Michael Blackburn: ‘Let me just say that the patriarchy is a great institution; I became a full member as soon as I was born, don’t pay any fees and get to oppress women everywhere. It also means that I am right in every argument, even if my wife hasn’t understood this yet.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘Not only am I not a fascist (not even a twee, vintagey one), but I can also eat more other-cake knowing that I am contributing to the radical, anti-neoliberal revolution that will overthrow all social oppression. I could be a right-on, non-infantilized child. I could be a sticky-fingered, cake-eating comrade.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘That casual sexism (and you have to imagine the surprise with which I am writing this) is just so old-fashioned, so Aussie male. But it’s part of the progressive failure, this assumption of being thoroughly modern coupled with the inability to stay up to date with everyone else, aggravated by the desire to keep things stuck in some politically approved past where the bad guys are clearly defined as those who disagree with you.’
IF, AS THE old adage goes, we get the government we deserve, some serious questions need to be answered. What in God’s name did we do to deserve Blair and Brown, for instance? And then Cameron and Clegg? I could say the same for Scotland, currently practising for nationhood under the tutelage of Salmond and […]
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Michael Blackburn: ‘Clegg ‘kept going on about Farage being “dangerous” and delusional. Dangerous to an unattended pint, yes, and to a packet of Rothmans, but hardly to the welfare of Britain. Sharky Farage, he repeated, wanted to take us back not to the 1950s, that favourite era for progressive contempt, but the nineteenth. Precisely the time when Britain was at its economic and industrial zenith. When, presumably, it wasn’t part of any European project, because it stood alone and “isolated”.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘A simple front garden on one of the main streets was mad in a typically English way: with lumps of rock and small areas of gravel, planted with bright flowers, including daffodils both real and plastic, heather and lavender in pots and in clumps; populated with grey concrete bird baths, rabbits and fauns, the occasional gnome, geese and what looked like a heron. It wasn’t a big garden; it was quite modest, but it was large enough for the eccentricity of the owner to display itself. It would have been easy not to notice its singularity as you walked past on your way to the Post Office shop or the pub.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘New times, old answers. And there’s the rub, for not only are we left with the same old bureaucratic leviathan but we must also rely on “the party”, suitably undefined and as “liquid” as this new democracy, to act as “The Bridge” between us and them, between the vertical and horizontal.’
Tuesday, 18 February 2014
Michael Blackburn: Thus it was always and thus it shall remain, that the hypocrites rise to the top of the waters and float away like excrement from flooded middens.
Saturday, 1 February 2014
Michael Blackburn: In order to homogenise and equalitise everything, then, the middle classes should be discriminated against, have their social mobility clipped and, if they do not or cannot afford to cough up the cash, endure sending their children to mediocre state schools. All while continuing to pay through their taxes for the education of the children of those who are insufficiently middle class to have any choice.
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Saturday, 1 February 2014
Michael Blackburn: ‘ I think Edward Thomas deserves a heaven not just for his marvellous poems but also as an eternal break from his torment. I imagine him able to relax there now, still afflicted with the indecisiveness his friends knew so well and which Frost made fun of in his poem “The Road Not Taken”. I can see him wandering the great gardens of heaven, wondering what lies in the shadows beyond the asphodels and amaranths where the blackbirds are singing, continually surprised at finding himself in a land that bears a powerful resemblance to England (but without the gamekeepers) and still amusing his walking companion, who must assuredly be Robert Frost again, by dithering over which path to take in the yellow wood.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘According to [Hunt’s] brilliant Cambridge-educated brain, German militarism may have caused the war, but that’s no reason to blame the Germans. Or militarism. Or something.’
Michael Blackburn:’ There is something about this concatenation of increased immigration, welfare cuts and an expanding porn industry that amuses me. I don’t think Birgitte would be amused, but no doubt she’d find a way of abolishing all immigration controls and doubling the welfare budget at the same time, all without creating a single new sex worker.’
Michael Blackburn: Selling books is hard; selling literary books is hellish. Selling poetry is like voluntarily putting yourself on a treadmill. Applying to arts boards for grants requires guts of steel and the tenacity of extreme obsessive-compulsiveness fuelled with amphetamines. If you aren’t already mentally deranged when you start, you will be by the time you finish.
Michael Blackburn: I wonder if Ed Miliband is paying any attention to the chaos being produced in Venezuela by policies similar to the ones he’s advocating for fuel prices and other things here? Silly question. If there’s one thing progressives around the world are dedicated to it’s repeating the mistakes of the past.
Saturday, 2 November 2013
Micahel Blackburn; ‘What a pathetic situation we are in, though, governed by clowns and now encouraged by another clown to tear everything up so the world can have yet another bash at the utopian socialist nightmare (accompanied this time with tree-hugging). What Brand and his ilk have missed, as Nick Cohen has pointed out, is that if there is a revolution it’s not going to be theirs; it’s going to come from the right.’
