Musicman 1
I have been lucky enough to see all sides of the economic stratosphere in my life. East London in the 1980s was still a home to down and outs who lived in cardboard boxes and sucked the very life out of you as you passed by. I remember one woman in particular who grabbed me around the wrist and locked her hand so tight that I was being perambulated at her pleasure. Her skin was ice cold and I could feel my body temperature falling as I struggled to disengage myself from this vampire who basically had nothing to lose!
Travelling to West Africa in 2005 was another lesson in how the poor and the damaged in our societies are generally ignored. I used to visit a local supermarket regularly, and as soon as one particular vagrant had assimilated the information that I was shopping at least twice a week at a particular time, he was there waiting with the usual greeting “I am your king.” A ripped tee shirt and soiled shorts were his only attire, and the rest of the world just carried on as if he was invisible, ignoring his begging, his hunger and his threatening insanity!
Then there are the playgrounds of Barbados and the
Caribbean; the 25 million dollar yachts in the Mediterranean marinas of the
moneyed class; the newly built Palm trees across acres of islands and race
tracks in Dubai, Qatar, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. There are stories of
governments and their wives who have been caught with their pants down! Another
billion dollars is stashed in an off shore account; another prostitute with a
kiss and tell story; another silent witness, and latterly another gun crime by
an unstable student of the political rhetoric that seems to suggest that the
stakes are so high that, if you can get away with the heist and get your nose out
of the trough without being caught, then you really are a winner! Baby Doc
Duvalier, having followed through on his father’s regime of voodoo, mass
sacrifice and terrorism, has returned to Haiti and is genuinely surprised that
he maybe held to account. Ah mean ….Ah played the game…. Ah looted the
national economy…Ah am a mass murderer… what the hell!! Last week the wife
of the president of Tunisia, having woken up in her whorehouse and noticing that
her husband had fled, was allowed to take a convoy of 50 vehicles to the bank
and loot 1.5 billion dollars of gold that is rightly the property of the people
and their economy!
So I get to thinking about the middle ground; the silent
majority; the stable core voters who make up that middle ground in any
democracy. We voted for the Left, and they turned out to be so economically
inept that the national debt reached pandemic proportions! We voted for the
Right, and lo and behold they cut back on all of the social programmes that the
Left had spent so much money on, and then gave the banks and all of the moneyed
class even more tax breaks, and free parking at their favourite “lets bash the
poor and kick ‘em when they’re down” mausoleum! Yet that middle ground
core vote continues to pay ridiculous prices for food, fuel, clothing and
anything that a good socialist economy would provide at basic cost! Is it
apathy, ignorance, a lily livered backbone or just plain stupid; or indeed all
of these?
I have been living and working in the UK for 2 years having
spent the previous 3 years in West Africa. If the Gambia was a culture shock and
steep learning curve, the return to the UK has been a confrontation of epic
proportions. I spend some hours each week doing consultancy work, marketing in
the Solar Energy industry. I believe in the ethics, the principle, the product
and the necessity to provide an alternative to fossil fuels. It also gives me
the chance to talk on a daily basis to a complete cross section of the
population, and I have to say that the results are revealing in a way that I
never would have imagined.
The behaviour of the poor, the ignored, the ignorant, those
whose shot at education was denied, the new money whose arrogance knows no
bounds, the old money whose attitudes are 13th century feudal
aristocratic at best, and the recent immigration of Eastern Europeans searching
for the dream, would seem to suggest that there is in fact no middle ground core
vote left!
Pluto was conjunct Uranus in the 1960s. This unleashed a
fundamental energy change into our society and our culture that cannot be
stopped. You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube. We had explosions of
cultural expression, theatre groups, great rock music, empathy with each other
and a vision for the future ( I do believe they laughed at the mention of the
word Greenpeace). There was a standing joke in the 1970s that all of the hippies
were now working for the local council. They were economically sand bagged,
blindsided and marginalized into being completely ineffectual. The Thatcheriser
( sorry Lady Thatcher of Grantham corner shop) followed swiftly on and proceeded
to show everybody that greed and selfishness were not only good, but also
created an attitude that would leave your neighbour dead and his wife your
servant! Cogito Ergo Ego Sum … I
think that’s great therefore my ego is unsurpassable and fuck you and the
community!
So now we have the approaching first quarter of the Pluto
… Uranus story…a square in early Capricorn and Aries soon come. It is as if
we are getting a first school report on how all of our dreams as manifest in
1966-69 have made it through to mainstream life as we know it. The result is
worse than disappointing; it is the worst kind of Shakespearian tragedy. The
tragic we can live with; shit happens! But a tragedy, an act of gross stupidity
based on all of the most basic drives of men and women, is just too absurd to
contemplate.
While African Americans, particularly in the U.S.A., have
led the way in progressing the realisation of Dr King’s dream, there has been
absolutely no progress whatsoever in the American and European white middle
class. While successive Marxist governments in Africa have led the way in
educating their children, nurturing the ever more important relationship with
China and the East, and generally producing attitude scales that create cultural
innovation and solidarity among ethnic groups, the waspish white Anglo Saxon
protestant/catholic self serving core voting middle class have become notorious
for their selfishness, greed, holier than thou proselytising, corruption,
stupidity and tunnel vision that got us into at least two world wars in the
first place.
Today I spent the morning talking to a sample group of
residents of villages in Northamptonshire UK. One particular village is owned,
and is indeed part of the estate of Earl Spencer, the brother of the late Diana,
Princess of Wales. After the usual pleasantries one is engaged in a discourse
about Solar energy. Imagine my surprise and disbelief to discover that these
particular residents are not even allowed to have television aerials on their
roofs, let alone Solar panels. At the first intoxicating whiff of feudalistic 13th
century aristocratic colonial posturing, I was engaged! Conversation followed
conversation and my disbelief slowly turned to shock and generally distaste.
They not only, as a core voting middle class wholeheartedly supported this crass
stupidity, but dismissed Solar energy with outright conviction and belief in
their own omnipotent membership of some long lost fossil fuelled civilisation
that takes no account of anybody from a lower caste, lower tribe or lower stairs
position!
Middle England! I have tonight…as Jupiter moves into
Aries for the first time since its last ingress on the 13.02 1999…thought long
and hard about what the incumbent attitudes and self-serving, colonialist,
ghost-ridden, empire-seeking, resource-stealing, world domination programmes
have done to our DNA. Eris is indeed about to reek havoc with the identity that
we as nations and individuals cling to, at the expense of truth! Therefore, as the
fragmentation is underscored by the Uranian and Plutonic power of
transformation, is it really any wonder
that the middle class is beginning to eat itself?
As I sit and listen to Piers Morgan and George Clooney
talking about spy-in-the-sky cameras, set up to try to avoid the genocide that
will be the fall-out from the vote in Southern Sudan, it really is time to say
to that spineless pack of morons who make up the silent majority, the core
voting middle class, the wealth seeking, cap tilting, need for approval white
trash that has made a mess of every country it ever colonised… Fuck You! You
are wrong! You were always wrong! Lets cut the crap! The oil is a fossil. Its
running out. Clean and green is the future. Work it! Get your head out from up
your ass! Join the human party!
The dignity that I have experienced in West Africa…. from the Marxist civil servant who was a room mate of Eldridge Cleaver in New York while studying for his PHD, to the cleaners and agricultural workers who meet for prayers on a Friday and share the joy of festivals such as Tobaski…. puts the wastage of the consumer driven western world in a very clear perspective! Put another way….for the price of a gallon of unleaded fuel at the UK pumps this weekend…you could feed 15 people in Africa for a month. For 2.5 pence…1/40th of a UK pound……1.5 US cents….1/60th of a US dollar…..you could get 100 miles of energy for your electric car!
How many more…..countries will suffer the rape and pillage and the fall-out of such dreadful natural disasters that are currently ongoing around the world? How much more ….of a burden will the people be asked to carry? Is it that we have, in the Reichian sense, become so impotent that we need the supremacy and the butchery of a war zone in our living rooms to get our sexual juices flowing? Are we so passive that the very taking of breath in our lives is simply to avoid the stench of the rotting karma that awaits us for the despicable way that we behave? We have got a whole lot of work to do…..!!
Africa…once it is blessed with peaceful settlement…has a cultural renaissance to build and can look forward to an exciting and a richly rewarding journey.
The white Anglo Saxon protestant/catholic American/European
middle class has a karmic date with its own mortality! We are the children of
those who trail blazed their particular kind of extortion, guilt and genocide
around the world. It is time to shake the tree to its foundations!
It isn’t about the Left! It isn’t about the Right. It is about the Wrong. The wrongdoing that has become so deeply embedded in our DNA that we are incapable of telling the difference!
Paul Hill