The Holy Family

It’s gonna take some time, but I’ll get there
Top to toe in tailbacks
Oh, I got red lights all around
But soon there’ll be a freeway, yeah
Get my feet on holy ground

So I sing for you
Though you can’t hear me
When I get through
And feel you near me
Driving in my car
I’m driving home for Christmas

Driving home for Christmas
With a thousand memories
I take a look at the driver next to me
He’s just the same
Just the same.            ‘Driving Home for Christmas’, Chris Rea   

The profound and ancient myth of Christmas is the miraculous birth of the Son of God in a stable in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago.

Not any more. For decades now anyone driving much over the month of December will have heard Christmas pop songs relentlessly. They all propagate the new myths of Christmas:

1. Everybody’s having fun
2. Spending Christmas with family is the new ‘holy ground’

Alas, like the original Christmas myth, they are without foundation. Apart from the most devout Christians, hardly anyone believes in the myth of Baby Jesus, gentle, meek and mild in the stable with the menagerie around him and Magi in residence applauding the virgin birth and the arrival of the Messiah. Hardly anyone.

And now the new myths have lost their lustre. Christmas is and has been for some time now an orgy of consumption with drunkenness the lubrication oiling the wheels.

And why do we need to be so sedated at this holy, festive time? Myth 2.

If your own memory doesn’t speak truth to you the facts will: every single organisation charitably devoted to our well-being records Christmas as the most distressing and upsetting time of year for many of us. The Samaritans receive an overwhelming number of calls from severely depressed people contemplating suicide. In the days following Christmas, Relate and solicitors receive more inquiries about divorce than at any other time of year.

So I think we can lay Chris Rea’s myth of the family as ‘holy ground’ to rest. And all the other exhibitions of the joys of a family Christmas as well. To put it bluntly, Christmas is such a hyped-up myth of universal fun and how fabulous family get-togethers are that, while the anticipation is great, the consummation is devoutly to be missed.

I shall conclude with a line from Coleridge’s ‘Ode: On Dejection’:

We cannot hope from outward forms to win

The joy whose spring and fountains lie within.

Then and Now

Then: populist = popular, broadly supported by the majority of voters

Now: Fascist

Then: Right wing or Conservative = the established, traditional, common view on most affairs, balanced, tolerant, open to discussion based on evidence, reason and logic

Now: Fascist

Then: Left Wing = Socialist or Communist

Now: indisputably virtuous, wise and unchallengeable

Then: Centre Ground = the broad consensus in society on what is fair, just and true

Now: ?????

Sir Winston Churchill once observed that the greatest argument against democracy would be found simply by asking the man or woman in the street for their views on politics and society in general.

US President Bill Clinton whilst in office said that “The average guy is an ass-hole.”

It seems that someone who enters politics may not despise his electorate but by the time he leaves it he will. This is particularly true of those who rise to cabinet office.

 If you encourage a fool in his folly and a knave in his knavery the result is a government led by Boris Johnson with Matt Hancock as Health Secretary and Gavin Williamson ruling Education.

We, the electorate, of course have our follies and vices but there is only one way we damage our fellow citizens: by electing to office fools and knaves.

The Achilles’ heel of democracy now extends all the way to the head.

And solution there is none save decline and fall. Thus perish all tyrants and democracy has turned into the greatest tyranny of all.

The Edge of War

02/12/23 Watching the excellent film ‘Munich: The Edge of War’ featuring a superb cast including Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain and Ulrich Matthes as Hitler signing the Munich Agreement of September 1938,  (one year before Chamberlain declared war on Germany). I was struck by a remarkable echo of our leaders today.

I detected the same clubbishness, the same naivete and glib gullibility, the same old boy network in new clothes. Rishi Sunak is the odd one out but since he has transferred policy to Lord Cameron, James Cleverley and Jeremy Hunt the parallel pertains.

Lord Cameron is The Great Appeaser. He is the ‘clubbable’ sort who wants to get on with all sorts of people and will in due course sell our allies down the river, Israel, Ukraine, all a matter of time.

“I have a piece of paper from Herr Hitler,” Chamberlain waved the flimsy about. Is that not Lord Cameron to the life?

History has warned us in the most brutal terms. And still we learn nothing.