Plato V Aristotle

So Aristotle and Plato set the debate for the last two thousand years in the West as to what life, reality and man might be. As I writer of experimental work, I rather reject Aristotle's linearities of narrative, of beginnings, middles and ends. And I certainly reject his notion of catharsis in art, leaving the audience purged of the emotions the artist has evoked in their art, so that they leave the theatre/library or whatever in perfect, moderate equilibrium, rather than having their passions aroused by the issues of the art work. A fundamentally conservative notion of art's function, rather than allowing it revolutionary possibilities. 

I am more sympathetic to the work of Plato, though not his somewhat elitist politics as expressed in "The Republic". But what I take from him, is his notion that all material things in life are but poor copies or representations of their ideal form. Now I don't believe in the notion of an ideal form for each thing, but I do credit the notion that what we take for reality is an illusion, or a representation or a symbol. Usually a symbol given a name in language, which seems to echo the notion of nominalism, that we class things together in groups by similarity of their features or functions and that these are given a single name (or noun) by which they are all known, whether they are a good match or not. 

But there really is only one way to settle this properly for once and for all and I present it to you below.

Glossary - Ancient Greek

Amanuensis - someone employed to write down the words of others

The Symposium - Plato's treatise on love

Encomium - high praise or eulogy

Helios - Ancient Greek God of the sun

Hemlock - Socrates was sentenced to death by Athens, the method by drinking the poison hemlock

Ontology - the study of the nature of existence / being

Academy - The name of the philosophy school established by Plato

Lyceum - The name of the philosophy school established by Aristotle

Periphrastic - circumlocution

Philosopher Kings - Plato's suggestion as to who should rule societies; the philosopher kinds would be the wisest through their study (which would allow them to approach an understanding of the ideal forms), but they would also be disinterested rulers as they would be forbidden to have money or own property.

Dialectic - formal method of logical deduction, involving thesis, its antithesis and then a synthesis of the two to provide a truth

Pangloss - character invented by Voltaire who is an eternal optimist - therefore Plato uses an anachronism to back up his claim that Aristotle is being anachronistic...

War in the Peloponnese - One of the wars between Athens and Sparta

Hoplite - Greek soldier

Platonic Ideal - Plato's theory of Ideal Forms

Datum of My Senses - Aristotle was an empiricist

Puppet Show/ Shadow - Plato's metaphor or the cave which underlines his entire theory of material reality and ideal forms

Plato's Cave -  see shadow above

Sophist - Plato uses the voices of the Sophists to argue with Socrates, Sophists were intellectually wooly and their arguments ultimately could not hold water

Polis - The Greek city state such as Athens or Sparta

Demos - The population entitled to vote in Athens

Hippocrates - The father of medicine, hence the "Hippocratic Oath"

Catharsis - Aristotle's notion of the drama on stage being such as to purge the audience of the emotions aroused by the play's action by the end of the play, so that they are left in perfect equilibrium rather than worked up. 

Lysistrata - Play by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens withhold sex from their partners in a strike

Techne - The craft of any art

Thespian - Actor

Mimesis - Imitation, hence 'mime', 'mimicry'

Hubris - The fatal character flaw in any hero of tragedy that ultimately brings him to his tragic fate

Hesiod - Greek poet

Wine Casks - Plato's works were all lectures that were written down. Aristotle's were all notes never published, but were rediscovered when a collection of them were found inside an empty wine barrel

Discovered / Anagorisis - Aristotle's term for discovery that was a key component in tragic drama for him. Not just a reveal, but a discovery of past history such as Orestes learning who his true parents are. 

Catachresis - rhetorical device of deliberately misusing words, such as mixed metaphors

Nike - Greek god of victory

Apollo - Greek god of the sun

Glossary - Hip-Hop

Frontin' - putting on a facade

Flexin' - showing off, as in flexing your muscles

Grille - the face

Shill - someone operating under false pretences to spread a message

Trill - a mixture of true and real, therefore more certain than both

Snitch - An informer

Full text:

Yo yo yo Plato/ Socrates’ amanuensis hoe

Frontin’ OG philosophy/ How bout some original thinking P?

It ain’t only hot air/ All wasted there

In your loved-up posse’s Symposium/

That ain’t encomiums, it’s full-on brown nosin’

Your tongue so far up where Helios don’t shine

You can taste the hemlock in the upper intestine 

Move over man/ Gonna get beat down

Your ontology shows you for a clown

Gonna take me your crown

Set that wreath upon my head

Give Athens some relief from constant grief

At generation after generation of war dead

All through having followed what you said

Down at your Academy of agonies

Now they roll up to my Lyceum instead

Word up, something’s buggin little philosophy cousin Aristotle 

White beard of sagacity or bleached from a bottle? 

Audacity to call yourself the father of logic/ So chronic 

You render your audiences catatonic

The flaws in your deduction are so drastic/

Must be why you resort to being periphrastic

You’re the student but I’m the Master/ my epigrams cut deep and flow faster

My busts are hewn from marble /yours cast in mere plaster 

If it ever came to pass/ Your Republic would be a disaster

Statues fall from their plinths amidst quaking laughter

Pie in the sky utopia can’t exist/ And you know that, you two bit hypocrite

You were my teacher/ But now you’re reachin’ 

Preachin’ fascistic Philosopher kings                                    

A most egregious aegis of state power

That would make even war hero you cower

Didn’t you use the fine art of rhetoric/ In representin’ Socratic dialectic/ 

Mainly to slam the poetic/ Arts would be outlawed in the Republic/ As way too hectic/ So your own writing would be banned as heretic

It can’t be fascistic cos/ that’s anachronistic Cuzz/ As you well know Mr Pangloss/ 

In our day tyrant was the regular epithet/ Part’a’ what they do down in Sparta 

Plato went toe to toe with those Martinets/ Not one iota of being a martyr/ 

When were you ever in armour? 

Your trembling knees/ At the thought of war in the Peloponnese

Your dick shrunk to the size of a chipolata/ 

I relished being a hoplite/ 

But you got no stomach for any kind of fight/ Least of all this one right? 

The antithesis of moderation in all things/ Is not extremism 

It’s the ideal form, see reason 

The Platonic Ideal? / Get real

You be tweekin if you’re believin’ in

Things that can’t exist/ What’s that make me Scotch mist? 

I credit the datum of my senses/ The material world just ain’t cast from pretences

Life is just a puppet show?/ We’re substantially more than our shadow

Besides we all know a small phallus/ Represents proportional balance

The triumph of the intellect

Over base desires of a beastly aspect

So your flexing is perplexing

Don’t get up in my grille, shill

You be trippin’ with your trill, still

Truth is not the real/ Only the universal ideal

And with all your senses you don’t get to feel

Only the educated soul can seal that deal

Plato, Bro, you be jiving

Slaves in a cave is no good

Even helots don’t live in a subterranean hood

That lame clique is just a Sophist trick 

Homie, enough with your theoretical baloney

Ya wanna prevent civil strife/ Draw lessons from real life

Scale up the state of wedlock with the wife

Ya get the city-state where unity is rife

Fuck da polis, you ran off to tutor a prince

Pimpin’ to Macedon so Athens took a sackin’

They death rowed Socrates for way less than rattin

Ya got the digits of Hippocrates and some riches?

Cos you know what happens to snitches

…They be gettin’ stitches 

You advocate citizen rule, fool 

You reckon the Demos is above being cruel? 

Word!/ Absurd / Follow the herd

You’ve heard the crowd/ When they’re aroused 

By the fashionable drama of the day on stage

So that epic poetry is no longer all the rage

Each spectacle grabs them by the testicles

Catharsis ain’t even worth a dis, since

Rationing irrational passions? Convinced? Nope

It ain’t dope it’s wack, Jack

What do you know of catharsis? 

Full of vinegar & piss, with no wife, you’ve never been kissed 

You wouldn’t have suffered under The Lysistrata 

Can’t mourn what you never missed

Your stigmata, you don’t know art from farts

Preachin’ you can’t come to wisdom through the thespian

That’s cos your techne got no heart

My Poetics lays out all the dramatic devices

And advises

Mimesis is the state of how things is

Hubris the nemesis of the man who rises 

Above his station, over that of the nation

You get all empirical/ Me I prefer the lyrical

What genius uses scientific method

To parse and study the odes of Hesiod?

No wonder you never lectured

On your specious conjectures

But hid your teachings in wine casks

Only discovered by drunks seeking to refill their flasks

Rooting around in the lees

Is that what you meant by Anagorisis?

I call catachresis!   *

And catharsis, slump back into mindless bliss

The word comes from a root meaning to upchuck

So your whole thesis comes unstuck

You’re the only oracle who manages to be ahistorical

Nike grant me now your laurel of victory

And Apollo, him his lowly sorrow

* Should have been Aristotle's line in the video, but I'd lost the will to live by then... 

I Stand with The National Gallery 27

The first ever political demonstration I ever participated in was during the mid-1980s when I was a student and we were protesting against the new government policy of privatising State-run services. In this case it was the cleaning services of National Health Hospitals, which were the first in what was to become a creeping tide of such government ideological driven policy. The justification was always cost efficiencies, but what panned out was a loss of all the institutional expertise built up over decades and a lack of inherent commitment as the drive was the private contractor's profits and not any allegiance to the institution being serviced. The rise of the hospital 'super-bugs' (hospital acquired infections) was a direct consequence of such corner-cutting and cost-saving. 

It was on that first demo I learned that if you're using bed sheets for your banners, you need to ensure you cut holes in the fabric for the wind to pass through, otherwise your banner serves as a ship's sail and you get blown about like a vessel on the high seas...!

I no longer go on demos. The reasons why are explored in my novel "Not In My Name". I also happen to have as one of my roles in my day job, an oversight over HR and the attendant legislation. So it grieves me that some 34 years after that first protest against cutting jobs under the supposed reason of 'cost saving', that recently another example has come to my attention.

After government ideology pursued privatising a whole raft of local and national services, then they attacked the arts. Previously the arts were partly supported by state funding because it was viewed as an asset to the nation, be it our souls, our welfare, our mental health, our personal development or whatever. The Arts were held to be a good thing and worth supporting in a modest way. But that cut cut cut 80s ideology (these days dressed up in the guise of 'Austerity'), demanded that Arts funding should be slashed and that the Arts had to support itself, that only the bottom line of profit would determine what art gets made. This had a chilling effect, in that less commercial art was less likely to be ventured and risked by both venues and artists themselves. 

But though at a lower level, the Arts are still supported from central funds, through the Arts Council. Museums that are free entry are supported by government funding. And yet here we have a national museum, The National Gallery, who are still pursuing the turkeys voting for Christmas policy of cutting their own costs, in this case through legally dubious and ethically abhorrent means (see below). Instead of standing up for the rights of arts, some institutions are complicit in the creeping assault on them by allowing that the government are right in pursuing these policies. 

In the case of the National Gallery, they have made a group of 27 arts educators who had worked there for many years, redundant without any of the usual attendant employment rights and compensations. They have used the ploy of saying that such workers were self-employed. The workers not unreasonably are taking them to an employment tribunal, but as is ever the case with any legal process, that costs money and they are seeking to raise funds so that they can at the very least have their case put forward and heard. I am not an expert on employment tribunals, but longevity of work for the same employers usually entails full employment status with all the attendant rights. Thus they believe they have a strong case and in the UK, tribunals often find for the workers claiming rights have been denied.

So I am squarely with the @standwithNG27 and you can find out about their case and offer support if you are so minded here. 

As it's going to tribunal, at least I won't have to cut holes in any bed linen.


*

The Grenfell Tower Fire - How local government ideology has directly led to this tragedy

What Did The Ancient Greeks Ever Do For Us?

I mean apart from democracy, philosophy, architecture, statuary and theatre, what did the Greeks ever give us? They always come off favourably in comparison with the supposedly more barbarian and plagiarist Romans, but for 'democracy' you also had 'despotism' (read Plato's "The Republic" which shows the way democracy can very easily slide into tyranny through its own lack of true awareness of important values). However it's the philosophy and the theatre which I really want to challenge for the supreme value of their heritage as it has passed down to us. 

I'm not going to say too much about the philosophy, except where it has resonance in art. Plato's phenomenalism is a crucial concept to how we perceive reality, with his famous example of slaves in a cave viewing the shadows thrown on the cave walls by their fire, equating to perceptive reality for these slaves who have never seen the world outside of the cave. He derives this example through his belief that the whole world of appearances which we take for reality, is but a degraded version of true reality and (aesthetic/mathematical) beauty.

For the highest existence of any object is its ideal form and in our world, actual objects never attain such an ideal form. Now this represents an important way of thinking & perceiving even in our modern world. Of course there are no 'ideal' forms of objects, but what there are is linguistic nouns which categorise all sorts of various 'non-ideal' forms of similar things; all breeds of dogs are 'Dogs' is the simplest representation of this. But consider something more debatable - is a flatpack table in Ikea's warehouse still a table before it gets sold and erected? Is a slave or hired prostitute at an orgy, who is ordered to bend over so that food can be served from their naked back, are they a table? Is the ammo box that the soldier utilises while on patrol to quickly scoff down his rations, a table, or is it still only an ammo box containing rocket propelled grenades? 

Phenomenalism and particularly Nominal Phenomenalism, means that the supposed evidence of our senses and particularly the dominant one of sight, actually goes through a pre-filter of language, grouping similar things together as a shorthand that may not in fact do justice to the complexity of 'reality'. And this filter of language is of course the mainstay and dominant tool of us writers. We can use it to not only describe reality, but to challenge its consensus by really examining its linguistic short-cuts. So we could and possibly should be challenging accepted reality and showing how it has been constructed. Those writers and philosophers who study signs and symbols (semiologists) do this on one level, but writers can bring it to the linguistic realm. 

Now let's come to Greek Theatre. It is absolutely entwined with politics in Ancient Greece, that politics being in the main direct participatory democracy (the military oligarchy of Sparta didn't produce much in the way of playwrights). Plays in Athens were performed during religious festivals, the rest of the time the theatres in the small administrative demes were used for political meetings of the whole community entitled to vote. Plays in these festivals were in competition and accordingly were sponsored by patrons, most of whom were professional politicians, else citizens who wanted to wield influence. Many plays debated the issues of recent or contemporary events, while comedies lambasted real prominent citizens to their faces sat there in the audience, to remind them of their place to serve the Polis rather than their own interests. The ancient Greek word for playwright has as its root 'teacher' or trainer, while the word 'Praxis' which Aristotle coined for the dramatic action, also stands for a body of practical political action.  

So Greek plays were not politically neutral and for all their show at having both sides of the debate (much like Plato's dialectic philosophical style), actually there was really only one message either the playwright, or his patron wanted to impart (just like Plato's "Republic", though his other dialectic works were more ambiguous and even handed in their conclusions). Plays were always geared to preaching to their audience and that audience were those with the vote in the democracy (so not women or slaves who were excluded from voting). The plays preached reasoned debate, when in fact they were tilting for a single point of view, with their own constructed democracy as the highest value (not an 'ideal' one in Plato's eyes, far from it as above). Those individualist citizens who weren't team players, or those with a tendency towards demagoguery, were constantly being defeated on stage.

For such men displayed 'hubris', that is the excess of pride in imagining yourself above your station within the society. Any individual citizen who wasn't a team player, was regarded as having hubris and all Tragic dramas in the Greek canon had men brought low by their hubris. Indeed even the word 'hero' which reverberates so powerfully in our own society, initially emerged from Greek theatre, not existing outside of that context beforehand. The dramatic hero is a demiurge, that is a man who sees himself superior to his fellow man, halfway to being a god and of course, such tragic heroes are felled by their hubris. The stage actors had to play both heroes and gods, an act and an appropriation involving of hubris in itself just in case any of them got ideas above their station. Hubris implicitly reinforces a 'know your place' attitude, for to flout it inevitably means personal destruction. 

The clinching point about this propagandist theatre comes from a word the Greek's themselves coined, 'catharsis'. Catharsis means a purging, initially a purification in the religious sense. But when applied to the theatre by Aristotle in "Poetics" it has a more manipulative meaning. Theatre, in line with praxis, is vicarious, the audience experience the play as brought to them by the actors. We don't know whether they were passive in the amphitheatres, or like Shakespeare's 'Pit' rowdy & interactive with the stage. But by the end of a tragedy, having seen Orestes put out his own eyes, or the abasement and cruelty visited upon "The Trojan Women", or the double suicide of the lovers to conclude "Antigone", the audience are purged of their passions through the very extremity of the emotions wrought in them by the action on stage. That is, the playwright has taken them on such a journey, they are useless for anything at the end of the play. Certainly no call to action, only the playwright's sly reinforcement of whatever particular message he was putting across and the audience too played out to resist that message. Wrung out and spent, they go home marvelling at the stagecraft, story and spectacle, confirmed in the moral teaching the playwright conveyed. 

I could go on about how the heritage from the Greeks has further hamstrung us in our modern age. That Greek philosophy's main thrust was seeking to answer the question 'what constitutes a good life?', which for Plato, in the context of a city, was living a 'Just' life. For Aristotle it was living a balanced life, avoiding excess at either end of the spectrum of behaviour. Now this may or may not be a reasonable philosophical question to consider (I would say there are more pressing ones along the line of what is man, why is he here on earth, what is he supposed to achieve in his short life?) But - and you can't necessarily blame the Greeks for this, their inquiry into goodness was hijacked and taken on by the Christian theologian-cum-philosophers, whose answer was of course faith in God and following a set of moral and behavioural commandments. Again, a rigid moral unilateralism that is today in tatters and has led to the evils of slavery, colonialism, subjection of women and our own bodies, which have only furthered the crippling issues we face today. 

So yes, I do declare, what have the Ancient Greeks done for us, except to set up the parameters by which we have navigated to our very troubling modern age? 

Dear Teen Me

A few years ago I was invited by the fabulous "Dear Teen Me" website to pen a letter from my contemporary self, addressing the teenage me. Sadly the website no longer functions, but I'm reproducing that letter I Wrote for the site.

Dear Marc from author Marc Nash

Seeing as like the primitive tribesman you have a dislike of having your soul captured by a camera, tracking this shot down from your Gap year back in 1982 was something of a coup. Fortunately even though you have no pictures of your youth, your mother clung on to the few photographic morsels you granted her. This is you sat at the top of a cathedral either in Paris or Italy in the days you used to travel. And yes you are wearing a music T-Shirt, that of Joy Division a band who were to play a very important part in your life, not least because one of your first plays was about them and the fact that their lead singer committed suicide. But here at age eighteen, the sun is shining, you’re underneath the sky on top of the world where anything is possible ... and you’re wearing summery black!

*

1977 aged thirteen and the year of family parties sitting in marquees in back gardens talking about punk rock. Well Marc, you never did master the paltry four strings of a bass guitar and fulfill your dream of being in a band, but you did make it into the arts. You didn’t write any lyrics, but you did still compose words in the form of stage plays and novels. Even though you have still never read a classic novel other than the handful you studied at school. At the age of fourteen, it was a recommendation from one of your cool older cousins to listen to The Cure’s song “Killing An Arab” and then read Albert Camus’ novel “The Outsider” that kindled your love of modern novels, while still burning the fires for music from which you have never looked back.

Teenage years were when you finally turned your head away from the childish world centred around the home and started to think about the wider world. You discovered politics through a concern with the nuclear arms race and mutually assured destruction. That fusion of the political and the fear of death has never left you and permeates all your writing as you now approach the age of 50. Cleaning the blood up off the floor of a parent after a serious suicide attempt in your last year of teenagehood probably saw to that. Though a terrifying and brutal initiation into other people’s misery, it has set you up for not shying away from tackling dark subjects in your writing and probing the extremes of human behaviour. When you wrote about suicide bombers in “Not In My Name”, you could balance the ‘bomber’ aspect with the ‘suicide’ part like few others possibly could.

There were wars a plenty around the world while you were a teenager. On your doorstep there were the charmingly euphemistically named “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. There was the ongoing conflict in the Middle East which was of grave concern to your family, but which you couldn’t engage with as you held an opposite point of view from them. In your Gap year Britain sailed an army halfway around the world to bafflingly fight over some barely inhabited islands against the Argentinians. That was when you realised you had a love-hate relationship with your own country, another theme you would go on to write about extensively, particularly in your debut novel “A,B&E”. Interestingly you chose to write that from the point of view of exile from Britain, even though after extensive Gap year travel as a teenager, you resolutely decided to stay in London and set your face against further travel. These days you don’t have holidays, you only write in your time off. You travel extensively in your imagination.

Yet it was a another conflict about which little was reported because journalists couldn’t gain access to the closed country, which really caught your attention, perhaps because you could not confront these other wars which were supposed to prompt your allegiances more directly. And that was the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the subsequent horrors of the Killing Fields and the disastrous famine. That warzone resonated more than any other with you, but you could never find the words to express such a scale of depravity and horror. It would take you 30 years until you were finally able to write a story about it. Before then you had written on Northern Ireland and the Middle East, intricate, complex works making no judgements of the various parties involved. But your story on Cambodia pulled no punches in delivering its searing condemnation of the cult of death.

And where did this passion for writing and particular the novel develop from? Well you got into Britain’s supposed best university to further you hunger for knowledge, But your were appalled by the closed and prejudiced minds of many of your fellow students. You were also disillusioned with your History course as you felt the teachers were not really interested in teaching, only in pursuing their own research. You were on the point of walking out, when a new student theatre stage space was opened and you decided to try your hand at writing stage plays. Even then with no experience, instinctively and temperamentally you opted for some radical staging and the whole play was performed behind a wire mesh fence separating the cast from the audience. And because you had difficulty casting it, you decided to back up your words by stepping in and performing yourself. You even learned to smoke for the part and scaled the fence to confront the audience at the play’s ending. From that short 20 minute piece, you then went up to the Edinburgh fringe Festival with two new plays, which in retrospect was complete madness, but you had no fear. You were hooked by creative writing back and you also completed your degree, as playwriting kept you in college.

You knew an office job wasn’t for you, so playwriting seemed like a good way to avoid that, which of course it wasn’t as there was no money to be made. After four years you secured a job in an independent record store to pay the bills, but the number work there left the word side of your brain free to continue writing in the evenings. You kept pushing the boundaries in what you did, moving away from dialogue and more towards movement and dance. The dancers looked at you like you were mad, what need did they have of the written and spoken word? It was only cut short when your beloved twin boys arrived and you became the main carer for them. No more hanging out networking in theatre bars for you, with bottle feeds and dirty diapers to see to at the double.

So you turned to writing novels through the night, interrupted only by feeds and changes. The books you liked to read weren’t really out there in the market, so you set out to write them. Stories that pushed the narrative form into new places, books of ideas and a rigorous pursuit and examination of language. And once self-published, you started giving live readings, the closest to the dream of performing live in a band. And you put on a show live. You inhabited the characters, you dialogued with the audience through the way you staged your readings. 

So it wasn’t quite how you imagined it might turn out, but looking back a lot of the seeds were in place in the teen you. Here’s to our salute of the old age us, pen in arthritic hand still writing and challenging the status quo.

Love and respect

marc x

What Election Campaigns Fail To Communicate

A Party Manifesto is a curious beast. It offers policies on almost every issue that effects a nation, or if not policies, a stated ideal. But no Party ever wins an election and then delivers every item. Also do supporters agree with every single policy outlined in a manifesto, especially given how broad a spectrum of political values and views the major parties represent within their membership.

This election more than others I can recall, has also seen that rather than the detail of a manifesto, the thrust of the campaigning is to associate your party with just one or two key values, or to associate the other lot with one or two key values; 'Tax and Spend' the Tories accuse Labour of. 'The Nasty Party of welfare cuts' Labour try and dub the Tories. It was curious how we had a phoney war beginning of the campaign, when we were drip-fed one policy a day by each party, because the manifestos weren't out. We had a 7-leader televised debate again before any had launched their manifestos. Manifestos seem to have become less and less significant. I wonder what the percentage of the voting population is that have read at least one manifesto? Tiny I would imagine.

In the past I have spoiled my ballot paper by writing 'None Of The Above' on my ballot paper. Mainly because there was no protest party I could vote for, since only the three main parties stood in my constituency and I simply couldn't support any of them with my vote. However recently other parties have started standing here (representing how these parties are standing right across the country). I voted Green in the last couple of ballots. I was intending to do so again this time round, when I noticed a twitter debate about one of their policies. They were proposing to limit artists' copyright to just 14 years after publication/performance. That is after just 14 years, the author ceases to own and control their work, but is free to view/perform for anybody. Currently copyright only ceases 70 years after the death of the artist. As a writer theoretically I'm affected by this. But since I only earn pin money from my work, losing control over my back catalogue wouldn't really affect me financially. But for artists whose income rests on their creations it would seriously affect their livelihoods. Plus copyright for 70 years after death allows the provision of a financial legacy as well as the artistic one for a couple of generations.

However, this policy as outlined here is completely ripped from its context. Whether you agree with them or not, the Greens are offering a genuinely radical vision of society. Labour may mouth platitudes about equality, but the Greens lay out a theory of change to enshrine this. They seek to remunerate all citizens equally, (a citizen salary if you will), which means getting away from the aspirational culture of job status, materialism, consumerism, all underpinned with conserving the rapidly depleting resources of the planet. If this has echoes of Communism to your ears, you're not far wrong; one of the things that ultimately brought down Soviet Russia was absenteeism and poor productivity in the workplace, because the workers were completely unmotivated. If a Doctor has to train for seven years to qualify, what is his incentive if he earns little more than a waiter?

The policy limiting copyright falls under this template for society. Private ownership is not community minded. Art should be accessible and available to all, for the enrichment of society as a whole. And this to my mind embodies the whole problem of the Green manifesto. They have to get across the whole vision and the rationale for it, so that releasing sound bite policies such as copyright just makes no sense. And it is so radical a vision, it is a huge undertaking to convey it to the populace at large. I have seen no evidence of this being undertaken. Possibly this is because the main conduits of press and media are not giving them much exposure as a minority party. But the message isn't getting out there, so they come across as looking like killjoys armed with a quiverful of policies attacking random social groups.

I mentioned that to some their vision for society may smack of Communism, but it also shares certain ideas from Anarchist theory. In my youth I read a lot of Anarchist texts and developed my own ideal for society. And in many ways it shared much of the Green vision, only I imagined it could only operate in a society in which work was minimised through automation, so that we dwelled in a leisure economy; free to spend our time socialising, making art, playing sport or just thinking and enacting ideas. In such a model, private production and ownership of art would make less sense if we were all at it. Therefore copyright might have had no real place. But the Green model still quite rightly assumes a working life for citizens (technology seems to have created longer working hours for us all through the drive of the market and fear of losing our jobs, rather than shorter ones), therefore the context for art does not change significantly from what it is now in a free market economy. The Greens pledge in the manifesto to invest heavily in the Arts, perhaps as a fillip to us artists cheesed off by losing ownership of our work in under a decade and a half. Therefore in a way they are not pursuing all that radical a version since they are still operating a capitalist system, just one with many limits and constraints.

So the bald statement of a limit on copyright turned off those in the artistic community who thought of voting Green this time round. The counter to that of it being a piece in a large jigsaw to radically transform society completely got lost because that larger vision has not been rolled out to the population in any significant way. But even when one takes the time to consider the whole picture proposed by the greens, I'm afraid they fall short and the copyright issue perfectly illustrates as to why. To my mind, their whole approach smacks of the influence of the Occupy movement. It's all very well holding discussion groups under canvas and batting around ideas, but unless on leaving those encampments you go and spread the word, they will not magically percolate into the mainstream. There is an exclusion and elitism about such an approach, that somehow if you don't join you don't get access to the key ideas to the magic kingdom. And while the Greens have knitted together many ideas into a coherent (if challengable) theory, not many of these ideas are actually new. that's what Occupy failed to see, as they imagined they were the first people to have such ideas and to be working on them in a uniquely creative way. I did my own work on this in my teens, since these ideas have been around for many decades. And still few in that camp have gone out to spread the word and preach the vision.

Sorry Greens, you've lost my vote even though temperamentally your vision is closest to my own. It took a bit of reading around the policy on copyright for me to reach this conclusion, rather than the threat to copyright itself. I've seen it argued that parties with no chance of getting into government don't really need a manifesto representing a raft of ideas they won't ever be called on to enact into law. This is debatable as through the exigencies of coalition government that we are likely to be faced with, smaller parties will actually have a shot at forming a government. But one thing is for sure, the Greens so want to transform society, the odd policy from their manifesto adopted here and there is not really what they are about. They of all parties DID need to produce a manifesto to lay out their wholesale vision. And it is the complete manifesto that ultimately sinks them in a way it doesn't for other parties who will blithely ignore or rescind great tranches of what they promise in their pages.

Second Class Citizens

Britain has for the last two parliamentary terms, one Labour, one Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition, had a black hole of debt. Although the current Chancellor George Osborne claims a growing economy will fill this hole, whoever triumphs at the next election will almost certainly tackle it with a swingeing raft of austerity cuts.




The problem with this, at least as manifested under the current government, is who suffers from the cuts. Despite government claims to the contrary, we are not in this together. Irrespective of the maths which deem cutting benefits and services of the poorest and most needy will reap the required amount of savings, rather than increased taxes on the rich, and passing over the ideological strand behind this decision, the problem is what it says about the people you will target for savings and those you won't.




Mrs Thatcher also inherited a financial black hole. She went about it through a mixture of increased economic growth (share ownership, the financial Big bang, buying council homes for private ownership) and cutting back services and benefits (local government funding, the arts, student grants, unemployment benefit). Everything had to be justified in terms of the free market. Did it turn a profit, or did it cost the State to provide? People were formally costed, either as productive, or as a drain, as a burden to the State. The productive elements of the working class were welcomed with offers to buy shares and council houses and to do everything on credit (for which we are now paying with our debt crisis). Those less well-off were pretty much left to sink in unemployment, sink housing and failing schools. And before you think this is merely a case of Thatcher or Conservative-bashing, Blair and Brown did nothing to reverse these policies of any significance. Those places that rioted in London in 2011 were the same as had rioted under Thatcher in the 80s. This was the next generation, the children and grandchildren of the earlier rioters. Nothing had materially changed within their communities in 30 years.




With Mrs Thatcher having executed the first raft of cuts to welfare benefits and services, what else remained for the current government to make savings on? They have gone far further than Thatcher ever did, targeting the disabled, people in social housing with spare rooms (a punishment for not buying your Council House?), police and army numbers cut back t5o the bare bone and despite Lib-Dem promises, an increase in student loans to pay for tuition. Yet no one is held responsible for the economic crisis that blighted so many people's lives against which this backdrop of cuts was taking place. The Power companies went unchecked on their price rises and recently laggardly response to the collapse in the oil price. Unmerited bonuses to executives leaving their jobs in failure are also allowed to proceed, unless the resignee has the grace to forego what they are entitled to, their reward for failure.


So here's the thing. All people having been costed. the decision has been made that money will be clawed-back from those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, those more vulnerable and needy, rather than those higher up. This implicitly, or maybe even explicitly, avows that such people are worth less to the government and the State than those higher up the ladder. A two-tiered system of favour and prejudice if ever there was one. The calculation is these people cost the state more and are likely to return less to the coffers, therefore they are the ones ripe for plucking for savings. Rather than tax those more able to cope and who can contribute more to State coffers. This is what happens when people are reduced to financial assets or liabilities. What does it behove a State to do to earn the loyalty and allegiance of its citizens? Not to scare off the rich with higher tax rates, or to provide a minimum level of help and assistance for those who are the worst off in society? If the rich can be frightened away so easily, then they are not really that committed to Britain, but only to their money. If the poor have their safety net shredded and ripped away from them, then that is not a State I want to pledge my allegiance to either.


This is not the politics of envy, this is the politics of decency and propriety. The terrorists win if in the campaign to defeat them, we sacrifice so much of what it means to be free and living in a democracy. Similarly, Great Britain ceases to be great if under economic burdens it strips away every welfare benefit and service that makes us a civilised society that looks after its most vulnerable citizens.


Oh and don't be fooled, if Ed Miliband acceded to power, he might tinker around the edges with things like a freeze on power prices, but he would still make swingeing cuts because he had to. How much would he tax the rich when push comes to shove? Blair didn't. Brown didn't. they are too scared of alienating some of that cohort who they know they need their votes to obtain power.


So do I have any solutions? Of course not. But I do know a society has to look at itself and decide what its values are, what living in that country means and stands for. And I know treating your citizens as economic indices and wealth-earning units is not the way to go. I also feel Great Britain should lose some of its self-aggrandised credit-rating, not the formal financial rating, but that of calling itself 'Great'. If we are perennially to face a financial black hole and decisions attendant on that, maybe we are not a powerhouse in the world anymore. Without our sense of self-inflation, then perhaps we wouldn't feel such a compunction to fight long-term foreign wars that are such a drain on our finances. Forget our glorious history, in the here and now we are a second division country,  acting and strutting as if we were still in the Premiership of nations. Of course no politician will own up to this because it is electoral suicide. The myth of Britain's greatness is to prevail. So to keep that neon sign illuminated, we punish the weakest and most vulnerable of our citizens, without even providing them a Band Aid for the sake of appearances.

60s Music - A barren decade

Until the dawn of the 21st century, the 1960s was my least favourite decade for music. I wasn't sure if I could even scrape together ten tunes to form one of my customary themed charts. And yet it was a highly political decade with youth at its head, so could have been more crucial musically than it turned out to be, although to be fair at least by the decade's end we no longer had to watch our beat combo groups performing on TV still wearing suits. Anyway, here are my top 10 tunes from the 60s.

1) The Doors - "Light My Fire"
To me Doors were the quintessential sound of the 60s. A bit political, a bit rebel, a bit hippy, a touch literary and a lot druggy. Having said that they along with Hendrix are perhaps the only two artists who would have more than a handful of songs in my collection. And Coppola's use of "The End" to bookend his movie "Apocalypse Now" is a perfect artistic synthesis.



2) MC5 -  "Kick Out The Jams"
Now here were a political group who brought a whole heap of trouble down on their heads because of their incendiary music. I met Fred Sonic Smith once, and he looked very burned out. that's what oppositional politics can do for you I guess.



3) Shangri-Las - "Leader Of The Pack"
Girl groups were a staple of the pop charts, but the Shangri-Las turned up to inject a touch of edge, cynicism and put the 'bad' into the bad boy they always seemed to yearn for.



4) Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child"
Never been bettered, nuff said. In my contemporary record collection there are bands with maybe two top guitar riffs at best. Hendrix had albums chockfull of them.



5) Creedance Clearwater Revival" - "Have You Ever Sen The Rain"
This is one of those bands I wouldn't have come across were they not referenced and covered heavily by bands I like such as Sonic Youth and Minutemen. But and this is a big but, as great as the songs they wrote were, there is the question, as with Neil Young, of whether you can stand John Fogerty's reedy and frankly weedy vocals. That is the limiting factor for me.



6) Julie London - "Cry Me A River"
There will always be a place for female crooners and this stands the test of time. Will Adele? We will have to wait and see.



7) The Guess Who - "American Woman"
Don't know any other of their songs and again I came to this via a modern cover version, but this is great.



8) Jefferson Starship - "White Rabbit"
Those of you who know me will recall that I am very anti-drug use. And yet in a demonstration of cognitive dissonance, I acknowledge there has been some great music (but probably not great literature) made while under the influence. This is the grand-daddy of them all, or maybe the grand-mommy since Grace Slick's vocal style takes this song beyond the stratosphere.



9) Don Drummond - "The Man In The Street"
At least the 60s brought us Studio One label and the opening up of Jamaican reggae. So it wasn't all bad as a decade then...



10) Pink Floyd - "Lucifer Sam"
The great unsolvable question, what would Pink Floyd have been like if Syd Barett hadn't destroyed his brain cells and been forced to hand the group over to Roger Waters that helped usher in the bloated supergroups of the 1970s like Floyd, Led Zep, Yes, Supertramp, Steeley Dan et al.

Homegrown Suicide Bomber- Sample

From my book "Not In My name" published 2011 - part 2, the new politics is being waged online where it is far more vicious and bloody...

"Blog: 17th May 2006 / 27th Rabia Awal 1427

Another- the last- fitting for my nuptial dress. Has me more than a little nervous. Only natural of course. My fingers are trembling and I can’t do up a single clasp. The seamstress clicks her tongue in sharp disapproval and says such conduct would be unbecoming on the big day itself. The girdle feels tight, even though I have barely eaten this last week, despite cautioning from those around me to maintain my strength. I have even surrendered up my beloved gelatis. But today I feel I can treat myself to a bombe glacée. A last trifling indulgence, before the most profound change occurs in my life. And if I spread a couple of inches under its calorific assault, then I’ll just have to suck in my stomach, which with the likely state of my breathing tomorrow, shouldn’t be too hard a task. I force myself to think pure thoughts by envisioning my betrothed before me, as the seamstress gingerly packs up my raiment. And in conjuring such happy thoughts, a smile breaks out to envelop the worry lines around my pensive brow. Now my lips quiver only with joy. Such a remedy never fails. Tomorrow we shall be conjoined for ever. I leave the premises to search out my ice cream, once I have safely stored the vestments. Now it is just a question of killing time.

*

With all the trepidation, it’s been a very long and sleepless night. As the light faded, my thoughts flared around me, projected into the formless shadows moving on the wall. Car headlights seared their way through my shutters and churned and roiled my ceiling, making me dizzy and disoriented. Shutting my eyes did nothing, as they managed to prise through the membranes of my eyelids. How thin and insubstantial all of my body feels at this time. My flesh a flimsy curtain, partitioning the unknown chambers ahead.

I rose from bed and am now carving this for the want of something to do. Of course they left me no means of communicating with the outside world. But they did leave me a knife for self-protection and when I had blunted that, I used the flints sheared off from the stone walls of the room itself. Had other brides and grooms to be, been put up here before me? Then the building will tell its tale as well as my own.

My overriding thought right now, would to please be permitted some sleep, so I am not too befuddled for tomorr- or later today as it now is. I’m going back to bed, doubtless to joust some more with my ceiling-borne demons overhead. Whence death seemingly always comes, in our insignificant part of the world. Where the sky is forever falling in.

*

A pealing siren outside woke me, even though it was far away in the distance. A presentiment of ill-fortune? But again I just marinade my mind with thoughts of my beloved opening his arms in welcome and all such anxieties melt away and me with it back into my furtive dreams. Wherein my Mother soon intercedes. Bustling and barging the angelic bystanders as she cuts a direct path to me. Standing now right in my face, eclipsing even the joy of my light, for she would not approve of such an espousal. This is not exactly an elopement, yet still she cannot know till after the event. I have recorded her a message to explain the matter. But her forceful image has demanded an explanation of me before she is even in the know. A lingering last vestige of guilt.

Mother, the sole message is I love you. Even as I seemingly repudiate you by this act. I am not propelling myself away from you. This you must understand. How I love you more than anything else on this earth and I am beaming this message to you, with greater force than all the generative force soon to adorn my belly, that will pull us apart merely on this plane. In my absence, you will receive only greater honour. Till we are ultimately reconciled in Paradise. My Mother and I hug, seemingly unconditionally as she did when I was a baby. And finally I fall into a dreamless sleep.

18th May 2006 / 28th Rabia Awal 1427

I imagine hearing another siren, but as I groggily come round, I realise it is my beeping alarm clock. An adhan summoning me to my calling. My salvation. I shut it off. I’ll be present at my union soon enough. Lying here, I try and evoke an image of the light of my life in the future, but nothing comes. It’s as if my thoughts are like birds, flying in confusion and without navigation during an eclipse, as my rapidly beating heart has blotted out the sun. So I do what I’ve been steeled to do and I use it to my advantage. I am to enter the core of this black sun, and ball it up in my hand. Driving the fingers till they seal my palm. Thereby readmitting the light to embrace me once again. Ha, already the quickened pulse recedes. Resumes its orderly place in the background. But do not be fooled. That faint tick, tick, ticking, is the sound of my seething heart, walled up behind the thorns and briars of my sin. How they dam up my heart from God. Now is the time to purge them like an infernal machine, back whence they came. Return my pure being back to the bosom of God. For He cannot be contained. My heart is fit to irrupt, its furious palpitations cannot be accommodated a moment longer.

I swing my legs out of bed. My bare feet meet the cold stone of the flags. All the more felicitous then, since a grave will be yet colder. I wash myself from a bowl of water, letting the precious liquid trickle back down to its source. Our adversaries would deny us even this most basic of elements. As I bathe them, I devote each one of the two hundred bones in my body to you my Love. And by my actions, I imagine we will share them in turn with five times that amount of suitors, dispersed like passing out wedges of wedding cake. Spearing into their trespassing hearts, as we entwine and are yoked together into death. Then there is the added confetti of nails and ball bearings, only this time it will be the bride showering the congregation. Even my virginal veil of modesty shall be aflame and sail through the air combusting all it brushes against. My flying blood will baste their foreheads with the indelible sign of their guilt. The liquid in the bowl is still once again.

I hope my laving is suitably thorough, but I am without any mirror for inspection. One isn’t to wake on the morn of one’s self-appointed expiration and glimpse dread in the eyes. No photos to kiss either, no earthly tugs at all to corrode the will. To blunt my whetted mind. Instead I picture weaving my own carpet. I who have nothing, can still donate this wedding gift. As they deny us the wool because we have no land to breed sheep and we have no looms to spin it within our flimsy, cramped houses, so then will I fashion mine from blood and bone. I aim to weave the largest rug that is humanly possible from my frame, to drape the entire tarmac between two bus stops. And my signature, will be my essence mingled in with theirs. They who are so precious about collecting and burying every last drop of their blood spilt, will not be able to determine if it is mine or theirs. Blotting me up with their paper as they do with their own. How they will waste such resources in taking precise, forensic care of my remains, it will almost be like they are forced to yield me the same worth as their own burnt offerings. But for all this, I will yield them no insights. Other than reinforcing that which they choose to remain wilfully blind to.

I’m ready. This time I rig myself with barely a faltering in my fingers. The clasps all snap home. The girdle still feels tight, but now hangs heavy, arrayed with the wedding gifts lavished last night by my escort. What a most generous gift he has seen fit to bestow upon me. The needles to unstitch with. The pattern in my mind. At last, for the first time in our despoiled land, my belly feels fecund.

19th May 2006

20th May 2006

21st May 2006

Gone

The requested resource

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is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource."

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Homegrown Bombers - Sunday Sample

From my book "Not In My name" published 2011 - part 2, the new politics is being waged online where it is far more vicious and bloody...

"Joe Bloggs’ Blog, London, July 8th 2006

The view from the top of the Clapham Omnibus

A year to the day. Plus one. In order to honour the memorial ceremonies passing off with due dignity.

But I can hold my peace no longer. Today I can ask the question, was that it??? A one-hit wonder? Is that the sum total, one atrocity?

Admittedly well-planned and co-ordinated, but where’s the sustained follow-up campaign? Apart from the four stooges who couldn’t even make a chapati, much less a bomb. And didn’t one of them, possessed with the courage of a lion, make his bolt by draping himself head to foot in a burka? How double-edged does the veil seem now?

It’s a bit of a well-worn tradition apparently. For I’m told as much as protecting female modesty, the veil can also help a vulpine lover secure access, to his off-limits but willing love in the harem.

Still, how we were all gripped by the thrill of the chase for a couple of weeks. CCTV footage of them plastered everywhere, rivalling a bad taste Benetton campaign. Blanket media coverage, till they were being led away under blankets. Extradited, locked up and forgotten about. News blackout.

About time they were coming to trial I’d say. How much more evidence do we need to gather? Caught red handed on camera. Up in the dock, so we can all see you for the pathetic specimens you really are! You’re nothing! We can’t even recall your names. Your prolix, unBritish sounding names, more verbose than any meaningful ideology you care to spout.

And, undaunted we’re still using the Underground aren’t we? Our wheels of commerce grind on. The fear and anxiety have diminished, cos you haven’t been able to repeat your heinous deed. Of course not, your top boys took themselves out in their one act. Your second top boys...are just languishing in our prison cells. I think you're done don't you?

So it showed that you could. Big deal. The Met Commissioner had been warning us for three years, with his mantra that it was a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’. Well, ‘when’ has come to pass. And past. In theory the threat must still persist. But London has shrugged its broad shoulders and got on with life. We’re battle hardened, first from the Blitz, then the spud-munchers throwing blazing fertilizer at us. Such outrages only firm up our sense of community and togetherness. A sense of belonging you can’t possibly penetrate.

When all’s said and done, ultimately you were no more than a mosquito or a gnat bite. A knee-jerk into the groin. Enough to make our eyes water, but no need for an overreaction of the body politic.

Since there’s been no lasting terror beyond the one-off incident, therefore it had to have been an act of vengeful spite. A token. A hate token to the country of your birth. Not even your adoptive or foster country, but where you were born, brought up and educated. A single act of bloody bloodymindedness.

Rather than play out your destructive oedipal fantasies on our bodies, you would have been better off blubbering on a shrink’s couch, except that is rooted in the other bunch of Semite cousins you claim to abhor. Hatred is always non-negotiable. Like prejudice.

One of you only ended up on that bus cos you neglected to charge the battery. Still, how redolent was that image, with its roof ripped off like a sardine tin? Powerfully symbolic, but symptomatic of not very much at all. Except your lack of understanding of our way of life, both marooned up there in Yorkshire and holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

Only a tired old strategy of economic dislocation, targets the transport system. But every Londoner knows any three Tube lines are out of commission on a daily basis. Signal trouble usually. The bus ought to have been your cue, seeing as it’s our culture you’re at war with anyway.

For our part, we may not be able to win a war on a word called ‘terror’. But you can triumph even less through war against a culture. Does Grozny or Gaza feel any more liberated by your act of derring-do? No, thought not.

So it remains a stifled howl. The yelp from kicking a three-legged dog. A petulant display from infantile minds. No matter how downright angry I may be after what you’ve done, I’m still civilised enough not  to be coming after your kith and kin. An eye for an eye? My eye more like. And I’ve got it trained on you."

Comments:

"I heartily concur with the sentiments expressed from the top of the Clapham Omnibus. Though I believe there is a little more behind the motivations of such men, other than petty vindictiveness. I would refer you to the dedicated network, small as it is but dispersed worldwide, as represented by a myriad of sites on the Web. Where exist hundreds of webpage bomb-making cookbooks and footage of IED (improvised explosive device) attacks from the Middle East, shot from the vantage of those pressing the remote control for the bomb. There was even, in English, a Powerpoint step-by-step presentation of how to construct a homemade device, till the URL was spiked.

So, in similar vein, I thought it about time the arsenal ranged against this network was laid out in turn. To wit, the eyes and ears of entire nations. If the requisite information can be got out, to you the public, then there stands more chance of thwarting the bombers. The Authorities want the populace to keep eyes and ears open to help in the fight against terrorism, but they don’t want you to open your mouths and question what lies behind such actions in the first place. So as with your Blog host, I can hold my peace no longer. I will furnish you with all the information you need to know. To hell with the Official Secrets Act. If they haul me over the coals for whistle blowing, so be it. At least what I have to offer will already be out in the public domain. This is what you truly call a civil service. Below are my credentials.

I am and have been for over thirty years, part of the Intelligence Services of this country. In the past, we have been all that lay between you and periodic bloody carnage throughout our sceptred isle. It started with tracking down the Angry Brigade in the 1970’s. Then outflanking both Irish Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries (in the interest of balance). Welsh Nationalist firebombers (remember them? I know, hard to credit Pembroke and Monmouth ever being more desirable for holiday homes than Tuscany and Provence). Animal liberationists, (never averse to serving up some slabs of well done human steak). Extortioners. Arsonists with delusions of grandeur and an accelerant career ladder. Those mail bombers and nail bombers, letter bombers bearing grudges and misanthrope purveyors of hate crimes. Oh and Libyans. Most were embarked on prolonged campaigns of repeated outrages, that it was our duty to stop dead in their tracks.

We operated from the painstaking reconstruction of each and every device, plus a consideration of the psychological cues contained in the targets, to catch our perpetrators. I could tell you about the fertilizer based bombs favoured by the Boys from the Bogside, prior to their roaring trade in Czech semtex. Or the respectable middle class Angry Brigades, who would only blow up property and institutional symbols rather than target people. Even as government scientists were simultaneously devising neutron bombs that killed people, but left buildings standing. However all of this has gone out the blast shattered window here and now. Our manuals have been ripped up and used for kindling.

For the current crop of antinomian bombers are radically different. They are not pursuing a prolonged campaign. Just the one abomination is ample for their purposes. Lighting the touchpaper but not standing back, seems sufficient to pass on a flaming baton to the next disciples. Now we have to interdict them before they ever carry out the dark deed. That is made especially hard, since my superiors have not seen fit over the years, to establish much in the way of a network of contacts within these communities. To my lords and masters, most of these beardy blokes are 'clean faces'.

Made tougher still by the annealing of the present antagonists. In the past, a bomber, no matter how adept, would normally only set a device after several practice runs. And an explosion is the type of ultramundane sound, that prompts people’s recall, once it has been suggested to them that it bears a greater magnitude than a car backfiring. However, this lot either have done their training abroad and out of sight, or they just go for it hell for leather, the first and only time of asking. I believe that’s what caught out the second quartet of would be Tube bombers. They’d read their Blue Peter bomb primers, but for the want of any stickyback plastique, hadn’t been able to put it into any practice. Thank God.

Nor is their psychology the same. Most bombers bear a signature hallmark in their make up, as to why they have particularly embraced the destructive power of explosives. Some may revel in the intricacies of their constructions, the timers, trip switches and detonators. They may even want their bombs to be discovered rather than detonate, so they can pit their fiendish wits with our expert disposalists. Others may get their charge, if you’ll excuse the pun, from enchaining the elemental force of the big bang itself. The red hot wind that for a brief moment, expels and purges the very air itself. Before the devastation comes cascading back to earth. Collapse of stout party. The bomber as Hephaestus at his forge. Perhaps Zeus himself hurling his thunderclaps and leaving huge craters in the earth. Though obviously such association is beyond the majority of most bomb throwers. For they remain forever, third spear chucker in a lame production of a modern-day revenge tragedy.

But this clump are not interested in the finesse of their design, nor the temporary divine power it may vest them. For they willingly sacrifice themselves immediately upon such divinity and are consumed by it. They are not around to relive their handiwork in their mind’s eye, or even congratulate themselves grimly on a job well done. Ergo no signature handiwork, because it is an act never to be recreated. For them, the bomb is a means to a singular, solitary end, pure and simple. Same difference ricin, anthrax or nuclear waste. Ordination by ordnance. Unlike most bombers who have long-since skedaddled from the proposed locus of their perniciousness, these men probably do look their victims in the eyes shortly before triggering their devices. Indiscriminate, but somehow intimate. This is coffin calculus, at its simplest, most stripped down algorithm.

Having said that, like I say there are underlying factors behind the atrocities. Though I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say they constitute a body of coherent ideology. You probably all know the mantras of incitement: Palestine/ Iraq. American/ Crusader imperialism. Other hotspots around the world and corrupt, unIslamic Arab regimes. There’s a critique of Western materialism and sexual mores, with which I have a modicum of sympathy, but their solution for which I find yet more repellent. What this hodgepodge of ideas actually means, is that the diffuse network that is Al Qaeda, can inspire any local sparkplug to tap into his own motives. Like a sort of pick and mix of malcontentment. In the 1960’s Buddhist monks protested American Foreign Policy by setting themselves on fire. Something about Islam insinuates they have to make sure we combust along with them. Again, Clapham Omnibus has it about right with his positing that as a one off, they did it because they could. It has a lot in common with the goalless death dealing of Russian Nihilism of the Nineteenth Century. Just witness the current bloody insurgency in Iraq. For Shi’a and Sunni, you could almost read Hutu and Tutsi.

However, don’t for one moment believe that it has subsided on our Isles with this one isolated act. Just as a poisoner ought to arouse suspicion with the chemicals he purchases, we should all be on the lookout for bulk purchases, whether we are pharmacies, garden centres, catering suppliers or even hair salons. I don’t think it’s faintly possible to prejudice the case against the second cohort of Tube bombers, the ones who lived to face up to justice, but I can tell you that the constituents of their bombs were humble household products; hair bleach, nail polish remover and chapati flour. All the more terrible for being so mundane in their genesis. Things we utilise in our lifestyles, repackaged and spat back poisonously in our faces."

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