It may be true that money follows money in a similar fashion to water following water until we find the floor wet, the water level inching up, and the ceiling beginning to bulge or in an alternative scenario water finding its way round the dam’s foundations and messing with one’s intentions – water following water until some fairly robust “engineering” puts a stop to it. There was that phrase bandied about a few years ago: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ or perhaps, ‘it’s the market, stupid’. Leave it to the market and watch how we all get richer. Except that’s not how it works because money follows money and the rich get richer. End of story. Trickle down? Maybe the occasional drip.
I look on the word kinetic as to do with movement. After all it is where we get cinema from – the movies. Kinetic art – art to do with movement. Kinesiology – the study of the mechanics of body movement. Now you tell me it means doing everything we can to render an enemy non-existent – kinetic war.
Margaret Thatcher (in)famously desired to destroy her old enemy of socialism (there is no such thing as society), to place it in the dustbin of history. But a few years later and with the image of Tony Blair burned into his brain, we have the aristocratic Pinky determined to create a Big Society. With all the money going overseas to China or flowing out with the non-doms, it will have to be a society of voluntaryism. No public service, no professionals. The wealthy will be looking into the goldfish bowl of the British Isles from their tax free homes as the rest of us are weaned off the idea of wages or salaries and are persuaded (those riot police will need extra powers) to volunteer their labour. Oh my goodness, have we been here before? Is it possible that camps will have to be built to house us all, to concentrate us where we are needed.
All the money’s flowing to China, you say . . . does the CCP have a good charitable record?
And there was recent talk of the squeezed middle. This must mean the impoverishment of great swathes of the expanded middle class. Could this be the re-emergence of a working class, not just an underclass of demonised refusenik chavs.
But don’t worry we have Pinky Dave and Ghostly Gideon, that pair of music hall comics dressed up in best management fashion, bleating ‘oh this is a good wheeze chaps, let’s do it!’
I liked Eric (Mr Google) Schmidt’s advice to us, the present occupants of this little island off the coast of North America, to marry the luvvies and the boffins. Yesterday evening I was in the audience at a conversation between Wayne McGregor and Scott deLahunta. This choreographer and psychologist have been endeavouring to do just this for the last decade or so. McGregor said at one point how he sees science interrupting or perturbing the usual creative habits. It seems we need the challenge of other viewpoints,
like Wallace Stevens’ blackbird . . .
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.