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28.3.16

I'M MIGRANT By Anthony Dougan

 I'm migrant!
I pity the poor immigrant.
It's a strange thing, language.  Within its various contours are  contained both overt and subliminal messages that intensely relate to both us and other.  That which connects is also that which severs.  It is Janus headed this lingo thing.
While it is true that the map is not the territory, as Bucky Fuller so amply demonstrated even a map of our world can contain vivid interpretations of us and them and home and we and you.
And at a certain level of reality countries, borders , nations are mere contructs arising from power games arising from tribal hierarchy arising from religious delusion arising from beleaguered sensations of nationalistic us and invading them.  We are hoisted by the Petard of our own fragile brains and our brittle and vulnerable emotional development in a world of casual cruelty and parental and tribal inadequacy to meet the demands of that fragile development over many years of powerlessness and dependence, ie our childhood. Childhood may be the evolutionary flaw in the species.  That the Tabula Rasa Brain takes so long to develop and there is so much potential for disrupted development that by the time it reaches adulthood the thing is completely fucked up.  Our one-pointed intelligence and our fixation on Aristotelian taxonomy and the need to cascade knowledge into some celestial cabinet of known and unknowns.  The loss of emotional connection, intuition, the creative impulse, relationship to.......reason and logic, to common sense, to the loosely assembled intellectual farce of economics, to cost benefit analysis-forests or houses?   Cars or trees?  Total economic hegemony of states of war or living lightly in self-sufficient sustaining communities?  The economic anti-miracle.  To collateral damage.
Thus to Syria and what it reveals of us in all our brutish nationalistic selfishness occasionally spurred to mawkish sentimentality by the image of a drowned child washed up on a holiday island beach and revealing ourselves momentarily like Dorian Gray staring aghast at his hideous Self hidden in the basements and cellars of our subconscious, momentarily revealed, Selves.
Let us begin with words.  Migrant.  Meaning other and not us, meaning invading horde of job snatching, idle, and freeloading aggressor.
Radical.  Radicalise.  Insurgent.  Migrant. People-smuggler. Terrorist. All dehumanising metaphors for us to create OTHER.  The BBC is so very good at this game.  Does it so well and I listen to its gentle but devious manipulations with a growing frustration at the insouciance of its vile script in the obvious service of the establishment, whatever that description of collective shitehawks actually refers to.  Perhaps the establishment should be called the shitehawkdom? The One Percent.  The Rich List.  The 100 most powerful women in the world?  The 'elite'?  The Oligarchie.  The Plutocracy?  The Kleptocracy?  The Fuckwitocracy?  Once we offered succour and hope to the frightened and the stateless-come to me you poor and huddled masses, now we build walls fences and slums to keep them away and/or contained:  Shame be upon us and all our works and our walls!

Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus

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