the butter has all gone

A seemingly official advocate of mainstream politics, seemingly acting on behalf of a mainstream politician we might all know but might not all love, asked for an opinion, in some secluded email place or other. We responded with wry wry wry, as we do and as we prefer. But several unwanted emails on, well its intellectual carparks at dawn, we yawn.

'...Please be attentive this time. We said 'start with' the ancient Greeks ... it was a lesson in contextualisation, from first principles; thus a history lesson, thus an excersise in locating some kind of first cause. So your incredulity is misplaced, in error, in being ahistorical, falling foul of problems associated with Hermeneutics. Hey - academia... There is no general enfranchisement - that's the problem. That, *, is your problem. Democracy insofar as it exists at all is a sham, a placebo. It occurs nowhere. Try Joseph Schumpeter for starters: '...What strikes me most of all, and seems to me to be the core of the trouble, is the fact that the sense of reality is so completely lost. One feels oneself to be moving in a fictitious world. This reduced sense of reality accounts for a reduced sense of responsibility and for the absence of effective volition. One has one's phrases, of course, and one's wishes and daydreams. One has one's likes and dislikes. They do not amount to a will. For the private citizen musing over national affairs there is no scope for such will and no task at which it could develop. He is a member of an unworkable committee, the committee of the whole nation, and this is why he expends less disciplined effort on mastering a political problem than he expands upon a game of bridge...'. Politicians trade on the idea that voting amounts to 'a will', when it demonstrably cannot. When pushed such people might just clutch for a palid pragmatism - saying, well, it's better than, say, Libya; knowing that those nodding heads donn't know the first thing about Libya. Great, well done, thanks. We are grateful. What rules is power. What rules is exploitation; and those who rule are those possessed of a willingness to exploit the little people and be exploited in turn by bigger people to their own gain; be it Saudi Arabia or Bush and his oil industry masters. It's just big busines, and a tiny slice for the population to keep them sufficiently quiet because business needs workers and because there's lots of them and that's scary. People know this now - that's why politics doesn't interest them; not because they are essentially satisfied and apathetic, as is often said. People, in our view, are turned-off your trade because they see through the deception and they have decided to busy themselves elsewhere. Overwhelmingly, rulers and their soldiers went to the same schools and have the same backgrounds. Social inbreeding is as destructive, sick, malign, and tasteless as familial inbreeding. The English establishment loves its little gangs. We're not in one and we are not interested in being in one. Too many are gangsters and murderers for our liking. We don't want our names on your bombs. Being in the Chomsky gang doesn't help either, we have found. Being aware and fighting with that awareness - as a form of social realism - does not work either, we have found. The problems are both irreversibly apocalyptic and too-intrenched by now, we feel. Thus, we view such things as grist for our black comedy mill only. By all means think otherwise....'.