Are We Amused?

Are We Amused?

I’ve closed down my Twitter account – can’t bear to call it X after that eejit Musk - until work-in-progress is delivered. Too much to read, too many outstanding posts to comment on and share. I will miss the community – and it is real community - when it comes to addressing Palestine, Zionism, Fascism, the Climate and Covid emergencies, the wars needed and favoured by the billionaires. But I have a living to make and time is more precious than usual. I’m grateful to Alon Mizrahi for recommending me on Substack and will continue to write here.

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As a proud European my stomach is turned by von der Leyen, Metsola, Kallas and their ilk.

‘Put more women in charge,’ they say. ‘Then, we will have peace’.

‘Oh no we won’t’, says the audience to the dangerous pantomime where politicians are in Office and billionaires are in Power.

Maybe as a brunette, blonde ambition was never my thing.

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Irish politics is not worth commenting on. A government with all the substance of a forgotten scarecrow, uninterrogated by swathes of media and voted back in by the smug. Lies on housing? Deals with Lowry? Whodathunk it? No plan anywhere to prevent the spread of airborne infections that are leaving our communities sick, our hospitals heaving. ‘Come to ED with chest pain? A broken leg? No problem. We’ll give you Covid or Influenza A/B or RSV for free. Oh, and the chest pain is probably due to a precious Covid infection. It affects the heart, brain and immune system you know. But hey, this is how we roll. This is what the public wants and who are we to deny them their denial?’

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We have reached a critical juncture in our world and are betrayed by a politics that has been confected and infected by the billionaire corporate media and its courtiers. Politicians – leaders – can be anything as long as they are first, amusing. We will die laughing as per Neil Postman’s devastating conclusion to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

“What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H.G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of the media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”