I was watching a thrush searching for food in the courtyard of where I live. The thrush (male or female, I know not) was the picture of maintaining focus: closely examining with eye and beak the joins in the paving, pulling out moss, turning over leaves, and occasionally finding a morsel of what she was searching for. There was also a constant alertness for possible danger – cats, I assume, being the greatest danger. I was never sure whether or not she discerned me behind the window; at times she seemed to look straight at me, checking to see whether I was a danger or not.
What sort of predator is (was?) the wretched Murdoch gang. I notice there is a programme on Channel Four this evening with the title How Murdoch Ran Britain. Interestingly there is a parallel in the current serial broadcast of Mervyn Peake’s History of Titus Groan on Radio 4. The character of Steerpike giving us a good account of how to grab power: the dual threats of violence and blackmail and the art of blagging being well to the fore. Not that this is anything new – there would seem to be an endless supply of those who would be emperor, trying their skill and luck. Or rather, in the case of the Murdoch gang, how to run things whilst apparently remaining in the background and hiding behind the freedom of the press whilst at the same time terrorising our elected representatives.
I do think our elected representatives should be more scared of us than some newspaper proprietor. But then you have to remember that they gave us the freedom of consumerism. Should we thank them for that?
Resistance is hard work against the whirlwind of market forces, the power houses of globalised financial institutions.
I have just been alerted (via the London Review of Books) to the account of some seminars (2010-11) that examined the question of the Labour tradition – which, of course was always a tradition of resistance – in relation to the current social/political/economic situation. It is available as an e-book at www.soundings.org.uk. I look forward to reading it.
And why not, as a final puzzle to this posting, bring in the fourth stanza of Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
Yes, I almost know what he means.