I – Do not confuse me with a fellow traveller...
...do not make that mistake
I won't be manning any barricade
or spray-painting your slogans
on unattended walls. I am not breathless
for the state to fall. Evolution
trumps revolution, ninety-nine
point nine percent of the time
and for the other fractional percent: well...
we're so screwed anyway. Rebellion serves
only rebels, who—great though they are
at stealing jeeps, and wiring parcels
to explode—are not so hot in power
distribution, at bringing people light;
or heady freedom for the sewage
to flow in drains... no, theirs are not the brains
for that, for careful use of power
and fuse—how can they be? They need believe
such silly things along their way
such as all men are equal,
only our stance is doctrinally robust,
or even...
that they must prefer the electrodes
inserted here and here
to any tea-and-biscuit chat today.
II – Media rhymes with "eediot"
You do not understand the world
and let me make it clear
that this is you, you with the "Press" card in your hat,
who understands so very well
the breaking of a story like
a wave of noxious fluid
through everybody's living room,
it's you who just doesn't get it.
The world is not the news,
the dead are dead without your stare,
the bereaved still sad; and when
El Presidente bravely takes the town
from behind and rebels are all rounded up
I will admit you stop atrocities
for just so long as you look that way
and don't run off to the human interest piece
about the dog that saved the boy.
And I'm sure you say: we give the people
exactly what they want, to which I say
oh yes, you spin a world for those whose minds
don't let them find their own, and every word
implies what you narrate is what matters,
and what you don't ain't real. You'll claim
you don't conceal but every day
your untidy desk selects what's best for "news",
for folk to know: it's in the public interest,
you insist, while typing quote marks around
what the TV said the radio said about the other paper's views.
III – A plague on both your second houses
The problem is belief. Belief is stupid.
Belief it is that makes you make mistakes
and then it takes your errors,
brands them heroic victories
and makes you make them all over again.
If there is one thing that I know,
it's the stupidity of me.
I know, my brain is wired with
its tiny neural liars and systems
which conspire to enact a holy fool.
Cognitive bias, it does what it says
right there upon the tin, and which
you did not read,
because the idea was uncomfortable
but all you with the one coloured shirts
are committed to your ideals, which makes shits
of them there in the other coloured shirts
and all of you line up to grasp
opposite ends of one long rope
and grunt and pull and hope
to shift it just one inch
in your preferred direction
and you monopolise attention
for you, and your rope, and how
the other bloke is pulling the wrong way
while all around the horizon—boundless
and magnificent and essentially free—
stretches toward infinity,
but we're not allowed to look,
or speak, on that.
This was sitting on a back burner for a long time, not going anywhere. Every now and then I would take it out and work on it a bit, but it didn't arrive anywhere and I had to put it away again.
Then I saw a call for contributions to The Commons by Waterhare Press and this was obviously exactly what they were looking for, so I picked up the poem, dusted it off and was delighted when it was accepted.
Poems like this are difficult. This, if anything, is what I am about: that, in bulk, we look at the world in damaging, stupid and shortsighted ways—but it can tread harshly on other people's beliefs.
However the degree of stomping need not be as violent as might first appear. Belief, I say in this poem, is stupid and I really think that, but this doesn't mean the sorts of thoughts which feature in beliefs aren't just as laudable viewed with cold hard reason. Should we be progressive? Obviously! Should we be kind? Definitely! Should we eat the rich? Let me get back to you on that one...
The problem is not what we believe. The problem is belief itself. The world is deeper, gnarlier, and more complex than we comprehend. Layering beliefs on top helps us get by in the short term, but it doesn't help us confront the difficult questions, and it doesn't help when we encounter people who believe differently. Belief allows no position there except that they are wrong; and when they won't change their beliefs, it usually decides they are evil.
Belief is bad. Believe nothing, neither political nor religious.
You'll be better person for it.
