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

Suffer the children

 

Children survivors of Auschwitz

Suffer the children

I'm hearing the screaming this morning. The

screams of Jamal Kashoggi as he was

hacked apart for telling the truth, and

wanting to marry his beloved lady.

I'm hearing the silent screams of the children

in the “showers” of Auschwitz as the

Third Reich ended innocent lives of Jews,

gypsies, Catholics, the disabled.

I'm hearing the impassioned wails of mothers

separated from their children, sent back to

South America without the young they bore

and nurtured and tried to bring to a promised land....

The land has lost its promise.

It survived its massacre of the Algonquin,

the Sioux, and all the other unique people

and cultures of North America.

It survived its enslavement of bewildered

souls transported forcibly from Africa, where

they had ruled the hostile jungles, but could not

overcome the more hostile—and well-armed--

Confederate slavers.

It struggles, now, to survive a platoon of

cockamamie self-styled pastors whose

similarity to their own saviour is as close as

is mine and yours to a rabid dog.

It struggles to survive an educational system

rendered impotent so George Bush's wastrel

brother could sell computers and standardized

tests.

It struggles to survive a health-care system in which

only the wealthy survive, thus ensuring that the next

generation will be saddled with too many useless, lazy

supernumerary trust-fund people for even the brawniest

economy to support. Unless, of course, the brawny workers

die out, leaving the helpless wealthy to carry on, which

equals the end of America.

It struggles with memory loss. Some don't even know

what the Holocaust was. Some forget that Russia has never

been anyone's friend, never. Not in all of recorded history.

And not now.

The population struggles to remember that they, too, can die

hungry and alone, unwanted and terrified. Indeed,

they don't understand that that end is more likely than

dying a self-made millionaire, a celebrity, or even

a Kardashian. Which is their dream, supported by

a culture that knows it is not possible, not for 99.999999%

of them, but profits on promoting the falsehood.

They don't struggle with uncertainty. Having to weigh

the relative merits of various courses of action is beyond

their pay grade. They lack the education to do it. Their

spiritual leaders are the cockamamie clergy, insisting

that Jesus would consign black or brown or yellow

people to earthly perdition despite abundant evidence

to the contrary in their own holy books. They do not

struggle with uncertainty; they are sure that black is white

and good is bad and they will arm themselves to the

teeth to make the rest of us believe it. They bear the

mark of Satan, all right, but also the vacant face of

the stupid person.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me”

does not mean, as one of the hollow clergy said recently,

excusing the Border Patrol, to make children suffer.

Suffer, there, means to allow. But...they are uneducated,

the clergy and their followers. And so, the words

of a man of peace are used as an excuse for acts so vile

that I cannot even list them without first taking strong drink.

I would scream. I do scream. My body, racked with pain

these two years since the UK referendum and Trump,

vibrates to the discordant notes—although discordant sounds

not strong enough—of the misery of two peoples, the British

and the American. There is no consensus on what is causing

my pain, but I know. It is the spectre of evil, settling on us

like a poison-laden mist. When it lifts, the physical pain will, too.

I wish I could pray.

Maybe they—we—deserve this misery, the misery that

has tripled homelessness, made prescriptions for anti-depressants

skyrocket. We spent out attention elsewhere

when the robbers were filling their satchels with our culture,

and enticing our politicians to join in the robbery. We spent our

attention elsewhere when the disaffected claimed all

politicians are the same, all clergy fools. There are some of

each, but we consigned all of them to the trash heap, bidden by

people too lazy to think, to discern, to decide, to act when

action was demanded.

It is our own fault, the vile situation in two nations. We

failed to notice the Russian runt as he weaved in and

out among honest, decent leaders. (Don't go there. Clinton

was a man, not a demon. Blair was a middle ground between

cockamamie socialism and the Tories, and not faultless.

In short, a man.) We must learn to accept partially flawed

leaders lest we get totally flawed ones, evil ones like Trump

and May.

Are you perfect? But are you good? Do you try? Are you kind?

There, then. How can we expect more in our leaders. Goodness,

energy, humanity. I'd settle for that.

I will settle for that and celebrate it if the US and the UK survive.

I give it no more than 50/50 odds. And I'm still hearing the screaming.

Stained glass: Alfred Handel, d. 1946[1], photo: Toby Hudson [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

 

 

C. 2018, 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

Dancing on the head of a pin

I am an Irish citizen, mulling remaining in the UK or taking myself, my husband and my dog off to Ireland. Both my husband and I worked our entire careers in the US, and so have a dog in that fight--our pensions--too. Here is one recent expression of what the global shitstorm feels like to those of us who need to be concerned with more than one skirmish in the apparent global war on peace, freedom and the prosperity everyone deserves.

 

Idealised fallout shelter, 1957, US. I expect Brexit will make most of us wish for something this good.

 

Dancing on the head of a pin

 

Laura Harrison McBride

When I was 12, we looked at new houses

with bomb shelters. My school

stored water

and crackers in its basement. And then,

Kennedy. And then

the fear of imminent death subsided

before a wall of intelligence. Or maybe

our brains

our emotions

were, so many decades short of

Bush and that grifter from Queens,

fried.

And so it had been, these 50 odd

years. Even clowns from Hollywood

deferred to those with

brains and

a modicum of common

sense. To a point.

I had hoped to get out of here alive, if

you see what I mean. Looking less

likely by the day.

Fifty years on

I know

no shelter of cement

a foot below grade will save us.

No amount of water

and crackers will

help.

Help. We need help. I never

thought

an impassioned plea

to whatever

gods there be

would leave my lips at

this age, an age when I know

I'll be reaped soon. My life is

well beyond

half over. Well beyond.

And yet, I cling

to each day. Certainly, I

don't want the bullet dodged so

long ago to find me.

I mostly don't want it to find me

now, now when there is a maniac

in the White House and a vile

hag riding the coat-tails of greedy

politics to lodge at No. 10, Downing Street,

UK.

I fear the upheaval,

the scarce food,

the minimal housing,

the marauders,

the disease,

the result

of a nuclear event.

Event, like a cotillion.

Only worse.

Dance on the head of a pin today

if you can. Today may be the last

you have. If not--

if by chance some intellect arrives

and shoves the buffoons aside--

still, it won't hurt to

practice being an angel.

Copyright 2018, Laura Harrison McBride