we don’t need fasces, just a bundle of souls

it seems to me
there must be
a shadow gang of hoodlums
in every nation
ready to put on uniforms
to torture and abuse
waiting for a bully government
to empower them
and this is such
a lonely, alienating thought.
i’m not sure you,
fascist sympathiser,
will read this poem
but it is not strong
to stand up for the powerful
strength is to accept
we are weak
alone we are at
the mercy
of forces
we can not control
we can just hope that by sheer benevolent numbers
we can crowd the villains out
each of us forever vulnerable
as a bundle, indestructible

trump is the embodiment of a generation who, facing down the barrel of their mortality, have decided to turn the gun on everyone around them, cohorts and descendents alike.

he is a stuck up entitled snob who has made the critical error of conflating his wealth with his personal ability. he is a caricature of a generation who had the luck to grow up in a time of economic growth. they benefited from the social democratic, egalitarian societies that the generations before them had created after living through the wall street crash, the depression and the second world war.

they came of age in a time of full employment, strong trade unions, high wages, generous employer funded pensions and low housing costs – in britain due to massive postwar social housing programs.

and then as they reached their thirties, if they were lucky not to have worked in one of the many industries that were closed down, they benefited from the privatisation of social housing, and then of all the other things the government used to monopolise and provide as a service (gas, electricity, water, trains, buses), all of which generated one-off receipts for the government, made a lot of capitalists rich, but created a long term problem for future generations by incentivising profit at the cost of quality.

so anyway, now they own all the stuff, and they are rich, because when they were young you could have a job working in a factory and retire with a decent pension and have maybe even made half a million quid or so just by moving home a few times during a time of unprecedented asset price appreciation.

and they think they are really smart because the system has worked fine for them. and that we should appreciate their wisdom as they foist fascists upon us.

agent trump i

frigid lager
on the balcony,
the sun is blaring
and when
i’m deckchairing
i feel i could lean out
and shout
to my neighbours
in baghdad
havana, chicago,
moscow, haw vlad
agent trump is dreamin’
of escape from alcatraz

agent trump thinks he’s quite the comedian. with all his silly nicknames. that do tend to stick and be quite good, much to the dismay of me and many. so i’m going to nickname him from now on. agent trump. really was looking in to reopening alcatraz.

raze justice

arbitrary justice
is not justice
power exercised without
reason tends to evil
nobody talks about
harvey weinstein anymore
or the panama papers
we need new ideas
not new scandals daily
razed to the ground
confused me
for so many years,
until i saw it written down
it feels cruelly ironic
beneath war’s fog

the fog of war, said hegseth. after instructing his navy to explode a fishing boat. then firing again upon the survivors. we must make a point of remembering these crimes. if america doesn’t hold its villains to justice, once the madness is over, the message of might is right could dominate the remaining decades of humanity’s global colony.

justice ii

justice delayed is
justice frustrated
so hasten the dawn
of infinite redress
the tariff is high,
the dumb face
with its smile
dollar diving
to market turmoil

so right it’s this alternative history novel and its like imagine if during the period circa 2016-2028 the usa elected a delirious reality tv star as president and he had to oversee a whole load of crises, like covid, the third world war, and the invention of killer ai robots. but the whole time the guy is just on the take and like bombing countries and assassinating world leaders just to manipulate the stock market and own the libs. oh yeah and like the far right / nazis are allied with israel for some reason?!

it’s far fetched tbh, wouldn’t recommend.

we borderline roll with the blows and try to process / you can’t control your body, but we hope we can live with it

it is one of the main tenets of stoicism that you are best to focus your attention on that which you can control. and that means accepting that there isn’t much you can actually control. and your body is one of the things you can’t control. it gets sleepy. it gets ill. it carries you about and it will one day kill you.

all that i can control are my character, my actions, and my reactions. my thoughts and my judgements upon others. to some extent, as much as i may worry about trump, putin and nuclear war, no good will come of it as i have no control over the outcome.

stoics also embrace the temporary nature of living. things may be how they are today. but that doesn’t mean that its justified, or will be the same in the future. i’ve only lived 4ish decades and how many atlases have i seen rendered obsolete?