fractured

Another day started with a text warning regarding the weather; the residue of a late night chat clouding the inside of the skull. It's been an odd kind of week, distortions and mirrors, following the world from a distance, that familiar disconnection with what's going on beyond the island.

Watching de Piffle Paffle's latest impersonation of a downmarket Drumpf - reading his words that anti racist protestors should focus less upon the symbols of racism and more upon the substance of the issue. Symbol and substance intertwined, how can you attempt to rid society of the poisons which run through its veins while allowing the symbols to remain untouched, unquestioned? The proposition that the removal of statues somehow acts as a rewriting of history would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic, nothing but another distraction, a soundbite which falls apart at the lightest touch of scrutiny, but it plays to his base.

History is in a constant state of being rewritten, the passage of time changing and modifying perspectives of aspects which were necessarily whitewashed to allow the evolution of a national myth forged upon moralities long since renounced, the fiction of a benevolent empire, native exceptionalism; the poisoned seeds from which ideas such as Brexshit are allowed to grow. The false narrative of culture as a stationary, stagnant, thing; the apparent regard for these symbols which owe their existence to the need for the glorification of that mythic past. From what I understand of it a healthy culture is a constantly evolving process, a melange of influences creating a whole far greater then the constituent parts.

You have to wonder if it's just ignorance or if there's something darker lurking beneath this malodorous idiocy which seems to spill from the gaping maws of the Tories as they attempt, once again, to shift goalposts and perceptions, to find false equivalence – a steady stream of nonsense and clickbait to distract from their basic factual ineptitude, the weekly u turns on policy, the expensive failures and unaccountable wastage. Adherents of the the populist playbook, dependant upon a constant barrage of distraction, the shock doctrine attuned towards the sharpening decline..