"Blog Oasis" - Week 8

"All that’s needed for evil to smirk
Is for good men to do nought, so said Burke:
An adage of yore.
The moral to draw?
That that Burke was really no berk!"
Gregory Dark




"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
Franklin, Benjamin, quoted in
‘Taking Liberties’ by Chris Atkins

Shhhh! Now, I don’t want to say this too loudly, and this is strictly between you and me, but I’m not an absolute believer in democracy. First of all, I know of nowhere where it is actually operative. And secondly, much like Churchill, I think its greatest virtue is that it’s preferable to any other alternative – at least, that we’ve tried thus far.

The problems, even with the ‘democracy’ as practised, are manifold. As a philosophy, one of its central faults is, frankly, that it’s wasted on the people. There used to be a rather witty breakdown of the English national press and its readership. “‘The Times’,” it went, “is read by the people who run the country; ‘The Financial Times’ is read by the people who own the country …” and so on in a remarkably accurate analysis until it arrived at ‘The Sun’ which is read, so it suggested, “by the people who don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.” Sadly, there is considerably more truth to that than I, as an idealist, find comfortable to recognise.

The political apathy today is enormous, and needs much more space to address than these few words. But, as with so much of today’s realities, that apathy is only a larger and more sinister development of that there has always been.
Remarkably few people are that bothered about free speech or civil liberties … about ‘liberty’, in fact, at all, in any abstract sense. Under the governance of Messers Bush and Blair we witnessed a totally unparalleled erosion of that liberty. Protests rarely rose above a whisper. And were almost totally ignored by a press and the broadcasting media, all of which should be in the vanguard of that protest.
Benjamin Franklin may well be right. Perhaps people today don’t deserve either liberty or security. Certainly what they have of both is a beggar’s rations. Perhaps people don’t deserve democracy either. But because they don’t deserve it does not countenance withholding it. Liberty and democracy are not rewards, but rights.

Let us commit today, poppet, to maintaining human rights and civil liberties – whether or not we believe people ‘deserve’ them. Millions of people died in the Second World War to preserve just such liberties as are now being stolen. Surely we owe those sacrificed lives a little of our emotional energy.



"Her fiancé was born close to Gloucester;
He was a roué, a cad, an impoucester;
He conned her and boucester,
And then double-croucester –
But, thank God, he finally loucester."
Gregory Dark

' A Blog Oasis' Week 7

" Love is central to every religion
It provides hope and gives us our vision;
But in our secular world
The word is now hurled
With something quite close to derision."
Gregory Dark




" When one tries to rise above Nature, one is liable to fall below it. "
Conan Doyle, Arthur

Now, don’t get me wrong: I know I lack the intellect of a Bertr and Russell or an Albert Einstein – or probably of their lesser known cousins, the remarkably stupid Albert Russell and Bertrand Einstein. But I do like to think there’s the odd bit of grey matter rattling between the two old ear-drums. It therefore appals me, how many years it was that I believed God and religion inseparable. I thought, because so much of so many religions was clearly so evil, that all those who took an interest in matters spiritual were either bad or mad. When I was again prepared to consider metaphysical matters one of my first ‘spiritual’ advisers suggested that all I needed know about God was that I was not He. Which is still, now I think about it, pretty much the lump sum of my knowledge of Him – or Her or It or them or him, with a small ‘h’.

It’s a pretty simple notion. It’s therefore so much more of a shame, and a bit perplexing, that as a species we seem unable to take it on board.
It seems to me that one of our most besetting vices, as a species, is our arrogance. The worst of which is that such arrogance is not completely unfounded! In a whole host of ways, we have triumphed over Nature. We are now able to fly, and to breathe underwater; we have even been able to escape from our own planet. But this ingenuity seems to have sired a rather unappealing cockiness, if not hubris. We are the masters of the planet, that hubris seems to tell us, and Nature is only there to do our bidding.

We continue to build major metropolises on geological fault-lines, to raze vast tracts of natural wasteland, to feed livestock fodder at variance with those animals’ natural diet and charged with chemicals, likewise to douse our fruit and vegetables, even to change the globe’s weather patterns and tidal flows, to poison our rivers, our oceans and our fish. And we do all of this confident that, whatever redress Nature takes, we will overcome it. Because we are the master. And we have been shown time and time – and time – again that we’re not. And that we can’t.
Today, my darling one, let’s just say to ourselves, let’s do one thing to atune our lives more to Nature, and do one thing less to spite her or to prove our mastery over her.



" A wise marmalade cat of Edinburgh
Spent all her days licking her furgh.
Said she, “My dear surgh,
Ýou too could purgh
If you took problems just when they occurgh!”
Gregory Dark