Defeat in Afghanistan

Yesterday a right wing Republican questioned what the hell the USA was doing in Afghanistan when, "No foreign army has won their for a thousand years". Meanwhile the British announced that they would be getting out of Sangin and leaving it to the Americans. The PR machine has been working tirelessly since to tell us that this was not of course a defeat but a strategic withdrawal.
Doubtless , as is intended in Iraq, the coalition forces will one day withdraw and say they have left a democratic government in control and dress it up as a triumph. Meanwhile the bombings will continue and the deep seated corruption, that surrounds these dubiously installed puppet governments, will flourish.
This is a tragedy for those who have lost loved ones but the blame must lay four square at the feet of the US and UK governments who have the arrogance to rush off all over the world to impose their alien values and dodgy principles in countries where they do not belong.
As for the British I remember Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State in the 1960's saying that, "Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role". Too right but, no wrong, for the British government still pathetically believe that we are a super power when we can't even feed our poor and run a decent rail system.
Matthew Arnold wrote this a century or two back. Why don't they listen:-

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Gordelpus

Photographed somewhere in Majorca.

 

The Good Companions and football.

Perhaps the finest piece ever written in English Literature on football, when it was still a working mans sport, was written by J.B. Priestly in his novel, "The Good Companions". The extract follows. It needs no further comment, except to say that I can just remember going on to THE SPION KOP at Birmingham City F. C. in the 1950's and feeling the same camaraderie and spirit:-

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by back or goalkeeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turn at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover it offered you more than a shilling's worth of material for talk during the rest of the week. A man who had missed the last home match of "t'United" had to enter social life on a tiptoe in Bruddersford."

Barcelona and Birmingham City F. C.

 

I took this picture, which is on display in Barcelona's fabulous museum at Kamp Neu, about five years ago. I have seen it twice. Once at the museum and once at St. Andrews when it was handed over to the Barcelona captain in 1957. Blues were the first British team ever to reach the final of a European cup competition a fact of which we Blues supporters are very proud.
Film from BritishPathe of the match follows. You may have to click on it to view it at BritishPathe's site and unfortunately there is no sound:-

BIRMINGHAM CITY V. BARCELONA

As compensation however there is sound in this clip of us thrashing The Pensioners in the cup:-

BIRMINGHAM V. CHELSEA

The Liberal Party a disgrace to The Nation.

Poor old Cleggy, the Tory Liberal who plotted the coup which installed him in government whilst the rest of the liberals blindly rushed after the power they had long lusted for.
Time for all good people to stand up for our nation and protest once again. But, be careful, they are watching and always have been. Phil Ochs knew this back in the sixties and it is still as relevant now as it was then.


Gordbutnotforgotten

Pleasures of the Harbor by Phil Ochs.

Phil Ochs was an incredibly complex man, who in the latter part of his short life wrote very intense and sensitive lyrics. Only he knows what this song is about but it has in it the elements of decay and ageing and the exploitation of women by men. This and other songs have references to the ladies with painted faces who are there to service the men and nothing else. Feminism had not yet become a force, but as ever he was ahead of his time, and his works never date.
Anyway, enough of my rantings, listen and make up your own minds up and perhaps leave a comment or two to enlighten me.



Gordforbid

Thatcherites in Wolf's Clothing eating the Liberals alive.

So poor old Cleggy has been sucked in and is now a prisonor of the as ever, ultra right Conservative Party, who remain as committed to slashing and burning public services as ever they were. Don't be fooled by the kid gloves; this lot are no different from the Iron Lady (a euphanism for the electric chair in America - always totally apt despite her revelling in the label) and they will use them to strangle the nation.
This time their excuse is that they have to reduce the national debt (all bollocks) and when in the last few days the arch right Daily Mail has been complaining that old age pensions at 66 are soon to be introduced, much earlier than Labour had proposed, and that people are being robbed of their dignity in old age then you know something is wrong. School building is being slashed, which will lose many jobs in the private sector and with up to 600,000 public service jobs going the more modest estimates are that we will soon have an additional 1.5 million unemployed. Even Norman Titbit is smiling again, especially as council house tenants have been told to get out of their houses and move to find some menial work elsewhere.
Ian Duncan Smith meanwhile has said that there is no need for the poor to buy new clothes, for their children, as after the first one is born the remaining siblings can live on hand me downs. Expect the Poor Law to be re-introduced any day.
As for poor old Murdoch's Times they have been reporting that thousands of vulnerable people with terminal cancer, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and clinical depression have had their applications for the new Tory employment and support allowance turned down already and have been told to look for work.
Don't expect a Liberal revolt from Simon Hughes and co. either for when push comes to shove those in the Liberal party have never had any balls.