Wednesday 28 July 2010

When the Sun came Down and Danced in Our street

A chapbook of a dozen new poems by yours truly has now been released by Parachute Poetry.

A free pdf download of the booklet is available here:

When the Sun Came Down to Dance in Our street by Mark Reed

Whitehaven and the Consumable Environment

It's a bitter-sweet experience walking around a lot of British towns these days, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

The fall-out of thirty years of de-industrialisation, and ten to fifteen years of urban regeneration projects, is now clear. Most of them have come to fruition in the past five years or so, kick-started in many cases by the marketing double whammy gem of a new century and millennium with all the associated investment fever hung onto those wonderful advertising bye-lines.


What that urban regeneration process has meant in most cases, is an interlinked double levelled strategy on one hand has seen the transformation of town centres into a tourist 'destination;' based on whatever socio-economic assets a locality once had- whether it be a harbour, or a particular mining or engineering industry- which is then sanitised, interpreted and transformed into a shiny new environment to be consumed by locals but more specifically, by visitors, who are supposed to bring in the much needed external capital that the former industries used to. Industries that of course are now long dead are not so much buried, but carefully 'preserved' in their more interesting, sanitised aspects and museum-ified with an almost militant aesthetic.


Tourism Pounds in the shape of hotel, restaurant and attraction ticket prices alone cannot of course substitute wholly for the income of say, a once thriving coal mining industry exporting its wares through a large busy harbour, so it has to be supplemented by an injection of service industry infrastructural support. Of course the new tourism and heritage facilities in themselves provide jobs for some people, but other sources are needed and so the science and business parks spring up on the fringes of the town. They are often home to global corporations [even if they may parade 'local' names], and so most of the profits they generate are syphoned off abroad, but they offer enough local sustenance in the shape of business taxes and wages [just] adequate enough to enable two-income families to buy local property and shop in Tesco's. Despite these initiatives, n most urban areas of Britain's de-industrialised landscape they are still not enough to provide jobs in adequate numbers across the board, and so medium-to-largest single industry employers are maintained. It may be a biscuit manufacturer; it may be a submarine or oil rig construction plant; it may be an engineering plant making springs; it may be a nuclear power station. Whatever it is, the urban area is more often than not as heavily dependent on it for employment and local income as the local heavy industries of old, that fell to the neoliberal axe of organised labour organisation destruction and globalised market creation of the 1980s. The only difference being, the former old industries were nearly all locally developed and owned. The new industries of course, are not.


As such our towns- particularly those outside of the South East and the ones reliant on heavier industries of the past, and which are now clinging on to the margins of the world economy- have become transformed by neoliberal free-market capitalism, into consumable items in their own right. They are products to be visited and consumed; the new street furniture, the new harbour architecture, the new statues, the refurbished pit wheels and foundry wagons set in flower beds and explained by neat interpretation boards, that strive not to over complicate things- three paragraph sound bites are deemed enough- are there to serve a basic, economic function. The whole area is placed within the wider market; quite literally The Market Place, the literal geographic place where once people went to as a neutral ground to carry out economic activity, has itself merely become another element to be consumed within the wider societal market.


Whitehaven in West Cumbria is a prime example of this process. A medium sized town clinging to the North West coast of England and sandwiched between the Irish Sea and the Lake District, it has a rich industrial heritage, as well as a history that goes back to Neolithic times through into the Roman period, and was a key port from Norman times to well into the 2oth century.


With a large harbour and a small but rich coal field beneath it, the town and its surrounding area enjoyed a fair bit of prosperity throughout much of the last millennium, its pre-industrial success evident in its many fine Georgian buildings and extensive harbouring facilities. What happened in the latter quarter of the 20th century however need not be explained in any further detail here.


Over the past ten years, the town centre- focused primarily on the harbour area- has undergone that most miraculous of late 20th/early 21st century phenomenon- an 'urban renaissance.' The harbour now has a large, well-stocked marina [who owns all these yachts you see up and down the country in such places, and why do our coastlines outside of the harbours appear so empty of them nearly all of the time?] and plenty of interpretation signage, renovated industrial artifacts, nice street furniture, white steel tubing canopies, new road and pavement surfaces and museum to enjoy.


Now I am not being a killjoy here; the environment is very pleasant and clearly well used and enjoyed, but one cannot help but have a nagging sense of unease at the sanitised presentation- the expensive dressing up- of a once proud and working, albeit dirty and course, self-developed economic powerhouse for the local area. In what has now effectively become an open air museum and harbour play-park, to be visited for an afternoon by wanderers through the lakes or local walking their dogs [nothing wrong with that; would do it myself if I lived there, but it doesn't bring in any readies for the town council], there once was a thriving industrial base that provided for nearly all of the local economic needs. It may have been [arguably] a more polluting local industrial process, but wasn't it still ultimately so much more sustainable in its economic containment than today's structure? A world now built on the tenuous but commercial-sound bite attractive 'idea' of global connectivity. I say of course idea, because the reality is not one of two way connectivity, but of one way drainage for places like Whitehaven…and that is as in outward.


And so Whitehaven maintains its lovely if sanitised harbour area for day-visitors and yachting enthusiastic who probably take their boats out- purchased in times when they had nothing else left to buy- two or three times at most a year- whilst the vast bulk of the population relies on employment at Sellafield, the world's no. 1 nuclear waste recycling plant of choice just down the coast, and which itself lurches from closure threat to closure threat every few years.


What happens to Whitehaven if or more likely when it does close? Will there be enough jobs on the small West Lakes Science Park to soak up the 80% or so of the working population that are reliant for employment directly [or indirectly in associated businesses] at Sellafield? You of course know the answer to that…and for a government who has ran out of money for the foreseeable future, and has now played all of its neoliberal leisure-consumer led urban regeneration cards not just in Whitehaven, but 99% of all the rest of similar places in the country, what then? What happens to Whitehaven? I hope for the best, but can't dispel this cloud of pessimism, and it hurts.

Monday 26 July 2010

Skemster: The Launch

Welcome to the overhauled, shiny and new Mark Reed blogspot. It moves on, in a second generational way, from the proto-blog that was markreedwritings.blogspot.com for the past year or so.

As such Skemster is my new blog tag. I intend the output to be eclectic but will in particular be focused upon literature, the visual arts, science/religion and politics. it will include trial runs of my own work, both written and graphic, and I hope to incorporate a 'local' flavour wherever possible.

So without further ado.....Viva La Skemster!

Sunday 25 July 2010

This is the new blog page for Mark Reed, which is also directly linked to his website which can be accessed here:

http://markreed-online.com/Home_Page.php

The original Mark Reed blogsopt still exists, although all new entries and information updates will henceforth appear here.

Saturday 24 July 2010

Confusion, Deception and Denial in the UK: Will a sense of reality ever return?


These are confusing times, as we stumble around in the aftermath of the financial crisis of a couple of years ago. Many people appear to be dazed from the shellshock to their lives amidst the recession; in one way, they have an inkling that something awful happened, because of something terribly wrong with the system they have spent years making a living/life in. Maybe it is because of that, despite all the obvious inequalities and structural weakness inherent in unregulated capitalist economies, they still harbour a deep seated desire to forget this, forget the trauma, and have things back to the cosy world they enjoyed before, as quickly as possible. We live, in short, in a nation of the Numbed.

Free market fundamentalist capitalism failed spectacularly; it clearly wrote the script to its own demise based on recurrent threads of greed, incompetence, elitist arrogance, selfish over-indulgence in over-complicated spheres of economic activity, that not even its own architects fully understood and, of course, an utterly misguided conceit that its players were being successful in the good times because of their skill, NOT because of the reality of the situation- they were just being incredibly lucky- and wholeheartedly acted it out to the gallery's until the Autumn of 2008.

The crash was spectacular but two years later, clearly not as debilitating as the vast majority of the world's ordinary citizen's expected. Neoliberalism, the ideology driving the over-fuelled engines of unregulated global capitalism, has in its own time honoured way with urban mythology and socio-economic mind engineering, recently shown signs of an expected resilience.

It is already re-inventing itself. At first, the western neoliberal capitalist machine was shuddering and reeling; the fault clearly lay with them, there were no cantankerous labour movements to blame this time, or socialist governments with bothersome high tax regimes to finger as spanners in the works of unfettered capitalism at this historic juncture. Oh no, just the structure, workings and players in the most extensive and unregulated system of capitalist exchange the globe has ever seen, were obviously to blame; for some time, this was so blatantly clear, not even the most strident of capitalists even tried to provide excuses for their actions and the resultant, chaotic fallout from the economic collapse. There even appeared to be some proto-deathbed conversions to Reality Perception, as Alan Greenspan, one of neoliberalism's foremost and most powerful ideologues and practitioners, publically recognised the flaws in his beliefs.

It is now clearly the financial shock of 2007-08 was only the first act in an ultimately more tumultuous series of global economic disasters that are going to unfold during this decade. This realisation is enforced by how quickly neoliberal ideology and its practical application in the way of unfettered global capitalism, is bouncing back. The propagandised message is now consolidating: it's back to business as usual, the crash was just a blip, we will get back to the old days again, just you watch…we will all once again have unlimited personal credit, constantly reducing tax burdens, [the illusion of] increasing salaries way beyond a miniscule inflation rate, accelerating property prices… the neoliberal dreams [based on ideological myth] are being peddled again. There are even examples of right-wing think tanks beginning to excuse the crash/credit crunch/recession/financial crisis call it what you will [in true neoliberal publicity technique, giving phenomenon a multitude of names neuters its overall societal effect], as a case of the world at the time of 2007-08, being not unregulated enough. A recent paper produced by the Adam Smith Institute, claimed with barefaced, on the face of it comical aplomb but all the more frightening because it was clearly serious, that tax havens were actually vital mechanisms to help the poor, and as such should not just be maintained but celebrated.

These claims are [currently] being laughed at by even he most hardened of neoliberal capitalists, but the fact that they are beginning to be said, shows the resilience of neoliberal ideology, how embedded it is within our political, economic and cultural psyche, what a hold it elitist practitioners still have over our society, and how it's socio-political mechanisms have a truly remarkable, shame-free self-promotional drive that flies in the face of all intellectual reason and general public perceptions. And it is relentless in its bare-faced self-promotion of concepts that are at the first rightly derided as rubbish, and then gradually listened to and remarkably, eventually, accepted as perceived wisdom.
More, even deeper financial disasters lie ahead. Not even getting a few hours away from an almost total western collapse of its banking system has stopped free market, fundamentalist capitalism in its tracks, take stock, and address it's most fundamental of flaws. Even worse must happen [and it will] before it is broken. But it's going to be a long haul. The new Conservative government in the UK for example, shows no real understanding of those fundamental flaws in neoliberalism as it pushes the crippled economy into a position where recovery can only be revived by the private sector. A private sector without any money and any wish to borrow/lend any money, a private sector reliant on internal markets that are being wound up [the public sector] and external markets [the EU] which is falling back into recession, and a private sector which is now almost entirely globalised when it comes to financial structure, and as such keeps the bulk of its assets off-shore in low or non-existent tax environments.

The future for the UK doesn't look bright, and it certainly doesn't look a shiny successful Tory blue.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Modern Science Is Rubbish


Modern science is entirely a capitalistic venture now. It has an establishment that is wedded to neoliberal ideology at the expense of varied democratic discussion, adaptability and social conscious.

Ironically, the ultimate casualty of this process is its own much vaunted Scientific Method.

Modern science is full of contradictions. Gravity- which modern science does not at all understand- it cannot, otherwise we would be whizzing round in anti-gravity machines [or at least the blueprints would exist by now]- for example, is to all intents and purpose observable as an instantaneous phenomenon. Yet modern science states categorically that the speed of light cannot be exceeded. You cannot, by modern science's own strictures, have the possibility of both states occurring at the same time.
At the core of modern science- a central tenant since the Enlightenment- is that all things must be quantifiable and a measurable force attributed to the actions of matter. Gravity of course escapes the [artificial] rigours of this self-imposed constraint to the pursuit of knowledge. Gravity exerts a force, without expending any energy whatsoever. It is a constant, perpetual force, if it were not so, the planets would fly from the orbit of the sun as soon as that energy was burnt up or even, if there was a disruption to that energy source. This obviously does not happen, even when a star dies. There are clearly fundamental forces at large in the Universe that modern science cannot begin to understand, yet it believes that the Big Bang is the only viable solution to explaining the beginnings of the universe. Hmmm.

One thing is clear. Modern, establishment science has shown it is so limited in scope [and dare one say intellect] that it has allowed itself to be straight-jacketed by systems and dogma; it can only provide models for the universe around us through equations, abstract constructions and computers. To explain phenomena it cannot explain, it invents unproven, quasi-scientific concepts such as Dark Matter and Neutrinos which are in fact, when rationally considered, as super-natural in essence as the concept of a Higher Power.

The actual understanding of even the most fundamental phenomenon such as gravity is beyond modern science. It just cannot get its head around it within the cerebral constraints it imposes upon itself. As such modern science, its adherent scientists and the Scientific Method are not in a position to- nor have the authority to- state categorically that spiritual and metaphysical forces are not an integral part of the universe. The 'Age of Reason' is in fact the most laughable of misnomers; at best it may of put our understanding of the natural world around us back hundreds of years. At worst, it may very well destroy us.

Monday 12 July 2010

Modern Science has become a Pseudo-Religion Trapped in Neoliberal Capitalism


It has become increasingly the case over the past 30-40 years that many branches of science have come to demand, as a bare necessity, complex [and thereby expensive] machines and systems to further their research. Notable examples are CERN's accelerator, JET and Hubble. In fact these immense projects are so big they require multi-government finance and collaboration to support them. Gone are the days of a individualist genius like Einstein, working in an academic lab to further our collective knowledge.


As such, science has become inextricably linked to Big Business. It is fully incorporated into the free market, fundamentalist capitalist complex. It is no longer a disciple looking to further human knowledge; it has shareholders [and individual reputations/media profiles/book sales]to think about.


Money matters to science now. Not debate, open-mindedness and the pursuit of truth. As such, any scientists and researchers that wish to challenge existing scientific beliefs that are in effect, written in tablets of stone by the scientific establishment- such as the Big Bang and Evolution, two 'scientific' theories that are actually barking mad when looked at rationally- get short shift from said establishment. The prevailing staus quo must not be questioned; funding cannot be affected by any signs of challenges to existing theories that are reliant on megabucks for their perpetuation as establishment givens, and which have been sold to the public as immutable truths.


Huge [egoistic] personal and corporate reputations [aka share value] rely on it. And so instead of debating openly and with a mature approach- one in line in fact, with their own vaunted scientific method- to ascertain whether there is any merit in these alternative theories and views, the scientific establishment take a leaf out of the neoliberal book to which they have become so politically aligned, and actively obstruct the publication and promotion of unacceptable counter-ideas, pillory and debunk said alternative ideas in their own journals that dominate the market [much as Murdoch does in popular media], whilst denying the targets of their discrimination a right to reply.


This is of course identical to the approach of the religious authorities before the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The contemporary scientific establishment is no different from them; they have become just as much a part of the wider economic and socio-political establishment as the Church did in medieval times- the church of course they so despise [yet secretly admire and copycat the techniques of] and waste no opportunity to attack as the basis of un-scientific mumbo-jumbo; again, with true neoliberal hypocrisy.


The techniques are also identical to those used by neoliberalism over the past thirty years; establish a position of power- use propaganda and falsified information, to create self-sustaining myths in society that support said power bases position as the only game in town: There Is No Alternative- actively suppress by whatever means possible any sign of dissent to this model and above all, protect the income/funding stream.


This ideology is ingrained in scientists from school/university onwards. It is an ingrained position; the scientific establishment is right; it always is; who are you to question it? To do so means you must be an idiot. Go away and realign yourself with the sheep.


Myth of course, pure myth. the science of the Enlightenment is as blinkered as any it has kidded itself it would replace. The Great irony. But a dangerous one for the advancement of human knowledge. How so much less advanced, how much original thought and humanity improving discoveries have been lost, by a forced conformity to the Old Theories held in such awe by the scientific establishment and their unthinking lackies, with such religious fervour?


There are signs things are changing; the 21st century is shaping up to move on and the ridiculous, comfort blanket theories of Old are being increasingly dismantled...but it's still going to be a struggle. Take your blinkers off, and join it.

Thursday 8 July 2010

Humanism and Political Denial


Humanism seems to be continually in denial as to its role in world politics in the past two hundred odd years, instead hiding behind a cosy veneer of scientific reason, controlled, experimental deduction and a continual propaganda stream that states all believers[and even investigators] in any metaphysical possibilities in the make-up of the universe, are simple idiots.


It's interesting, for all the statements that religious groups in the past would have carried out mass destruction on the scale of the 20th century if only they had had the weapons technology of that century and now at hand, there's been no example in contemporary times of religious powers being inclined to do just that, when arguably there's been plenty of opportunity; Hitler could have made his crusade a religious one; the Germans were a broken but nonetheless devout Christian people in the aftermath of the Great War, but he of course chose not to, more enamoured as he was by social Darwinism and the principles of the Enlightenment.
Now then, it can be said that the Enlightenment had a large part to play in this, by eroding the political powers of religion, notably the Christian Church in the West [although this was a process already underway before the advent of the Age of Reason]. Fair enough. But the proponents of the virtues of the Enlightenment- one of reason, the over-riding power of the human intellect and the supremacy of the scientific method as an assessment of current and future cultural framework- cannot escape responsibility for what followed. Where religious political power fell back, 'humanist' politics based in modern philosophy and atheistic political ideology [of both the right and left] inexorably filled the vacuum. It resulted in the first, worldwide war of ideology between 1939 and 1945; the following Cold War was based in its principles and it reached it's logical, horrific logical conclusion with the Khmer Rouge's atheistic/nihilistic Year Zero.
Humanism and atheism cannot escape the legacy of its ethos, once it had the opportunity to exercise real power, such as it did in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. These two examples alone, should be enough to make us stop and take stock of our cultural over-reliance in the West, on the supposed advantages of the Enlightenment. For too long the Age of Reason has been taken as a given, as a vital intellectual core to the mechanics of our economy and society. Its early proponents such as Voltaire may have shouted 'God Is Dead! but perhaps we swallowed the by-line too easily, without bothering to understand the true nature ethos that has so pervasively replaced Him.


And so the to the 21st century where the over-riding claim of the humanist/atheist/Social Darwinist Reasonists rings out: 'There is No Alternative!' Now where have we heard that before….

Wednesday 7 July 2010

Darwin, Racism and Fascistic Humanism


Much is made about the evils of religion and the purity of thought and purpose inherent in humanism and atheism, springing of course from the glories of the 'Enlightenment,' and there is no greater revered priest to this New Theology than good old Darwin.


As with all extremist belief's, this is intellectually ill-founded and theorists like Darwin are not only misunderstood, but selectively represented, in exactly the same tried and tested ways of the religious fundamentalists they purport to abhor.


It is a rarely reported fact that the sub-title Darwin chose for Origin of the Species was 'the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life' [it was removed from later editions of the book]. Darwin was a racist, and by association, all of his current day advocates are also. Darwinism [and the humanist movement in general] has a lot to answer for when you look at the turmoil of the 20th century. Hitler [a militant atheist that Dawkins no doubt secretly reveres] was a huge fan of Darwin; he wrote the fundamentals of eugenics into the heart of the Nazi charter. In fact the 'Age of Reason' [if ever there was such a laughable misnomer] has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the Napoleonic Wars through Nazi/Stalinism to the Khmer Rouge and 21st century Iraq.


Evolutionist theory led directly to the holocaust. 'Survival of the fittest' as an ethos has led to a free market fundamentalist capitalist system [where all metaphysical considerations are at best blanked at worst ridiculed], in which the accumulation of money and the perpetuation of a small, global, economic elite is promoted as the only valid purpose of human life.


This system is not only destroying our humanity, but our planet.