It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.
It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.
It's easier to be Cool Britannia than to be Jeremy Corbyn.
But
It's easier to enjoy money if you're Paul.
It's easier to enjoy beauty if you're the Beatles.
It's easier to be enjoy truth if you're Corbyn.
Discuss.
We shall coin a term here, the 'Beatles Fallacy' used to describe an aberrant view of the creative process as both creative and original where originality, shaped by commercial appeal, ultimately censors itself and refuses to bloom. Eric Idle is derivative but in a genius manner, a bit of deconstruction of which we can not disapprove. No he is not as creative as John Lennon of even the loathed Paul Mc but awesome nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteAs for Corbyn, he has both my respect and contempt: a character in a hair shirt straight out of Canterbury Tales, he is unoriginal, refuses to adapt and pious where an uptick in consciousness might turn him not into a Blair or a Clinton but a philosopher king. He is the lone wise steadfast raven of his namesake where Wotan, a true leader who was adaptable, had two. Hence the imbalance. He does not bend, does not break, but does not grow or see the sunlight that a society which rejects capitalism might present. The binaries are killing us all.
@maker I totally agree - and as corbyn continues to refuse his fallibility he slides ever faster into loony politician territory currently being updated for a new age by Trump. What corbyn hasn't grasped is there is a difference between being spineless and evolving.
ReplyDelete@maker I totally agree - and as corbyn continues to refuse his fallibility he slides ever faster into loony politician territory currently being updated for a new age by Trump. What corbyn hasn't grasped is there is a difference between being spineless and evolving.
ReplyDeleteIt's difficult for us to accept a Jeremy Corbyn because of the way a Jeremy Corbyn is presented to us- he is identified as still just another component in a wider set of coordinates, but a weaker component in this set, he is presented as too weak and outdated, i.e. he can't renew trident because he's too soft, he won't listen to economic reason because he's too much of a sop, he cannot control his paradoxically racist, sexist, naive academically inclined populist supporters because otherwise nobody will like him because he's not as cool as Tony Blair once was. He's presented as a highly disorganised, dysfunctional, museum artifact pertaining to a watered down version of the prevailing ideology; someone incapable of being rational, oratorical (a witty imposing and confident speaker), patriotic and militant, someone who cannot inoculate our fragile economy with the much needed stiff upper lip it needs to get itself sorted and be the Britannia it always/never was/n't. Truth isn't easy for Jeremy Corbyn because it's true that trident is scary, war is bad, meat eating is icky, poverty is ugly and uh, what's it called... oh yeah global warming... is happening... But the Big Other- in a sense the injunction to 'enjoy' and to be quietly apathetic about a negative, confrontational, patriarchal, reproachful attitude to politics, which is a supposedly rational space/attitude, so that our irrational, hedonistic and superficial, objet petit a ribbon-tied together genetically predetermined, fate/identity governed paradigm, can continue to develop in its paradoxical, mechanistic but at the same time unpredictable (like the lottery) manner. Truth isn't easy because there is no overt prohibition on truth, anybody can tell the truth, but can you do something about it (is the threat... go on I dare you, care about the way things are, and see where that gets you)? The prohibition is subtler, it takes place through a continuous sensual bombardment of confused simulacra, and overblown threats, simplified good vs evil media narratives, which tell us, guys if we tamper with this system, well there's some pretty fucked up people out there who will take advantage of our preoccupation with impossible, doomed to fail utopia fantasies, we must be cynics, not look up the term neoliberalism, must not look up the term plutocratic, or ideology (it's true meaning) we must just accept a limited, closed circuit choice between what have been prescribed evils, because the world is fucked and look at what happened to the Soviet Union, it'll just be the same, you'll just fuck it up more. The more Corbyn is ridiculed, sidelined, depicted as the fool on the hill, the more he is seen as a head shaking, tutting neurotic (which must be bad), who just doesn't get that these big sophisticated cynical truths keep our plutocracy... I mean free world ticking (nobody benefits financially from trident right?). I don't think Corbyn is such a fool, he has some really bright, intriguing, well thought out ideas, he's got an interesting team of people around him, he's no infallible left hero, in fact he's very fallible, but more in touch with society than a Boris or a Theresa, and genuine about shifting society to the left of centre again, which would open up whole untouched topics and ideas that have been sidelined by our radical right consensus (which is really what we are in) i.e. to quote Benjamin, things have changed superficially but not in property terms where things have become more limited than ever), he shouldn't be the enemy of a Khan, a Monbiot or an Ed, there disagreements should be the basis for debate, for scrutiny, for testing and improving each others ideas, maybe there's just a little bit too much ego in the waters: labour looking in the mirror, expecting to see something as strong as the conservative mirror image in its reflected visage (remember Ed Miliband 'hell yes, I'm tough enough')...
ReplyDeletemaybe Labour needs to try see it's problems as potential solutions, as a potential incubator for an ecologically minded (including humans, cyborgs and technology) alternative. The Beatles best music was written when they'd become a group of dysfunctional, diametrically opposed introverted artists, who didn't straight up split, but instead decided to try and understand each other's accumulated differences, to hone in on them, and explore what they meant...
ReplyDelete