Torapuk, another name for Brexit

Actor/artist Jim Carrey's Trump-trolling works

Being in the resistance is an art. All those innocent British and French young people who were trained to work under Nazi noses, blowing up bridges, funneling troop movement information to the Allies--they were heroes, and they got a paycheck. Sometimes they got death, either heroically in action or horribly at the hands of the SS.

But it was an art, and they had to be good at it to get the reward; life.

Other forms of resistance to evil have been around both before and after WWII. Indeed, at this moment, the US and the UK--two nations that fought side by side against the Nazis, and won--are engaged in a very similar resistance operation, although the field of engagement is far different.

Back then, it was the fields of France, mainly.

Now, it is cyberspace and the few print media left (which are mainly fascist) and the big pots of money to buy advertising to promote falsehoods; i.e., 350 million quid a week for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK or Make America Great Again (MAGA) by putting little brown children in cages in the US.

So, reluctantly, I have become an active member of the resistance.  I live in the UK now, having found the US too vicious for me a dozen years ago and having also moved to the UK as soon after that as I could;  I am mostly concerned with derailing the fascist-inspired, Putin-supported, self-harming so-called Brexit.

Brexit, shorthand for Britain exiting from EU membership, ought to be replaced by a more accurate term: Torapuk, short for Tories Raping the UK--for their own further enrichment, of course. (Pronounced Tor-ah-puke.)

They've been doing it since they were elected and had to share the spotlight with second-place LibDems. Cunning and evil, they managed to blame their depredations of the population on the LibDems, convincing the voters that the LibDems are somehow to blame for the continuing austerity in the UK. 

Austerity? In what was the fifth richest world nation? Stupid, huh? Stupid it was for us to allow them to get away with it. What they meant was they had to outsource government functions (health care, public utilities, work-readiness assessments, various hospital functions) so they could reap dividends from the companies contracted to replace the government departments and in which they had a financial interest. Not so unlike Donald Trump selling off America for his own empty--recall, he has NEVER had a successful business until now, American Trumpism Inc.--pockets.

Brexit is beautiful in that regard. The Tories--with their flunkies the Brexiters and DUP, Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which still thinks this is 1840 or so and they are the true rulers of Ireland--convinced a great many UK voters that the European Union (EU) was responsible for their descending incomes, difficulties with health care, inadequate schooling...despite the fact that, in truly impoverished places like Cornwall, only EU grants had kept the wolf from the door for decades. 

At one point, some witless fool had scribbled Brexit memes all over a sign giving the enormous amount of funding for the industrial estate it stood in front of, an industrial estate that provides jobs that Cornwall would not otherwise have had. And believe me, a county that is torn between second-homers using services and not paying taxes for them (second homes are exempt from most taxation) and a dying fishing industry (what have you done for it, Sheryll Murray, the fisherman's false friend?) needs all the help it can get.

And yet, it voted to leave the EU, to regain sovereignty (huh? did the Queen retire without heirs? I didn't know....) and so they wouldn't have to spend a few cents per person on EU dues in return for many times that amount in infrastructure investment in Cornwall by the EU. For god's sake, people, your sickening, stodgy if historic pasty--a food made to carry down into the tin mines of yore--would not have achieved world heritage status without the EU. Does that make a difference? Of course it does; visitors actually pay for the tasteless, greasy, doughy things because of that, increasing Cornish income by a bit. 

So, Torapuke is ridiculous, and yet, it lives on and on, like the last mosquito of summer, apparently immune to sprays and swatters and your imprecations for the fucking insect to get the hell out of your house and leave you in peace.

And so, I have become a member of the Resistance. I don't think I'll get shot, despite my using Twitter to tell fascist oligarch wanker Jacob Rees-Mogg how despicable he is several times a week, or positing that Tyrant Tess, the Perfidious Prime Minister has dementia.

I'm not quite sure how to use visual art for protest, despite being, by now, an old hand at verbal protest. I also make donations to protest organizations. But art...

Jim Carrey, whom I don't like as an actor but do like as an artist, has found a way. Maybe I'll emulate him. Maybe my planned series of animals in hats will actually turn out to be politicians as the animals they resemble. Many cartoonists have portrayed May as a rather weedy and sickly vulture, and that's right on target. But few have done Boris Johnson (pig? easy) or Michael Gove (help me out here; he's too wimpy for any sort of animal....)  

Well, that's the gist of it.  I have to turn my drawing as well as my writing to this project. Not what I had in mind for my last couple of decades on earth. Sigh. But then, we don't always choose our path; sometimes, it chooses us.

Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride

Maelstrom, a poem about NOW

Maelstrom


What in hell has crawled through

the strands of DNA to snarl through

the weeds of time? To steal the welfare

of people going about their business,

not expecting disaster to strike, at

least not from within their own houses

and their own nations. How have

ignorant buffoons managed to overcome

every attempt by educated, thoughtful

people to stymie efforts to wreck lawful

society, to wreck venerable institutions

that keep humans—those who would misbehave

at any rate—from killing off the rest of us?

Where will this end? Am I too old to live

through it? Do I want to? Do I want to live

if the last fifth of my life is no more than

a struggle to eat for another day, to have a

roof for another day, not to be invaded in my

own home by gilet jaunes, the crass army

of deluded, delusional and just plain dumb

ne'er-do-wells unleashed by the greedy upper

crust, by the arrogant Rees-Moggs, by the

simpering Goves, the jerks like Johnson

and the terminally bereft and vile, the morons

without portfolio like Theresa May?

What can I do that I have not done? I have protested

verbally and with money. I have written. I

have—of course—worried myself sick. For me, of

course. But for all those younger or sicker or

in any way less prepared to deal with the maelstrom

that's coming, less prepared than I, and I am

totally unprepared. How could I be? I grew up

in a post-War world where things, generally

speaking, got better and better, with only a few

small backsteps and missteps, easily rectified,

and off we went again. Forward in technology,

in medicine, in art, in international relations,

in democracy, in kindness.

And then, all of a sudden, there was Brexit.

All of a sudden, there was Trump.
Where did these despoilers of human life, of

human progress, of human kindness...

WHERE did these monsters—yes, monsters all--

Trump, May, Farage, and godknows Putin--

monsters with human skin, some with human hair

(not Trump; by his cranial rug shalt thou know him)

come from? What manner of DNA damage,

and where from,

produced this crop of beings set to ruin the world,

set to unleash the worst human tendencies, the

ones we have been trying to overcome for many

thousands of years? The Old Testament rule of vengeance,

suddenly front and center, and carried out by the

least possible humans to be found on this planet,

or any.

I despair. But yet, I awake another day. I cannot

let my beloved husband, my dear dog, face the descent into

hell alone. I'm not sure I'm any help to them, distraught

as I am. But at least they know I love them. For what

it's worth. Worth more would be this: If I were an assassin

and did not care for my own life. Then...then...then

I could do something positive for humanity. I'd just

have to choose the target wisely, for there would be

no second chance, no way to remove a second horrific

stain from the cloak of humanity.

I'm a good shot with a basketball, even with a

Baretta. But not, unfortunately, with a rifle capable

of sending a bullet true for half a mile or more. No.

I haven't the nerve, even if I had the skill. So

I cannot do that. Nor can I spend all of every day

in prayer like so many Tibetan monks or Roman Catholic

cloistered nuns. A lot of good they've done, anyway.

I can close my mind to the horrors for a couple of hours a day,

finally. But not for all of it. Before the moon rises, I will

have suffered the tortures of the damned, in my heart and mind

at least. Sometimes, with the misery to come for all of us

preying on my soul, I suffer physically as my body reacts to yet

another needless shot of adrenalin, cortisol flooding my body,

releasing the fight or flight response, rushing through my veins

to damage what the coming starvation might miss.

I'm too old for this. We are all too old for this. The world is

too old for this. I wonder if its time has come.

Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride

Colonic irrigation for the soul

You may not have toxic colon. You may just have Trump or Brexit.

In case you haven't figured it out, I am a liberal. I believe ALL people deserve decent food, housing, clothing, education and a society peaceful enough for everyone to work on reaching his or her heart's desire.

I decry anyone who, for greed or sociopathology, interferes with that by being needlessly vicious or by electing sociopaths. So yes, the bogus president of the United States and the reprehensible, if not quite as bogus, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom meet the criteria.

So what? So how is a relatively balanced person supposed to create art when sociopathic kleptocrats are in charge of the two largest English-speaking nations on earth? They're filling society and our hearts and minds and even souls with a layer of anti-humane memes a mile thick, backed up by the threat of force. Troops to corral refuges in Texas; the threat of soldiers on British streets to stop citizens killing each other over a box of aspirin post-Brexit.

Our every waking moment, for slightly more than 2.5 years, has been blanketed with not a tissue of lies, but a mile-thick blanket of egregious untruths, in both nations. Blotus lies, according to those who have surveyed it, an average of 100 times a day. ONE HUNDRED LIES A DAY FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. That is a level Nixon could only dream about, and he was a criminal from his wing-tips to his thinning hair.

May doesn't lie as much, I think. She doesn't need to. Like a parrot who has had a stroke, she repeatedly parrots her single meme about leave meaning leave.  (Ah, yes, doctor, about that loss of cerebral function....) She is so totally incompetent that whatever she does or says is greeted with palpable disdain and disrespect by, I think, both Remainers and Leavers. The Leavers fear she will NOT ruin the nation as they desire so that they can feel better, tossers that they are, as the rest of us are forced to live like rats. Remainers are worried that she will ruin it so that we will be under siege not only from the envious Leaver rats whose own addlepated actions are sinking the ship, but from the petty criminals the rapidly declining society will spawn.

But this isn't a political blog; that would be McBride's Bar & Grill.

It's not a health blog, either.

So what's the title about, then, especially after the anti-fascist rant above?

It's about how we manage to get through it, how we remove the largest loads of crap the world has seen in a century, at least, from invading our sacred space, our artistic soul. Or how, if the walls have been breached, we can manage to shit the poison out, metaphorically speaking.



Shit it out, though, I think we must. Either that, or we'll find ourselves babbling in a corner about how cute Hallmark-style cards with little Kewpie dolls and cutesy saying on them really are. And god forbid, painting one.

So what to do?

ART

A relatively calm expression of the attitude that requires colonic cleansing. L. H. McBride, 2019 It is probably fit for the Museum of Bad Art; it was done in abut 4 minutes or less in the old Microsoft Paint program.

There have been, for some time now, art therapy courses for kids and adults suffering almost any kind of malady or disruption.

Aside from that, artists make are. Some artists, perhaps realist painters, might fling paint at a canvas to relieve their angst, and call the result abstract expressionism. Others would paint horrific faux-medieval tableaux of devils down the the tiniest detail.   

Writers can also turn their skill to tasks they don't ordinarily undertake with a view to relieving stress. Some, who might toil as poets by day, might write a dystopian novel. A journalist might write a play; a playwright might decide on a series of letters to the editor--journalism of sorts--to clear her artistic colon of accumulated bullshit.

I have been thinking for days of doing the paint slinging. But I'm too cheap to waste expensive oils. Watercolour wouldn't bring to the effort the gravitas it demands. The idea of writing a play or even a dystopian novel is daunting; I've got the second Shelf Barker mystery, Pool Full of Death, to complete sometime between now and Christmas; it's humorous, so I don't want to get a tragedian's mindset about it all at the moment.

A more distressed Paint effort in the colonic cleansing vein. L.H. McBride, 2019

Yes, the very thing: the old Microsoft Paint program. It's simple, vibrant--unless you do a lot of monkeying with the colours with various effects. If you do that, though, it won't be quick and won't get the foul meal of Republican or Tory force-feeding through your gullet and out the nether end, so to speak. So no, just Paint, alone.

Really getting the shit shifted now; no pretense at design. L. H. McBride, 2019

I did the three Paint works above while I was writing this.

And just now, my efforts opened me up to one I want to do. A cabbage. Just a cabbage. A cabbage somehow reminds me of that grand photo of 45IQ in an old-style clear plastic women's rain hat, the ones that tie under the chin. (Not high art, but high humour to be sure.)

If you're a writer with a colonic issue, I'd suggest you sign up for Comedywire; being forced to write funny one-liners about anything and everything is one way to force the Cheeto/Brexit bullshit out of your system for a while.

I go through Comedywire periods, but it as been a while. Sometimes the crap is so thick, you can't even shift it that far. But I just checked it. Top of page was a BBC report about Pilots Report IFOs off Irish Coast. The first quip I read was, "Where else would little green men be headed?"  You don't even have to be PC in your comments. And I'm fairly sure I've used the word Fuck on Comedywire and it got posted.

I became a member of Comedywire months and months ago, maybe years. It might have been when no one with a brain could imagine Cheeto could ever be elected. Maybe that long.

When I joined (one had to send a CV then, don't know about now), the founder let me join but asked me why I wanted to, as he could see that I was basically a journalist, and journalists aren't known for being witty, although I admit we are known for being PC, snarky and at times a bit darkly humorous. He was probably right to be a bit skeptical; there are times when the inundation of political bullshit these days is so deep, I can't even dream of making a funny remark. But if I force myself, it helps.

Or you could try the old standards: drinking and carousing.  Both are fun, and might clear the pipes pretty well. But you can't do them instantly; Paint and Comedywire, you can.



Plus, you can always drink and carouse later, when you feel better.

###

Copyright 2018, LH McBride