A Blurring of Lines

Should your vision begin to slacken, should those crisp lines slide towards an uncertain softness- decidedly more Renoir than Millais- the words upon the page appear to dissolve and waver, then your local high street will probably be able to offer a solution, one of the 'competetive' many! Correcting the nation's eyesight is not dissimilar to being granted a license to print one's own money. My Lord, health related and virtually entirely privately funded, surely this is a scene from a Jeremy C Hunt wet dream!

We may not be able to afford the most desirable of options, but at least we know where to locate an access point. Should those blurred lines elect to venture rather more behind the eyes, however, then your local high street is far more likely to have a invested interest in maintaining the status quo, hoping instead to perpetuate the fug.

Thanks must go to Arielle Kristina

It's entirely a travesty of gargantuan proportions that the correction of all such blurred lines cannot be more efficiently dealt with. Allow me to elucidate. 

It's already old news but let's just briefly reflect upon a fairly recent BBC headline. "Foreign drivers owe 'millions in unpaid fines," was such a 'perfect' summary, tapping in, as it did, to so many of the blurred perceptions of the working British tabloid-reading tax-payer. Just to clarify, the issue was one of unpaid parking fines.

Clever old BBC, using the tried and tested tools of the established propagandist. I would merely like to widen the debate by pointing out that, whilst there may indeed be citable examples of gross disregard by some foreign drivers, the issue of the dubious validity of many parking fines on Britain's streets remains a highly controversial one. The alarming ease with which an illicit fine may be escalated into an instance of 'demanding monies with menaces,' can be truly alarming. In the case of, 'elderly driver threatened by debt collectors, over failure to follow deliberately convoluted parking system,' I know where my sympathies are going to lie, regardless of the nationality of the transgressor. And these lines have been blurred for a reason.

Thanks again, Arielle Kristina

Also, should you be able to stomach the antics of Nick Knowles of a Saturday evening, constantly parroting the 'virtues' of, "money to 'good causes," you might understand exactly what I mean by the BBC's perpetuation of blurred perceptions. Nick- and he is merely one of the many- has happily sold his soul to the 'British' cause of furthering the inequality of the tax-funding of vital and public services. So, what the rictus-wearing Nick will not be reminding us is that many/most of these, "good causes," were once far more justly funded, through a more progressive tax system, rather than the regressive one with which we are presently saddled. The National Lottery simply offers a means by which a 'desperation tax' upon the poorer sections of society may be used in order to offset tax savings for our 'hard-working' million-and-billionaires. Notice those distortions creeping in!

Lord Coe, casher-in-upon the Olympic legacy, would no doubt offer an alternative viewpoint, and his argument would be far better funded than mine, perhaps care of The National Lottery. Lord Coe is of course understandably delighted with the real Olympic Legacy, that of feathering the nests of certain advertising-industry-ambassadors. The actual sport is merely the vehicle! This in much the same vein as Tony Blair was delighted by the personal remuneration afforded him as a consequence of his part in instigating the ongoing Middle Eastern genocide. More fuzziness? BAE Systems may beg to differ.

Thanks also to Jack

Which leads me on to the thrust of my post; that would be the issue of Remembrance, specifically for those who fought in either World War, "Lest we should forget."

And, how precisely to word this highly emotive issue? 

Undoubtedly, we shouldn't permit the sacrifices of those who served in either of the World Wars to diminish in the eyes and hearts of the nation. Some thirty years since his passing, the thought that my gentle grandfather's contribution should in any way be diminished would still, to me, be an affront. His generation's charge was one of creating a better world, regardless of the misdeeds of so many of those absentee generals. 

Yet, for neigh on a decade and a half now, the wearing of a poppy, "with pride," has become ever more of a difficult issue. "Lest we should forget," maybe, but also, "Lest we should notice," the slackening of the argument. For my part, the problem now is, precisely who are we commemorating, and to what purpose are those funds being used? Harry Patch and his many brave colleagues continue to deserve our respect, their cause should not be forgotten, yet neither should it be permitted to become a smokescreen for more recent and decidedly less honourable conflicts. 

So, when the guns sound, to mark the end of the Armistice two minute silence, what do we suppose those at BAE Systems are thinking?

WoMD? Certainly, Prime Minister, which models and how many will you be requiring? Hardly twenty-twenty vision, is it?

"The synapses are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them spark again in our life-time."