Fingering the Pulse

This could have been so much worse

My ongoing twitter experiment to try and maintain some semblance of a grasp on current events continues to bear mixed fruit. The consensus on recent events appears to be that we’re all going to die in the now inevitable Sino-Japanese pissing contest over a bunch of rocks, but that’s OK because no one is allowed to talk about it anyway.

Well, they are, but they have to keep it respectful. Loud noises made in a political capacity are apparently the same as terrorism, which I guess means those politicians’ loudspeaker vans that get rolled out before every election are some sort of domestically targeted dirty bomb. I’m relieved to hear that Mr Ishiba is seeking to clamp down on this hideously antidemocratic practice and look forward to the total absence of political grandstanding from LDP candidates in future election cycles. Well done sir!

It’s also heartening to see the beacon of global democracy that is the USA supporting such measures towards reduced freedom of expression and accountability because FREEDOM and some other things which I’m sure I don’t need to worry my pretty little head about because our lords and masters have it all safely in hand, but mainly FREEDOM. And did I also mention FREEDOM?

Would you mind awfully keeping it down a little?

Y’see, this is why I don’t really write much in the way of political stuff on this blog. It’s all just so depressing and inevitable and hypocritical that sarcasm is, really, the only available alternative to apathy. And snark’s fine in small doses (at least I hope it is), but basing entire posts on it with any sort of regularity is just so fucking tiring, both in terms of reading and writing the stuff.

The basic, the continual, the everlasting message issuing forth from politicians of every nation is, essentially, “Shut up. We’re doing fine. Now watch in awe as we slap our pricks against each other” (obviously that ‘we’ doesn’t actually include the likes of you and me, just the other ruling elites, and we all get to watch in cowed resignation as they indulge in geopolitical cock-slamming contests). You can only bang on about that so many times before it all becomes this infinite grey miasma of low-level disinterest.

That’s how they win, of course. Even the monumentally ineffectual action of writing a sarcastic blog post is a step beyond most people’s level of political engagement. And on one level I can understand that. You’ve got to look after you and yours and when the stuff in front of your face is trying but not insurmountable then why risk upsetting the apple cart? Nope, safer just to whine on twitter and leave it at that (please note that the sarcasm hasn’t stopped yet).

So what else has been happening? Mandela died, an event to which I can’t possibly add anything of note other than to talk about the time I saw him make a speech in Trafalgar Square because clearly what’s most important here is my personal connection to it all, and various other things occurred which people all got very het up about for about half a day at a time before getting all pissed off about something else.

Now, clearly I don’t actually believe that. I’m perfectly willing to think that the annoyance or whatever was maintained for a suitably respectful period of time, but it’s the nature of the medium that tends to force all this into such massively compressed cycles. Nor, to be honest, am I going to sit here and condemn that medium outright, because it is what you make of it, and if my twitter feed appears to be composed principally of puns and outrage then that’s just as much a reflection of who I’m choosing to follow and I should probably try to find fewer angry people who think they’re funny. My own fault, really.

My own fault also that this has now turned into that twitter post I swore I’d never write. Sorry. Most of it’s about shitty Japanese politicians though, and that’s surely something we can all get behind? Look, I’ll make a hashtag. That’ll make it all better.

#shhh

Credit where it’s due.