David Garcia on Sun, 11 Nov 2018 08:54:04 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Our revels now are ended |
Our Revels Now are Ended.. Or at least they bloody should be! (Or I blame Shakespeare) Yesterday I heard four journos on the radio discussing the unfolding Brexit nightmare (I nearly said ‘drama') in the wake of the resignation of a junior minister whose departure would have caused no more than a ripple were it not for the fact that his brother is the Killer Clown of Brexit Boris Johnson. Towards the end of the discussion the radio host invited the commentators to throw some light of the big debate on the ‘final deal’ that May might (or might not) bring back to Parliament in the coming weeks. It was framed as the moment of great "parliamentary theatre”. And you could practically feel the journos salivating at the ("marvelous darling") drama of it all. As though the curtain will come down and the provincial troop of poor character actors (oh we English love a ‘character’) come on for their final bow. The audience will applaud their favorites, the lights will come up. And we (the audience/public/citizens) will troop out into the gathering gloom of a chilly winter evening and a long journey home (oh yes the trains will have been cancelled again). After a two year long performance we will wake up to a reality that unlike actual theatre we will have irrevocably changed the world outside..Unless that is someone (who people listen to) rushes in and shouts “fire”..This is not an exercise! Brexit negotiator Sabine Weyan described the English negotiators as indulging in ”magical thinking” and yes that is our national talent and our burden. In the last speech of Shapspear’s last play the magician Prospero has the good sense renounce magic. He declares that “These our actors as I foretold you, were all spirits And are melted into thin air:” (like Cameron among others) He then talks of the great globe itself also dissolving “like this insubstantial pageant”.. And many believe that he was eliding the Globe Theatre with the globe of the world. But Shakepear had the sense to recognise that he/Prospero had to set magic aside.. And if we don’t we to will learn the hard lesson that politics may have an aspect of theatre but it is NOT theatre .And that politicians may enjoy the brief applause of the ‘audience’ but be left to face the longer term anger of the “citizens” they sacrificed to their vanity and delusion. David Garcia # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: