Category Archives: America and the UK

September 27, 2012 · 9:22 am

THE MUZZLED BLOG

27th September 2012 –

I had a weird dream last night, about a great, ancient house, and a beautiful woman seeking love, yet my failure to reach her! Something’s terribly wrong then, and out of a story that might give actual proof of what Jung called The Collective Unconscious, with so many connected dreams, I think it’s about my own family name, and a ‘house’ I’m very proud of. My father and grandfather’s house. The third post below has been removed then, not in again backing down on it here, but because there are ‘Calibans’ out there, in the lost cyber world, and it’s too specific and too invasive to my family. It’s also too long. I’ve been very ashamed in terms of harm to that name, having had to talk about my fear, internet addiction and a nervous breakdown, although the term’s too easy. As for Fifty Shades of Grey stuff, just let it be some warning about what it does to real love, although I think the psyche will find any way it can to heal itself and I try not to judge. Anyone can come here just to talk about it, in trust. A writer is on a reader’s side, as editors should be on a writer’s side. You cannot be labelled mad and evil by a major editor though, at the heart of a department, and it just be left there at any serious publisher. A cry for help has been completely wrong, I would rather help, and this isn’t, it is open protest.

As for miracles, it’s enough to know some ‘bad’ miracle happened, if only in the relationship between my novel, and real events with a real child, concerned with eyesight and seeing. But then I did write The Sight. It’s written not just across one but several novels, and strange events too, as Fell involves people at my own publisher Abrams, in happier days. The novel commented on by an ex and my own editor, as it was being written and real events being turned to fiction, but which an ex refused to even read, as she slammed a door. It’s tragic that at a Children’s and fantasy publisher, Amulet, a wing of Abrams, and with people who mouth ‘God’, they could not have given the spirit of love to at least try a real miracle, when I cried out in the middle of Scream, or something good for a family, in those terrible circumstances. I think that’s why a CEO reversed a decision to cancel a book, he had no right to cancel, only when a family member called, so not to been seen to be awful, yet the way they tried it was even more Kafkaesque. I resisted that too, but had to walk away.

Two people there, my editor, the now Vice President, and the President of Abrams, should answer it, and say why they destroyed a lauded writing career, with no regard to writing process, award-winning story or fans at all. With no regard to the meanings in my books, trying to address Global Warming, endangered animals or a climate of World Terror, much about America, that must affect our children as much as us all. They are not simple issues, as Man is not a simple animal, and need addressing in story. Perhaps they have to ask if an ex is only capable of malice. Why the former Vice President and my publisher was removed, but no redress made to me, or just no action taken to stop it, and where they think real ‘evil’ lies too. Whether it might be more related to terrible American labels like ‘Evil’, their legal abuses, appalling human cruelty, over so long, and to the obsessive privacies of a woman, my ex and so-called friend, who comes from a family involved in real child abuse and a death from Aids, but who caused such much harm in her selfishness and mounting arrogance. That does not ignore my own rage, or pleading.

The CEO admitted both Civil Conspiracy inside a department and breach and repudiation of contracts. I’m loosing my home now, but no US lawyer will touch the case, because I can’t afford to pay, and perhaps because of my so-called ‘harassment’ of someone I loved, had spent two years with, and discussed a life and future with. A Pro Se, self respresenting action 3000 miles away is too difficult, and could take years, while only 7% win, but never say never. The truth is it was harassment of me too, by my editor too, in a place I could not walk from, with five novels at a firm and a career just taking off in the USA, although something tore out of me, in despair at what people can do, and what she did. Their lie though that my ex, simply as an officer of company, had no better duty of care to me than “Hew, Screw and Glue” was first used in a cover up, I exposed, then described as ‘tedious’ by a CEO, then returned to as a legal manoeuvre to further harass me and a blog right up to 2011, and hide the truth.

Every time they have backed down, when I found the strength to stand up, if sometimes I just appealed to love or spirit and hate invasion, and I have invited them to challenge in court. They should be shamed into action, but have no shame. It was humanly appalling that a woman I had a natural right to trust, let alone loved, could not show any sensitivity to my asking for help over addiction too, or to protect delicate privacies, from a medical issue, to other secrets. Think of ‘David’ in ‘One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest‘ and Jack Nicholson getting labelled mad and lobotomized. Perhaps I should be happier being ‘the bad boy’. The response she put in a Company email was collusion too, inside a small department I loved, incredibly cruel, and harmed several people’s lives. It’s human and artistic cynicism is disgusting.

I am stopping a blog though, because it is harmful to me psychologically, going back and back to the issue. But also in silent protest at what happened and is happening everywhere, although this is just one publishing story. There’s no respect nor protection for the artist though, unless money is involved, but all over we see abuses of power. Abrams’s abuses became monumental, but Macmillan UK were in specific breach of contract too, just handing electronic rights to Penguin US, and have no respect for a classic novel either, letting Fire Bringer fall out of hard copy print after 12 years, and with amazing reviews, and resounding love and praise from readers. Penguin UK keeps classics in print, even if the turnover is not huge. I wonder what they will do to The Sight. It sounds arrogant to say it, but when a friend of my brother’s asked what her daughter might think of Fire Bringer and I said she’ll say it’s “the best book she’s ever read“, in three weeks she came back to say “she said it’s the best book she’s ever read!” I’m not arrogant, but very confident as a writer and storyteller, or was, when I was allowed to do it, with proper and legally contracted support. I just can’t survive this now and cannot find an agent or the right support. No simple sob story, just an awful story.

Culture is in danger though when no one stands up, but then my own editor was allowed to breach my rights to Privacy and Seclusion to another publisher at Penguin US, treating everything I am as owned commodity, while literally using a threat to my own career to muzzle me. “The one thing in life I have learnt, David, if anything, is to keep my mouth shut,” she had already said. As well as warning “we will protect our girl” and being intimately involved both with my ex and her new man, as I saw when I flew out to New York. Fine, but you are a protected editor, behind the scenes, living off share schemes in your writer’s work, using The Sight in your job interview, not an author hired and risking everything to write truthful or inspiring stories. What she said on the phone to my former agent Ginger Clarke in 2009 must be considered to have involved some kind of criminal libel. “Loyalty is a tricky thing,” she once told me too. It certainly is at Abrams.

She put Abrams in specific breach of written conditions of contract too, fighting absurdly for her “power over her list”, nothing else, and admitted to seeing it was all”holding my life to ransom”. But then did nothing except exploit the situation to get to the top as Vice President and try and force a novel into print she mangled, to try and keep a secret from a CEO. The Calibans are definitely at the heart of Abrams, and these are bald facts. That is why ‘culture’ is being given mass market books like Diary of A Wimpy Kid and Hello Kitty, which drive the money machine and so editorial power too.

I was born to write and am rather addicted to blogging too now, earning nothing here, if we’re all addicted to the Internet these days. That needs debate itself but the truth is Phoenix Ark, including most design, was built single handed. Readers’s letters and support were extremely important to that. There are brilliant stories here though, about many things, especially real London in the late 16th Century and Edmund Shakespeare, and other artists and writers might have come in, if everyone was not so wary of being linked to a ‘scandal’, or just looking for cash.

That is the sadness of watching supposed friend’s reactions too, though it is quite hard to stand up to what I did stand up to, in such circumstances. You fight into a place of love and it harms the Self. It was quite hard to get my sanity back, at a point of the most enormous metaphysical grief and fear. I challenged Abrams, God and Heaven, like a loony, when I wrote to them and went on pilrimage, but it reconnected me, heart and soul, and Heaven’s inside and only on earth. Like Hell. I’ve committed to readers to try and get Scream out and will, but everything stops now, until something dramatic changes, which I fully expect, in our frightened, frightening and faithless world, melting ice caps and all, it will not.

Just to stress who I am, to resist any more fear or shame here, and show how the sad years have rolled on, a new author photo is going up in the page headed “The Beginning” too. Pity it’s most likely the end, but it was not for want of trying. Perhaps it’s been too much about me, but its spirit is about the times. I’m not Paulo Coehlo, nor a Catholic, am fascinated by science and nature, the writing power is really there, but I’ve seen true darkness and could help too, in a world that needs balance back, and the language of love, that breathes out of literature, religious and secular. Perhaps in six months time some miracles of the human heart will be allowed, because that is what storytelling is about too.

David Clement-Davies

Phoenix Ark Press

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September 26, 2012 · 3:31 am

PHOENIX ARK CLOSES

To add to the flaming post below, far too long for most to read, I’m closing a blog. It’s been a source of anguish, invasion and neurosis itself, but with respect to truth, much good work, and warnings too, I’m keeping it up online for at least six months. My strange “J’Accuse”, even if I blame myself too. As for Abrams, two women key to my life, an ex and my editor, wrecked a person, work, trusts and broke the most fundamental legal principles too, completely hand in glove and lying through their teeth. But the human and creative damage they stood over is just unbelievable. It’s key moment was that “Hew, Screw and Glue” with that creep of a man in London, that rather sums up the whole scandal, but for many reasons they should answer the charge that the ‘evil’ is fully theirs, not just claw their way to the top, though I guess a business is perfectly entitled to set Hew, Screw and Glue as its real benchmark. Quite a family at “Family Abrams”. You can try writing to my ‘editor’ too, who used The Sight in her own Abrams job interview. Time to thank real friends, and many readers, but get a life again! There might just be a slight chance. DCD

PA PRESS

ps as to Andrew Marr, at least he reversed his Super Injunction, and it’s really those reconstructions that were so….

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September 25, 2012 · 5:15 pm

THE FLAMES OF HEAVEN AND HELL, FIFTY SHADES OF GREY AND THE BAD PHOENIX ARK MIRACLE

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN SUSPENDED AS TOO INVASIVE TO DCD AND TOO MANY PEOPLE

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September 23, 2012 · 12:13 pm

JFK, SHAKESPEARE AND CONSPIRACY THEORY

Just blogged a reply to a comment in The Earl of Oxford, William Ray and a Leering Hydrocephalic Idiot, that talks about the “conspiracy theories” around Shakespeare. But watching Oliver Stone’s JFK last night, what could be more obvious proof that conspiracies happen? JFK’s assassination was the 9/11 of its time, in terms of world shock, when everyone remembers where there were. It certainly was for my parent’s generation. If even a tenth of the facts are right, there cannot be serious doubt that Oswald was not the lone shooter, indeed it’s impossible, so the patsy he said he was, and that the Warren Commission was a fabrication. A “Coup d’état” is Stone’s conclusion, in a film where people often quote Shakespeare, and with that highly convincing and chilling moment when Donald Sutherland remarks that “the organising principle for any society is for war.” It might say a lot about Iraq and Afghanistan too. Of course the CIA director Allen Dulles is mentioned too, and his dismissal by Kennedy, and that organisation that Kennedy said he wanted to “scatter to the four winds.”

It brought up the issue of research here into Dulles’s amazing career in Switzerland, the Manhattan heiress and art and literary patroness Drue Heinz and American OSS and British spies there, involved with the Edda Mussolini story and the Count Ciano affair. It was rather shocking to me though when an editor on The Independent newspaper in the UK doubted anyone would be interested nowadays, if you could prove who killed JFK. Perhaps he was right and it’s just a brutal fact, and time and truths always hurry on.

I have no proof of anything specifically related to Kennedy. It was just studying Dulles more closely, and the free-wheeling writ that he and the OSS were given to fight the Nazis, that began to make Stone’s take even more convincing. Just as Churchill told the SOE to “set Europe ablaze“, US Black Ops started in the Second War, and included not only media disinformation and propaganda campaigns, that carried back into America with “Operation Mockingbird”, but the habit of OSS and later CIA assassination, that Dulles fully sanctioned. Still a hero at the CIA, very heroic in Switzerland, when he crossed the border with a Million Dollar money order, at the moment of Operation Torch and the closing of borders, he may have been something of the Good Shepherd in the Matt Damon movie, but his later career is rather more suspect.

PA PRESS

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September 20, 2012 · 12:24 pm

THE GODHEAD GAME COMES TRUE?

There are three months to go until “The Mayan End of The World“, but from our excellent sources around the globe come two highlighted articles:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/9553837/Israel-stages-largest-snap-exercise-in-years.html

http://news.sky.com/story/987227/anti-jihad-adverts-to-run-in-new-york-subway

No-one likes a prophet much, but if events in the thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies are coming true then, like Obama’s predicted election this year, the whole story also follows the issue of Iran’s nuclear capability, indeed the threat of nuclear conflict, in A Game of Secrets, A Hunt for Skulls, A Battle of Spies.

While exploring the whole Mayan story too, it is more optimistic than being ‘milarianist’ though. If it does invite everyone, including Israel and Iran, to stop replaying old attitudes, and wake up to something extraordinary about mankind, nature and reality, that must include all of us. Just as its hero receives a strange email, at the heart of the FBI in Washington, inviting him to “change his life forever.” It is also about how science and ‘religion’ have split dangerously into two opposing kinds of language and need to be redefined. Why not send an email yourselves and invite people to read it? To get a copy CLICK HERE, but for a snatch of the Phoenix Ark ‘book trailer’, click on the arrow below:

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September 20, 2012 · 10:17 am

ABRAMS, PRIVACIES AND TRUTH

Perhaps the most dignified way to describe what happened back 2008/9 was a kind of nervous breakdown. Although it was stranger than that, and trying to work and protect myself, I was never allowed to break down. I went into a kind of emotional black hole, so dark it seemed to swallow light. At times I was both clever and even manipulative, perhaps, but think of how thinking about such places is called The Genius Point. Although I always fought for the wider truth, and indeed somehow to protect everyone! Then the only way I could fight something that held me in a kind of hell for two years and more though, and profoundly disagreeing with it on many principles, was to ‘breach’ supposed privacies by writing about what happened at Abrams here.

It has been rather boring at times, for readers, trying to find some “court of public opinion”, which I actually don’t trust much. It certainly was not the person I was before I fell foul of New York. As for my “madness”, perhaps I should quote Shakespeare’s Brother and one Elizabethan actor who ended up in the vicious Bedlam of the day and found himself crying “They thought me mad, and I they!”

It involved something both frightening and very difficult for me, indeed shaming, and precisely the point of the damage they did over so long. Actually pure cruelty. Though there has been a deal of confusion over something so personal too, I did it to step beyond the kind of corruption I still believe or know they engaged in, written all over the story of a CEO’s negative relationship with a publisher, and why it allowed him to be replaced by my own editor, while destroying their own author too. It is actually self-evident and was both professionally and humanly terrible.

Nor was I allowed any protection of my privacy at all, and part of the ‘madness’ was the absolute hypocrisy there, and my own ferocious, even desperate fight to protect myself, while I was the author trying to function, under contract. It was an attack on story telling itself, and the conditions needed to get there. It was also, in any pretence of due process there, a glaring attack on free speech. Not least beacuse not only did they hold my life and career to ransom, not once did they stop to think about the meanings in my books, both in terms of Global Warming and a climate of terror, two novels intended to specifically address.

When an editor where you are trying to work and are contracted is allowed to get away with calling you mad, deluded and evil, but you are instructed to shut up, under threat of your own career and livelihood, you have a right to ask where evil really lies. Whether an ex’s furious sense of rights and privacy, but no regard for mine, and bizarre turn arounds were directly related to her and a strange family, or indeed the discovery inside a relationship that a relation of theirs, with a terrible temper, had abused a teenager. With my own life angers, or issues with the past, it is why I sent them The Shipping News, though any sense of art or healing has been irrelevant to how they handled it. It is about money, ‘power’ and jobs, and rights but absolutely no sense of responsibility.

At the heart of a children’s publisher I know it influenced that obsession with privacy, that fearful secrecy there, and since I started to write about what evil really is in a novel too, in part outrage that she had so labelled me, and because such labels have always been themes of such complex works, it helped lead to an emotional hell. Since a young adult fantasy author has to return to certain emotional states while writing, even very idealistic emotions and thoughts, the way I was treated trying to make that journey of “growing up” for readers was actually repeatedly abusive. It is related to how verbally abusive or rude I became at times. I still insist though that in those circumstances, what a publisher did to me and my work was sinister, unnecessary, pure politics and a human and professional evil.

Evil is actually not some easy metaphysical concept, or should not be, but what people really do to each other, and allow to be done by doing nothing too. In other ways I think many have suffered and will suffer from that kind of group fight, side-based mentality and American labelling too, not to mention hypocrisy. It does matter at the heart of a New York publisher and it matters that men too can sometimes be too easily labelled a source of harm, though my own energy became horrid at times. Perhaps what matters is a story that might take a long time to properly understand and talk about. But I could have lost a person, but healed it professionally, if a person had not just left a label there, to keep secrets inside a small department, distorting the truth of what happened over months, indeed three years before, and why. That showed no trace of love, friendship, fareness, nor any kind of professional respects, that induced the crisis in the first place. Indeed if my own editor had not become so arrogant and bullying.

For many dislikes of the Press, I do not agree with Max Mosley though, but rather Ian Hislop’s argument that draconian privacy laws can be used to mask other legal abuses. Even if I wish my own life and privacy had been protected, perhaps respected is a better word, my life problems,fears and shared intimacies, right at the source of work and deep affections, both by and ex and by my own editor. Exposed in a big novel too, it was like leaving some psychic wound open and my editor should have stopped it too. It is precisely why authors far more than editors need their privacies respected, at least by their own publisher and editor. Privacies for everyone are important, because they much depend on how individuals can or cannot cope with invasion, but I believe people should be aware enough to know it is not exactly about how everyone ‘should’ behave, especially in very particular circumstances, more about what is happening to real people and the suffering they are going through. The facts remain in all blogs here, and my judgments of it too, but who they actually are is no one else’s business, and so all names have now been changed.

I ask every reader to respect that and forget it as any ‘public’ affair. It was also three years ago and very sad. This was always about the relationship between fictions and real events too, astonishing to me, and perhaps in itself it starts to change the story, mediating ‘truths’, as the use of language does, and no one is one thing, fixed in time. Especially not labelled by the very person who has caused such harm, then my editor, then a whole firm. It is a fact of libel law that if a libel is established as such it is only necessary to be able easily to identify the person or people in question. That is rather inevitable in still identifying Abrams in New York, but it is not libel, and I will never back down on it, or be intimidated on points of bogus legal ‘principle’. But real names once served their purpose to stand up to an attack by a UK lawyer. As for Phoenix Ark, as I’ve said, the only proper way to challenge it would actually be through a civil action in a court of law.

DCD

PA PRESS

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September 19, 2012 · 6:15 pm

MITT ROMNEY’S TELLING IDIOCY

We had some sympathy when Mitt Romney mouthed off about the appalling murder of a brave and highly regarded Ambassador in Libya, although America surely cannot afford a man as President who is not more politically aware, and in control. Just as a US spokesman on Newsnight said it was not about a rather awful film, despite any defence of filmic ‘free speech’, or Libyans all being fundamentalists and up in arms either, but specific terrorists targeting of an embassy. In such circumstances though, especially during an election, words and emotions are bound to run high. Perhaps those advisors are failing again.

But now comes a mobile phone film and his comments about forty-seven percent of Americans being effectively “on the social”. Unfortunate that everyone is on film nowadays, or in fear of it, like Gordon Brown’s captured outburst about that “stupid woman”. Itself oddly corrosive to real freedom of expression, even, at times, healthy democracy. Which needs politicians in charge of their own consciences, not push button slaves to a politically correct electorate, nor the supposed outrage of the media. Who would want to be a politician these days, and if you don’t get brave or good people, you probably get the government you deserve. God help us when the Drones arrive.

It also appears, rather startlingly over here, that 47% of Americans do not pay income tax, although they pay other kinds of tax. Perhaps it will spark a useful debate then, as another intelligent young Republican commentator said on Newsnight. But that film footage does so clearly show the stamp and thinking of a man who can talk so brazenly about how to play an election, and dismiss whoever those 47% are, or why, including many Republicans. He has just very possibly lost himself an election, though we feel Obama would have won it anyway. We’ll see in these coming televised debates how they stand up and how an electorate really listens. It’s just so cynical though, if both sides are clearly capable of that, and just such a misunderstanding too, both of how so many people neither want to cadge off the “State”, nor very often are capable of finding a fair playing field in a world that can bull-dose over them, especially at particular points of crisis in their lives. Hence banks bending over backwards to peddle credit, but cutting the rug from under small business when the crisis hit. But also ignorant of what it means for everyone to have and be given some stake in their society.

We still think most truly great US presidents have been instinctive Democrats too, or actual ones, but the real issue is not just welfare, but the growing disparity between the haves and have nots, and the imbalance between being on the ladder, having a chance of getting on it, and being wiped out falling off it, as those in the money pot get openly protected by a system not allowed to fail. Money is a class system in America too though, as big as any UK class system. Instinct here says the world does not owe anyone a living, experience that some social intervention is not only inevitable, in building cities, services and laws that protect us all, it is profoundly civilising. It is also necessary to stimulate economies. Obama is a very civilised man, if a bit red in the face when he made the fabulous gaff of talking through God Save The Queen at Buck Palace, poor love. We wonder if Romney is. But it is the gap and the glaring abuses that are causing anti-capitalism riots, or confusion and fear everywhere about how the system works, and if Romney thinks that somehow irrelevant, he should just be voted down as being an idiot.

PA PRESS

For a further article on the election Click here

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September 15, 2012 · 7:45 pm

2012: THE MAYA APOCALYPSE

More Four’s documentary on the Mayans and this year’s supposed apocalypse, in december, with the end of the thirteenth baktun from their “Long Count” calendar was rather good. In our age of super anxiety, all of it’s ideas are reflected in the thriller The GodHead Game. Though to help a sigh of relief, it is set in 2014. The documentary’s most fascinating moment was wandering around the excavations of the city El Mirador, from one of the world’s five founding civilisation, now folded back into the rainsforests. Highlighting how all civilisations have risen and fallen too, so we might start to wake up to something.

It mentioned religious and milarianist hysteria, which is as old as the hills. Also Europeans creating an industry, spawning thousands of books and websites. Well, it might be nice to see 62 Million copies of The Godhead Game sold, like the space-man Mayan “theorist” Erik Von Daniken. But, if meant to be enjoyable, a good narrative read, the thriller’s themes are more serious.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped talking about religion, or more importantly spirituality, as just wrong, but a very different kind of language to science. One contained in the emotional and indeed moral nature of man, as Jung believed human consciousness has an essential “religious” element, where science has no essential moral, but is obviously a vital way of deconstructing, understanding and redefining. For a copy of The Godhead Game, to read before December’s end, in your nuclear bunker, for several years just after, or just at home on the sofa, CLICK HERE

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September 10, 2012 · 8:22 pm

OBAMA VS ROMNEY – THE BIG DEBATE?

We don’t subscribe to the idea all Republicans are baddies and all Democrats goodies, or visa versa. Though many people vote out of tradition and instinctive prejudice. But with an election looming and Obama and Romney neck and neck, though perhaps TV debates will be crucial, let’s pause to acknowledge failings, or the likes of Brad Pitt talking of disappointment with Obama, but then pause to remember too.

Remember the enormous sigh of relief when a Bush era seemed to have been left behind, even if McCain was holding the Republican banner by 2009. Bush being a President so spectacularly ignorant that the world winced and hurled shoes. That on his re-election, in dubious circumstances in Florida, Americans put up pictures on the Internet saying “Sorry World.” But one whose presidency not only saw the Iraq War, arguable on both sides but almost puerile in its “Mission Accomplished” and Liberation bringing blandishments, but also saw the massive growth of the Military Industrial complex, in the shape of Homeland Security and The NSA, indeed a doubling, and the very dubious operations of companies like Halliburton, so beloved of Dick Cheney. So American business, while people died, was ensured benefits that never got to Iraqis, and even Eisenhower warned of the danger when the military take control.

Then there was, in that “shock capitalism”, Chicago school of economics philosophy, massive deregulation, especially of energy markets, that led straight to Enron and the biggest corporate fraud in US history. That saw energy traders in California turning off power stations so they could rig prices. They are some of the arguments in the thriller The Godhead Game about the Mayan ‘End of the World’, or hopefully new dawn.

So if you buy into Romney ‘the big business leader model’, the hope for jobs and prosperity, be very aware of what individuals or society might again get at the end of the line, especially with the European economy so fragile. Obama has a great deal to do, but out of the shared scandal of massive lending, complex banking fixes and the selling on of Toxic debt in the housing market, the US treasury has made moves to protect individuals and to stimulate the economy, in ways the UK has not, and Obama believes in social and human protections, if Capitol Hill might lock him into the difficulty of getting there. Capitalism of itself can be ruthless and takes no prisoners, but perhaps Americans have to get over ideas, bedded so deep in the experience of the Second and Cold War, that “socialism” cannot have different forms and inspirations and is just a dirty word, rather an enormously important intellectual tradition, for all the horrors of Communism.

Obama has all the hallmarks of a true leader and statesman too, not least his intellectual capacity, even if his own skillful rhetoric might sometimes get the better of him. Fighting that American tendency to isolationism though, or to put up fearful and threatening walls, especially out of the terrible wound of 9/11, he spoke to Muslims of respect and dignity, not fear, but also tracked down Bin Laden. He turned to Putin to press the vital case too of Nuclear Non-Proliferation. His election also represented a sea change out of atavistic prejudice in America, so close to home in the relatively recent experience of the Civil Right’s movement. He is a figure the World can talk to and do business with and America’s hope, not Romney.

PA PRESS

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September 10, 2012 · 8:27 am

THE ASTONISHING OLYMPIC CLOSING CEREMONY

Now thick grey clouds cover London, the euphoria starts to wear off. We don’t think the audience quite got the implications on the comedy show ‘Mock the Week’ the other day, when Andy Parsons talked about Sir Ian McKellen at the opening of the Para-Olympics, and Magnito from the X-Men, but stopped short of mentioning “the mutants”. Then even Jimmy Carr, Master of the outrageous joke, has pulled himself in, perhaps after that slap about Jersey tax haven antics, and called this “our finest hour.” He was genuinely moved and involved, we hope not just on the advice of his PR advisers. Well, we can’t run a Marathon, always flopped the steeple chase and long back shot-our-put, but we can let our little fingers dance on typewriter keys.

Good God, the closing ceremony of the London Para-Olympics, and indeed the whole Para-Olympic and Olympic Games, has been so deeply moving and inspiring, we think we’ll vote for Boris Johnson (A Tory Mayor). Talking of God, did you note the pagan and seasonal rhythms of the whole thing, with an essential spirituality right at the heart of Weird UK? As for the Para-Olympics, the adversity those people have conquered and face daily puts Phoenix Ark to shame, but it isn’t even about that, it’s about different spectacles and perceptions, the astonishment of the human spirit, and the will to try and try again. The love shown in London, the human dignity and the shere explosion of talent, creativity and invention, is an inspiration to the World, including Coe’s speech at the end, and if we can wake up a little, we must start to seek one world solutions.

Just before the Games The New York Times ran an excellent lead editorial on the “Bread and Circuses” element of David Cameron doubling the opening ceremony budget. Perhaps, keep an eye out, but where the Romans steeped the masses in blood and cruelty, the Games have steeped Britain in rightful dignity. Out of such shames as the London Riots, with whatever social causes, yobs stealing from injured foreign kids, the horror of abuse in British care homes, or the never-ending spectacle of fingers shamelessly in the pie at the top. The stamp from the start has been inclusion, of everyone, not just the triumph of excellence, and for Games supposed to be a-political, they have been astonishingly and unashamedly political. Well, good for them, stand up for what you believe, and since politics these days seems to have no easy answers from Right or Left, if any at all, believe in something bigger than it all too.

That’s what the Games have really done, shown the enormous complexity and tradition of the British legacy, its astonishing history and culture, and blasted it into the future. Those opening and closing ceremonies proved the triumph, ignoring the dreadful mid-Games closing, not only of all those athletes, all those Games Makers, but of the artist and creator, and those ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, as Shelley called them, poets. Now The Flaming Lips have even been demoted to number two here, after Coldplay’s Mellow Yellow, (or ‘Rebel’ and ‘I used to Rule the World’), the Para-Olympic orchestra adopted as top classicists and we’ll see if that “momentum” talked about by David Cameron last night can carry into any visionary action in the UK, that will not make such Games a sideshow and let us all down. Namely can you just cut your way out of Recession and, if the UK needs a more visionary solution, who is the leader to bring it?

Then, to anyone despairing or giving up, not kicking against the pricks, not fighting again and again, (perhaps trying is a better verb), or even thinking it’s only about being British, remember it was a German Jew, Dr Gootman, who fought for injured lives out of the Second World War and started those games at Stoke Mandeville hospital, as everyone giggled or looked away, planting an extraordinary seed, we have just seen bloom in fire. Both the Para-olympic and ordinary Games have indeed come home and might convince us all that even the nasty Darwinian fight of nature is more complex than that, and that everything exists in a mutually sustaining bio-spheres, we are fully capable of wrecking. That the journey of life and consciousness, however frightening at times, is astonishing. So it is about the limits of human possibility, or lack of them, that must also wake up to the animal biosphere we emerged from too.

We all want to blub at times, seek the easy ideal, find the righteous cause, walk the rhetorical hire-wire, but for any raised eye at Coe’s “made in Britain” stamp, why not be extremely proud, and ride the wave of such creativity too in the World? That’s real life too, just as it is a truism that people in wheel chairs are as capable of being as nice or nasty as the rest of us, though have more to cope with. There is a profound difference between sentimentality and genuine sentiment though, between mad visions and the visionary, between schlock and real love, and these Games, both “able bodied” and “disabled”, have given us a visionary sentiment, most essentially because all of it was grounded in true intelligence and meaning. Rock and roll can indeed change the world, and so can you, even if it’s only yours. It may well be someone else’s.

PA PRESS

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