very large surface in the sure and certain knowledge that no one will read it? The surface is the internet and the small patch is this
blog.

This is a ruined but partially rebuilt fireplace.

Why would I read Facebook?

Why would I read Facebook? 

I just found myself stretching for the bookmark for fb, as though an incompleteness was threatened.

I read / looked last night, - rooked / lead - and it was nothing, just tiny pre-toxic precursors of not much. Slowly switching off the connecting channels, single vectors. One way street.

A couple of things : 

I lived for 3 years 9 months next door to an anechoic chamber. It was represented in this dimension by a young couple who operated in carmelite silence. Avoidant and avoiding. Barely able to speak, no eye contact, soundless. He stopped his bass playing, she stopped working and became invisible. The purdah of the suburbs.
He played on his phone in the sun after work, briefly. She came outside one Saturday morning wrapped in a curtain. 

At xmas, I saw her being cajoled by her parents; she sulked and folded her arms.

Then they got married, just the parents. He played the ukelele quietly. They announced via an estate agent's board that they were leaving.

They filled their bin to the point of immobility with crockery, utensils. They moved by the smallest truck. The house was a riot of magnolia. He said "she needs to be near her mother". An unsurprising lack of goodbye.

The other thing :

A young woman walked towards her car pushing a mountain bike. She took off the wheels and stowed it on top of another bike inside a Fiat 500. She grinned and shook my hand.

There's a link between the Trump process and the Referendum process. Neither is about their ostensible purpose - a decision about who will run for president or the status of the EU in the UK. 

The way the Tories staged a Jacobean revenge tragedy without blood, or a series of poorly propped doors falling in sequence splattering the residue of the previous fall. It was a clear out of the politicians and hangers-on and wannabes, an entire Ancien Regime swept out to sea. And its return on the next tide.

There were 12 candidates - a sorry crew of chancers, hacks and "mayor of a small Sun Belt city". And this revved up Homer Simpson caricature - that is a caricature drawn by Homer - with no story, no structure, no staying power, nothing much to say but one-liners about what he didn't like. All delivered like a dodgy comedian, a warm up man, all pointing and pouting and posturing.

He has the same function : to winkle out the Tea Party / Evangelical / party hacks. None of whom even put up a simple response or even an adult reaction to the torrent of nonsense. Even Ted "Machine Gun Bacon" Cruz, zip, nada, nowt. 

To expose them as the hollowed out effigies of competing political factions was beyond the capacity of any opponent, only their own side could attack. The central paradox is there. 

Having shown them to be the worthless hacks they are, he is last man standing and he's worse.

The collapse of the Republican Party and then a new Republican Party run by the same arrangement of power blocks in American capitalism. 

The trick will be to do this while losing the election after months of Trumpery and enraged middle aged clones. 

Or the whole project collapses if he wins - an clinically stupid and borderline fascist chancer elected to the most powerful political position on Earth. That is the end game.

A collapsing superpower run by a clown, with more nuclear weapons than anyone else and the world about to implode. Ayn Rand probably had this idea, Nietszche, Carl Schmidt, any number of lesser luminaries of the psychotic right. A fantasy which can be operationalised with a few million dollars and a willing clown.

Grunting towards November wading through American euphemism and the search for zingers. If they elect Trump, we deserve him. The principle of "Oh dear" and dying capitalism locked together going over the Reichenbach Falls.

And then we wake up. Or not.

An excess

I've finished with Facebook, it has turned into unremitting. Not anything, just unremitting addition of further unremitting and then repeat with variations as unremitting as the previous but only more so.
I watched 3 minutes of edited voxpop of the Cleveland orgy of self importance. And then a 200 year old apple tree. And a friend's child with a giant moth. And a note from my son to say he will have a good time on holiday.

This is not communication, it's not real but is factual. It crashes into a wall, repeatedly.

This seems sane.