Tuesday, June 05, 2007
The Blair Decade 4: I Lose the Will to Live
My Blair Decade series has become an albatross round my neck. The truth is this Long Goodbye/Lame Duck/En Attendant Gordo phase has sapped my will to live. For some reason, ever since Labour MPs voted for Brown like so many dead bodies in Chicago (thanks Duck), everything, not just politics, has ground to a halt. There is nothing happening - apart from the impending shed shortage shocker, of course - and nothing to be said. This seems to be wiping my memory of the past decade. Perhaps that's the plan. In which case, I must fight the torpor of the time.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
'The Blair decade'?
ReplyDeleteHard to understand in anything other than psychiatric terms why the English would vote(the same doesn't apply to the celtic fringe)not once, not twice, but three times to put Blair in power.
Eric Anderson (his housemaster at Fettes and at the time headmaster of Eton) said somewhere, soon after he was elected, that he had had been inclined to beat Blair for a particularly egregious act of rebellion, but he had allowed Blair to talk him out of it. A lapse that he deeply regretted and may have changed the course of history.
Quite apart from what the story says about Anderson himself, it is clear that Blair has never been mastered and he represents a generation of people with similar upbringings.
In the 1940s Dr. D. W. Winnicott who was at the time, the chairman of the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis, wrote a paper on 'The Problem of Homeless Children'. His view was that the child requires to have its original feeling of infinity closely delimited and its life confined within a circle. 'If the laws established by a child's parents prove unreliable, if the child can break them with impunity, the feeling of infinity becomes an abyss of nothingness and sets up acute distress and indeed despair in the child.' he looks elsewhere for his circle of authority and tests the law personified by his teachers and later by the police. The young delinquent values and loves the policeman.'
Does this throw any light on Blair and his generation?
Are you saying Blair is a Freemson and Knight of Malta, Philip.
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to know is: why was it necessary for Blair to make a 'farewell tour of Africa'?
ReplyDeleteOne assumes he'll be having a weepy farewell afternoon spot with Richard and Judy next!
Is there no end to the ingenuity of this man?
Don't you mean disingenuousness, Beatrice?
ReplyDeleteAnd meanwhile the shining light of democracy strides ever onwards to greater glory while the ruling elites are meeting in Istanbul at the Bilderberg meeting to discuss their humanitarian agendas and play a little golf. The principles of democracy...secretive elites without mandate. All for the best.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just that nothing's happening, it's the endless, infinitely tiresome efforts to fool us into thinking things are happening - things of great moment. Take this damn fool idea of a public holiday to celebrate 'British citizenship' (sorry, I've lost the will to link) - how desperate is that? This nebulous, not to say fraudulent, notion apparently has something to do with voluntary work. If nothing else, the Blair Decade has turned displacement activity into the very stuff - probably the only stuff - of politics.
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't think so, Philip Walling. Since where his own ingenuity might fail, there are probably plenty of others cleverer than he, to step in and provide it for him.
ReplyDeleteAt least that has always been my take on the Blair phenomenon. What in the world else, after all, could account for it?
But than I'm only a woman, and probably deeply ingenuous. Still, I thought there ought to be some attempt at a female counter-riposte here.
I think the majority of the 'english' voted for the other guys but it's easy to understand why Blair won three times - just look at those other guys! the dying-on-his-arse, the dead quiet and the undead.
ReplyDeleteYes the English voted Tory last time (not by much, but they did). In fact, I believe that if the proportions of the popular vote in the last election were reversed (as between Tory and Labour), Labour would still have a majority of 50-odd seats. More reasons to be deeply suspicious of this 'British citizen' nonsense - more like 'State subject'...
ReplyDeletea friend of mine said he can only remember who the PM is because he knew his father, who was seemingly quite nice. But as Dante often puzzled, a good man can have an evil son.
ReplyDeleteNot that Blair seems to be evil, just utterly empty, the ultimate politician, devoted to power for power's sake, with no values at all. A thoroughly bad egg.
No more evil than any human being is capable of, but he's both more determined and has less of an idea about how to behave than most people. His father was (and is I believe) a 'Tory' whatever that means, and he was a perfectly amiable person, i am told. But that doesn't tell us anything much does it?
ReplyDeleteJust came across the incumbent PM's New World Order speech. Onward the children of the Beast....
ReplyDelete