Grasping at composure

We were talking about music, were we not?

I've been mainlining Stackridge these past few weeks, cycling round their albums over and over again. A unique band, thoroughly British, thoroughly bonkers and thoroughly brilliant. They've chopped and changed their line-up over the years, with various people leaving and/or coming back, so there must have been personal tensions within the group, and they had their positively last hurrah some time last year. There's a live DVD, The Forbidden City, which shows off some of the best of their material, though you do wonder, watching some of them singing, if they're not liable to do themselves a mischief trying to hit those notes at their age. Still, I should talk.

Here's a video from 1974: https://youtu.be/Pe_GUseMRmg

And another from said DVD: https://youtu.be/bbmiLWTfUqs

And an album track to finish off with: https://youtu.be/kq-zFh8mw2U?list=PL6EEDE6EE2F3C246E

That's better. By Jove, I needed that.

Another good reason to stay away from FB

Just at the moment, anyway. The current berserker rage infesting two groups of people who have the same goal (to stop the truly horrific Donald Trump becoming the leader of the allegedly free world) but who disagree slightly on ways and means.

Some of them seem to think if they insult and demean the other group's figurehead at least sixteen or seventeen times a day it will somehow win the other group over. They don't for a moment consider the fact that the other group is doing exactly the same to theirs, without noticeable effect on them, or that the actual issue will be decided by the votes of a much larger number of people who aren't listening. Meanwhile, the rest of us (especially those with the luxury of not being American) get heartily sick of the whole boiling, and the Trump crowd pass the popcorn, sit back and laugh and laugh.

The thing is, both Britain and the US have a two-party system, and the trouble with a two-party system is that (as we have seen) the only way anyone outside the two parties can get a look in is by sucking up to one of the two parties, which then most probably ignores them. Also, since both parties are desperately wooing the voters who are somewhere in the middle, their aims are twofold: 1) to become as much like the other party as possible without actually being them, or 2) to shift, somehow, the notional middle ground in their own direction.

Back in the seventies and eighties, Reagan and Thatcher, using that most efficacious and least rational of stimuli, fear, successfully shifted the middle ground waaaay over to the right. As a result, the less right-wing of our two parties had to become more right-wing in order to stand a dog's chance of being elected, which suited the establishment (which is always right-wing) down to the ground. They've had it all their own way ever since. The only way the unconscionable Clegg could get his party's feet under the table over here was by sucking up to either the Tories or Labour, and we know (and will never forget, nor forgive) which one he chose. Same over there. Bernie Sanders, on the face of it, would have been the better candidate, but he was never going to get the votes. The establishment wanted Hillary Clinton, and they got her. (I know it ain't over till it's over, but from what I've seen it really kind of is.) And now the American people's choice is simple. Trump or Hillary. (I mean, of course, Clinton or Donald.) And that's Sanders' choice as well, if he wants to have any say in how things go. And he'd better hope whichever side he picks treats him better than Cameron treated Clegg.

So that's it. Stir up all the internet BS you like. Doesn't matter. The result isn't what some of us wanted. It is what it is, and the sooner you prepare yourselves to deal with that, the better. For myself, I'm done voting my ideals. Never works. From now on, it's the less neoliberal of the viable options every time, and hope for a miracle, or the Second Coming, or aliens, or whatever it will take to break the two-party system, because a hundred or so people voting for Ernie Dinkelfwat just won't do it. Even if I'm one of them.

Sad but true.