🌅☸️ Feast of Ophanim 🌘 Waxing Cold Moon 🥶 14 Pentember 2024 ⛩️ 25 Nivôse CCXXXII ❄️ Capricorn 🐐♑ Day 10,074 ⛩️
14 January 2024
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essay on Concept of the Political and Bleed Out
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I’ve begun re-reading The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dangerfield.
I’ve been itching to re-read it for gosh a couple weeks now i guess.
I first started reading it aprox November 2020 during the first fall of the Pandemic, i heard about it on a centrist british politics podcast and finished it in 2022. due to it being a re-read and the improvements in my mental health the re-read is going much faster/easier this time.
i love the purple copy i have but it is missing like 2 pages in the middle of the suffregete chapter. was able to find them online last time.
the prose is beautiful. here are some of my favorite passages from the first 3 chapters:
“The Prime Minister, sad and shaken, went up on deck and stood there, gazing into the sky. Upon the chill and vacant twilight blazed Halley’s Comet — which, visiting the European heavens but once in a century, had arrived with appalling promptness to blaze forth the death of a king.
“In London, darkness was gradually relinsquishing the bleak fac!ade of the dead king’s palace and the crowds which still surrounded it, like the rising of a curtain upon some expensive melodrama, where the electric dawn gradually reveals a scene thronged with mourners. But here Mr Asquith held the stage alone, the only visible human being within the ghostly margins of the sea and sky, staring up at that punctual omen.”
Page 17, Chapter One: The Comet.
“The historian of pre-war England is at one grave disadvantage. Upon the face of every character he deals with there has stiffened a mask of facts, which only the acid of time can dissolve. Two cenutries from now, Mr Asquith will be a fiction, a contrivance of taste, sensebility, and scholarship; perhaps they will see him then as a man extravagantly moderate, who was facing at this precise moment four of the most immoderate years in English history.”
Page 18, Chapter One: The Comet
“that nightmare dinner”
Page 19, Chapter One: The Comet.
“It is a controversy which has gone down into history attended with a great deal of frankly comic circumstance, and assisted into an unjust oblivion by such a chorus of English peers as might have sprung, fully coroneted, from the brain of Sir William Gilbert: yet during itss petty careerthe Enlgish constitution was gravely threatened, and the Liberals emerged from it, flush with one of the greatest victories of all time.
“From that victory they never recovered.”
“The Conservatives were as sad and quarrelsome a pack as ever bayed a Liberal moon. And it was now, in this desolate political midnight to which Chamberlain had conemed them, that they turned to an old and faithful ally, an ally with whose aid — they openly but not wisely declared — they could run the country in or out of power. They turned to the House of Lords.
“The House of Lords had been forgotten for nearly twelve years.”
Page 23, Chapter Two: The Liberals, 1906-1910
“For this Constittuion, which haunted the Lasdowne House Conference, was nowhere set forth in an Instrument. It had no visible body. A Magna Carta, an Apology, an Act of Settlement, an Act of Union, had printed themselves across the ribbed snads of English history like the footsteps of an unseen traveller, a mighty ghost. Materialized, this spectral Constituion would have been a very monster, bearing a horrid mixture of features, from Norman French to early Edwardian; a monster flagrantly improvised, illogically permanent; a monster which existed on the principle that every grievance had a remedy, but that no grievance was eternal and no remedy a panacea.
“It was this variegated spirit, the genius of English History, which mocked the rather idle labours of those eight gentlemen in the Lansdowne House.”
Page 41-42, Chapter Three: Their Lordships Die in the Dark
I am weary of the hopeful pessimism that *Strange Death* might be newly relevant to the present era of discontent which the North Atlantic empire presently maintains. I do not think that the current Democratic party has the energy or incentives to rebuke, for example, the Supreme Court, as the Liberals did the Lords. the Democrats are too soft and mouldering a thing to collapse nder their own contradictions, but rather, like a fungi which depends upon its own disruption to propagate and fill new vacancies, they delight in covering the eroding American institutions in a gelatinus and sentimental skin with which to preserve the signs and ideals of an empire as their interior contents dissolve safely out of sight.
the coercive tactics of the Labor party and the Irish nationalists provide maybe some inspiration for those who would coerce a Joe Biden or Kamala Harris into passing some popular legislation until one recognizes that their verve is most readily expressed in today’s freedom caucus, which which has ensured that Republican government must function as a grand coalition with centrist Democrats, their own much smaller and more effectively recuperated back bencher radicals—Sanders, the squad—constantly and unidirectionally conscripted from their constituencies interests to save Democracy, which the Democrats happily proclaim is Now and Forever on the Ballot. Abortion rights, climate legislation, forever war—all of these the Democrats are happy to let their GOP equivilentss ravage whenever it is their turn in power (statistically at least One out of every Three elections, the last time a party having held the presidency for 12 straight years having ended with the Reagan-Bush I government in ‘93) and then allow those same ravages, like newly thoughtful ruins, go unrepaired, a monument to the Narcestic Parenting Strategies the Dems love to employ, Indifferent Savior, who will let Bad Cop run the gauntlet, at best tut-tutting that voters could ever have allowed them into power, blaming radicals and minorities for the crime of existing and thereby enflaming the rage of their good friends across the aisle, so that in every election thereafter they can point to those ignoble ruins, grinning witht he satisfaction of a well oiled One-Sided transaction, and forcing their constituents to repeat, reverentially, unquestioning, that This is What Happens When You Don’t Vote Hard Enough.
Hence the cult’s sacrament of confession and, not absolution, but deferral. The Sins of the Greater Evil are our own, and the sufferiengs thereby engendered are to be avowed, maintained and expanded in perpetua, as Just Pennance for every election in which the people failed to embrace with sufficient verve their Savior the Lesser Evil.
…
Refuge and Escape, Freedom and the Object of Pursuit, Liberation and the Rupture of boundaries,
Interpretation, Interpoltion, Transformation, Heruistics
Political Demonology
Harrow the constraints of narrow liberal ideas of what a body can do (Deleuze), what a body can be for.
Ransome Theory of Attonement