Amerika

One of my more notorious sayings was:

There’s truth in this. More than one might want.

I am slightly unusual, in that until fairly recently, I was blissfully unaware of politics, or even what politics were. I had never had a political thought in my life. At least none that I could recognize as such.

My first encounter with this mysterious thing was an egg-buying foray, across fields and through woods, to a local farm. The farmer enquired as to whether I was going to vote. Vote? I asked. For what, and why? He explained there was an upcoming election, and that I should vote for Party X. Oh, I said. Well no, I never voted, didn’t know who represented what, or what possible use my opinion would be to anybody, anyway.

He called me a moron.  And I never bought eggs from him again.

In fact it was not until I returned to England, after a quarter-century of absence, that I really started to become aware of politics…

I didn’t know where I was. The England I had left, was nowhere to be found. It was ugly, dirty, depressing, and pervaded with a sense of menace and mistrust. But let’s not get going on that one.

Tony Blair swept into power on a landslide of popular enthusiasm, and from already rather bad, England fell off the cliff of what once was, and into the abyss of what it is still in the process of becoming.

Nobody could say what they thought. Furtively glancing around before saying thoroughly harmless things, paranoia reigned. Those were the most normal ones. The rest would all say almost identical things, in almost identical ways, as if reading from some script that had not been passed out to me.

England had become un-English, to a shocking degree. I felt disconnected and confused.

Upon investigation, something called Politics had been turned loose upon the land, turning ordinary people into zombies who lurched around, at odds with their very bodies, and parroting gibberish.

I delved further. I became interested in the British National Party, even received an email from Nick Griffin, before deciding that England was already too far gone to ever be saved.

The BNP needed to be protected from itself, really, making some truly regrettable tactical blunders along the way, and losing most of its burgeoning support, as a result.

Incompetence, madness, out-and-out weirdness at every turn. After discovering that any attempt to exercise my patriotic instincts was highly likely to get me arrested, I abandoned my homeland, after a dozen years of attempted -and doomed – re-integration, and never looked back.

Politics.

More destructive than warfare. Mind-warping, delusion-making, nation-wrecking madness.

The art of minding everybody else’s business, and trying to run their lives for them.

It sort-of worked when nations had some common goal to head towards. Now that any such goal has been abandoned, politics is no more than a very efficient wrecking-ball.

Tags: ideology