A cartoon shows a man and his wife at home. The wife has just returned from a shopping trip and is heavily laden with bags. The husband looks astonished as his wife explains;

The advertising made me do it!

Taking responsibility for one’s actions has been an important pillar of self respect for hundred’s of years. It is what we teach our children.

At it’s most extreme we hear the defence in war crime trials that;

I was only following orders.

Or in the air plane high jacking where the captain has a handgun pressed to his ear and is told;

If you do not do as I say, everyone will die and it will be you fault.

This game of ‘passing the buck’ is at best shallow and at worst highly manipulative, criminal and immoral.

So it is interesting that in today’s democracies, there appear instances of public figures abdicating responsibility in the same way, either to avoid blame or to gain advantage or both.

At present, so called Teresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is telling parliament that if they do not agree to her negotiated withdrawal agreement with the EU, Brexit will crash into a brick wall and it will not be her fault, but theirs.

More morally, she could have spent one year finding the views of the British people, another year finding out what the majority in parliament wanted and a month telling Europe what deal Britain will accept, based on her findings. Instead, two Brexit secretaries have resigned, civil servants have worked in the background up towards the Prime Ministers’ notional ‘red lines’. In the end TM negotiated what she thought was good for everyone without asking in detail, what they wanted. When it all fails miserably and the country is severely damaged, she will not be able to be voted out as she won her recent vote of ‘no confidence’. More importantly, the blame for the damage will be on those who did not do as she told them to do, and TM will abdicate any responsibility. Only logicians will see what she has been doing.

At the same time in history we have an American president, Donald Trump, who is holding a fully licensed, semi automatic assault rifle to the heads of each member of Congress.

If you don’t do what I want (give me five billion dollars to build a wall with Mexico) I will allow government funding to expire.

Correctly, Congress is standing firm. They do not like being blackmailed and certainly do not want to cover up a lie Trump made to the people.

I am going to build a wall with Mexico (cheer) and I am going to get the government of Mexico to pay for it.

Perhaps not many Americans have noticed his slight of hand or as he would say, lie? Perhaps not many mind manipulative politics to put it politely. Whatever it is, it is not democracy and more akin to Nazi and Soviet methods of persuasion.

This at a time when the infrastructure of the USA is crumbling; that is roads, bridges, railways, public buildings…the money could go where the American people will see it being spent. America First.

And you have to wonder which millennium Mr. Trump is living in to have faith in a project that the Ancient Chinese and Romans employed. Hadrian’s wall, (separating Roman Britain and the Picts in the north) was more a political barrier than a physical barrier because archaeologists find evidence of Picts living peacefully on both sides of the wall.

Ironically, both examples of today’s bully politics result from one perceived problem, immigration. Fitting the correct solution to the perceived problem in the UK and the USA, would have been more effective, moral, cheaper and democratic.

On both sides of the Atlantic we see politicians fumbling for solutions. TM’s will not work, DT’s will not work and they are being told so. But if you result to threats to obtain what you want, you have to clear some moral high ground for when it all goes wrong. Interestingly they both are using the ploy of switching responsibility onto the good guy for their bad plans of action.

I put the hamster in the microwave because you won’t take me to the zoo and you said you would, Mummy!

Have we voted for the leaders we deserve or have we elected three year olds into office?

A love story

Christmas day, nothing on the telly as usual, then I notice BBC 4 has Swan Lake. I amuse myself until eight o’clock, miss the deep and meaningful introduction as I raid the fridge and settle down just as the overture starts.

I enjoy a lot of jumping around, the sets and costumes and it’s not until the third act that a thought occurs to me. What is this all about?

The progress on stage is so seemingly slow that I have a mo to pick up my tablet and Google for a plot summary and the names of the characters. I realise that all this information is sat on the laps of the live audience in their programmes and is missing for folks at home! Anyway, it’s a fairly simple plot and I finally get what all the miming has been about (how about ballet with speech and singing!)

If you don’t know the plot then have a read on line as I don’t have space here.

Sometime in the night I wake up and run the plot through my mind again. It’s a fairy story, right? That means it’s about as real and as useful as fairies are in the twenty first century, right? Well wrong.

I realise that the story is considerably more profound than even the twenty quid programme lets on.

There is a lake full of white fluffy swans, about twenty four of them as far as I could see on the telly but they did keep moving around a lot so it could have been twenty eight. Anyway the lake represents the world (round world, round lake – please keep up) and the souls who have been turned into swans are us…that is humans, spending our short lives going around in circles and basically asleep. Only Odette is able to become human again in the night time. (Just like me waking up in the night and being profound). She represents the two states of being alive and being dead. She is dead when she is alive (an enchanted swan) and alive at night (a human soul in the spirit world).

The prince is unimpressed by the marriage proposals of the best beauties Russia has to offer because he is himself enchanted by the beauty of the Queen of the swan population, Odette.

Confusion and evil arise in the shape of the Von Rothbart who is keen for his own daughter, Odile, to be the object of Prince’s love. To achieve this he cunningly uses magic to make Odile appear as Odette. His only mistake is to give the baddy a black swan cossy and the goody a white swan cossy, just so the audience can see what is going on.

Here Prince Siegfried is exploring his own consciousness, which consists of his feminine Self, as well as the male. Since men usually have this repressed (darkened- black) in themselves, their inner journey is to bring light their own femininity. The black turns to white, good triumphs over evil ( in moral terms ) and the prince becomes a King.

In the final act the prince expresses his love for Odette and she forgives him for making what was a simple mistake. He has had to learn discrimination and wisdom to show his Kingly understanding of truth. The evil Von Rothbart and imposter Odile are returned to their true bird like (or reptilian ) forms representing the humans who live their lives on automatic pilot.

By returning to the lake and expressing his love for Odette, Siegfried pops the spell like a balloon. They both jump into the lake (something the less inspired may have been waiting for since the interval) and from their ascend into heaven. This represents the process of human spiritual evolution as attributed to great prophets but is accessible even to humble folks like us. At the point of ‘individuation’ or becoming a complete human being, the physical world (the lake) is no longer needed as a learning environment for the soul.

Well, there is my cranky interpretation of a wonderful story. Should something like this be in the programme? Do we really need to know about hidden meanings? Certainly not. These stories were developed and retold because they illumine the human mind without interpretation, just in the telling. In our modern times, thousands of people sit through what is on the face of things a load of nonsense (a fairy story) and go away thinking they know a lot better than the people of the past who used to believe that sort of thing. But they (and particularly children whose minds are more open to symbolism) will have been enchanted  by the whole thing.

That makes them members of the flock of enchanted swans swimming in circles on the lake of life. But fret ye not. Someday your prince will come and take you away, because that is what princes do.

Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,

Poor Oliver Hardy was curiously loyal to Stan Laurel given the chaos of their on-screen lives which Olly blamed entirely on Stan.

So you might add the same epithet to UK politics. As much as I dislike being ‘wise after the event’ I will indulge in this somewhat, because I said it before the event.

Firstly, you don’t agree to something before you know what it is you are agreeing to. There is an Aesop Fable about this human weakness where a pig is purchased whilst it is still hidden in a bag.

Any vote on whether to stay in or leave the European Union should have included the previously negotiated terms of such a deal. It’s like putting a label on the box.

Because this did not take place, the two sides were able to invent what would and what would not happen after Brexit. So whatever result the general populace wanted, such as uncontrolled immigration, could be promised to be solved by Brexit. The Home Office have had eight years to control immigration and only now are proposing a strategy to control it. And the fact all along, was that four out of five immigrants to the UK are not from the European Union.

Thirdly, there was the problem of the Northern Ireland border with Eire. The older politicians in the house of Commons will have lived through the so called ‘troubles’. They might have warned the younger inexperienced politicians that any attempt to replace border controls would be social and political suicide for Northern Ireland. Because of this alone, the referendum should have never been promised, until a solution to Ireland was obvious. This would have included the option of uniting Ireland. This is not an impossible outcome in the future now that the south is becoming more liberal and the majority in the north want to remain in Europe.

So what happened? How did politicians ignore the false promises, agree to something without knowing what was being proposed and before solving the Irish land border’s vulnerability?

Could it have been that the conservative party had a problem within itself that it needed to confront or face losing power? It has been the case for decades that European sceptics within the party were at odds constantly with those who believed the UK is more prosperous within Europe?

Is this in-fighting really the tail that was wagging the dog?

You would like to think that politicians act in the interest of the Nation first and their own party’s second. That is what they tell us but it is conceivable that this has not been so. Brexit was called by Cameron to force a direction, one way or the other. Confirmation of this is that the rules of the referendum permitted an infinitely narrow margin in the result. The rules did not require a sixty percent or two thirds majority, as they could have done.

Someone decided that the voting should be; whoever gets over fifty percent wins. That decision anticipated that there was no consensus within the party and to force change, a majority of one vote over millions, would be deemed representative of the people and logically no one could disagree.

In my view British politics has been brought to an all time low by the current set of politicians on both sides of the house. The only MP I have heard talk sense is Caroline Lucas – the Green Party MP. ‘Good on yer, Caroline’. Don’t forget that the voice of one person can decide the future of a nation, at least in the current nonsensical version of so called democracy.

Whoever can point out the elephant in the room and stop the nation accepting a ‘no deal’ will be a hero.