Dionysus And Apollo

there

Lilac Thunder

Homme Fatale

I wrote this song in the aftermath to Brexit and many of the feelings I felt in those strange post-referendum days have been relighted by the election of Trump today.

Undoubtedly the movement to the political right has taken place across the western world and the liberal progressive metropolitan agenda which I along with many am now brushed as endorsing is now enduring a period of being attacked. 

This song is a diatribe - to not admit it is to claim ignorance to the reality that my agenda is subjective and reactionary like all agendas are - against the sinister populist politics that threaten to undermine all that I've cherished about the period I've had the great fortune to have lived in so far. 

This is a song that protests against a politics of fear, of borders, of arrogance, of reckless anti-establishmentarianism for the sake of it, for a world in which we surround ourselves with media and headlines that only serve to gloss over our own insecurities with a narcissistic mirror of a social self that is merely a cartoon reflection, a cartoon reflection crafted by ineffable forces of power which no one yet really understands or can fully shape (unless that's what Trump has done).

Nobody saw this coming from my 'leftwing intelligentsia cosmopolitan elite' world because we only see our own world via internet cookies, Facebook likes, who we follow on twitter, what news content providers we are baited by, and so on. 

In the same way, many of those who voted for Brexit and Trump were lulled into voting for something which they don't really understand, voting on emotions and disenfranchisement because the media they already followed was telling them that this is what their votes represented when really Trump is as much a part of the economic establishment of self-indulgent big business as anyone while Brexit was sold via a guise of false promises by Farage (a former stockbroker still nicking a living at the establishment he derides) and a machiavellian Oxbridge graduate in Johnson.

Ultimately the reason we're so disenfranchised is that people in general from all sides have become so politically dumb. We all vote for political agendas as though they're football teams, tribal in the extreme. The left has become complacent and establishmentarian while the right has whored itself out to fear and people's worst instincts.

Undoubtedly the neoliberal agenda that has dominated economics over the last 30/40 years is an unfair and ineffective one, as evidenced by the dominant 1% at the top and the 2008 crash. The effects of this are genuinely felt across large parts of the UK, USA and broader world and it's no surprise that there was a backlash against it. The form it's taken is just so harrowing.

When we treat our world as an endless pool of instantaneous clickbait entertainment without looking deeper into the substance of what we're presented with, when the politicians chase the clicks to climb into our brains and the media collect the clicks and trade it in for advertising which in turns shapes the things we want to end up clicking on via internet cookies, it's not surprising that we've got here. It's an accelerated mindless whirlpool away from substance, away from a politics that grapples with the complexities of the world and the real difficulties out there. No wonder the solutions that people have ended up resorting to are simplifications that miss the entire point.

This song hopes that the era in which deeply complex political and sociological issues are bandied around as headline grabbing click-bait generating self-reinforcing entertainment, by media outlets who no longer challenge their readers but instead give them an ever worsening reflection of themselves back to them, I hope this era comes to an end in my life time. 

Until it does, all of us, on all the wings and appendages of flailing media-spouted political bird, will burn in helpless anger and fear.

It's hard not to feel despondent.

William Patrick Owen