The End of Something

A few decades later those resounding assurances ring more like dim echoes from some ancient history. Fresh (at least for an hour or two) pronouncements are regularly cranked out proclaiming the failure/death/ demise/ decline of liberalism… and the rise of oligarchy/populism/autocracy/techno-feudalism and God knows what. While remaining optimistic as to the inherent value and potential resurgence of Liberalism, Fukuyama now concedes that the tendency is in trouble, as reflected in the title of his latest book: Liberalism and Its Discontents. English political philosopher John Gray is more pessimistic, speculating that while liberalism may continue to endure and even flourish in certain enclaves, its heyday is over. We may never again know the degree of individual liberty, freedom of speech and expression, and toleration more or less taken for granted under the liberal banner.

A definition of liberalism is complicated by the existence of classical liberals, neo-liberals, libertarians, liberal-democrats, liberal humanists, progressives, and other strains. People identifying as liberal may be condemned by other people identifying as liberal, and both will almost certainly be condemned by those calling themselves conservative—particularly in the United States, where the line between liberal and conservative is more like a trench. Fukuyama refers to liberalism as a tradition, a philosophy, a set of principles, a cognitive style through which certain values or aspirations come to the fore: freedom, autonomy, choice, individualism, equality, tolerance, separation of religion and state, diversity, justice, social betterment… Liberals tend to agree that human beings everywhere share basic values and are entitled to basic rights, and that a key role of government is to protect those rights by upholding a rule of law. Government power should not become absolute, meanwhile, but rather remain subject to a system of checks and balances. Flaws rising in human systems and institutions may be weeded out or mended through reform. Liberalism maintains a fundamental faith in reason, and regards scientific, technological, moral, and socio-economic progress as real. The world will be made a better place if universal human rights are recognised and respected.

John Gray sees liberalism not so much as a philosophy or set of principles as a way of life emerging out of Europe’s wars of religion—a way of life that was soon making quasi-religious (and inflated) claims to a universal appeal, and even to promises of salvation. Gray holds liberalism largely responsible for its own fall from grace. Far from being a momentous stride into the brightest of all possible futures, an end of history, liberal civilisation is history, Gray surmises, in the sense of curtains, the party’s over.

In fact, no one knows what tomorrow holds for liberalism, let alone for most any other aspect of what’s been regarded as human civilisation. Technology, economy, education, government, agriculture, art, science, religion, community, law… everything feels vulnerable, up for grabs. And grabbers are in ready supply if the current power shift in the US is any indication. Implosion has come to feel plausible in a world where resource wars, mass extinction, drought, cultural malaise, spiritual blight, social disintegration, political paralysis, random violence, moral decline, and environmental catastrophe are no longer viewed as gathering clouds on some distant horizon, but are rather fully upon us, horsemen of the Apocalypse storming into a shattering world. Chaos and fears of chaos are commonplace, spurred by actual events and by leaders who no longer aim to reassure so much as to jar and disrupt.

Decade by decade since at least the 1950s we’ve been making resolutions to ‘do something’ before it is too late. Yet the hole we’re in feels ever deeper, and the planet’s eight billion human residents more disposed than ever to conclude that too late is where we’re at. The mood in 2025 ranges from resigned, sombre, and troubled to denialist, resentful, and troubled.

‘Are we at a turning point in world history?’ asks a recent Guardian headline, relatively mild given the dire tones now in favour. Feverish speculation proliferates in an era of disruption and uncertainty, when it feels as if another rug is being yanked from underfoot on a daily basis. The article’s author, David Motadel, quotes former US president Joe Biden raising the concern prior to leaving the White House: ‘I truly believe we are at another inflection point in world history where the choices we make today will determine our future for many decades to come.’ Count on a politician, pundit, or talking head to go with ‘inflection’ over ‘turning point’, a novel phrase that would soon become a cliché. Biden as president strove to come across as a decent sort, though it may be recalled that the bar for decency was not set very high in the election he won in 2020. Unfortunately, ‘decency’ for Biden and many in his party came to mean largely a matter of not being Donald Trump. By pretending the genocidal war on Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 represented little beyond another sample of Israel’s ‘legitimate right to defend itself’, by sending arms and ever more arms, by looking on in near-silence as the slaughter unfolded, Biden revealed a capacity for indecency that may have out-trumped his rival’s. By 2024 the President looked and sounded increasingly frail. ‘Make no mistake,’ he was wont to declare as he ran for a second term, drawing his eyes into something like a portentous, yet tough and resolute squint: ‘This election is literally the most important in our nation’s history.’ Americans now stick ‘literally’ into every third sentence uttered. And every election now is the most important in the nation’s history (make no mistake). ‘This is a battle for the soul of America,’ Biden repeated time and again, until the rallying cry lost its edge. In the face of MAGA’s firehose of distortion and distraction he preached: ‘This is not who we are.’ In the face of genocide, he refrained from comment. Eventually Biden was forced to bow out of the race. His party went on to lose the election, leaving Americans and an anxious world as stumped as before by the riddle of who America is.

Critics have remarked a tendency among liberals to assume that everyone is at bottom rational (like the clear-thinking and enlightened entity known as We Liberals) and will choose to come to his or her senses once the voice of liberal reason has spoken. Faith in the existence of a universal human desire to see the (Our) light may be well-intended and have some admirable qualities to it, yet such a faith risks coming across as condescending, elitist, and out-of-touch. The American poet Walt Whitman strikes one as Liberal in the best sense of the word—idealistic, egalitarian, all-embracing, generous, sympathetic, compassionate, unapologetically besotted with freedom. ‘Unscrew the locks from the doors!’ he enthused. ‘Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’ But English author DH Lawrence, a discerning and original interpreter of American literature, remained suspicious of what he called Whitman’s ‘uncomfortable universalization’. While he praised the poet’s pioneering spirit and welcomed his invitation to set out on ‘the open road’, Lawrence could not abide the famous injunction from the opening lines of ‘Song of Myself”: ‘And what I assume you shall assume…’ No thanks, he decided, unwilling to sign up for the great embrace. Nor was Lawrence entirely keen on Whitman’s version of sympathy. Lawrence held sympathy to be the quality of feeling with other people. But Whitman, he suggested, was often as not feeling for other people. Feeling with others demanded risk, personal involvement, going out on a limb; whereas feeling for others might be merely a matter of emotional release, a self-indulgent rush of feeling, a sense of rightness and of righteousness, agreeable to oneself, but of little use to those suffering misfortune or injustice. While Lawrence’s critique makes sense, it must be remembered that Whitman’s capacity for sympathy was remarkable and genuine as demonstrated by his committed service as a volunteer nurse in various field hospitals during the American Civil War.

‘A culture of moral vanity,’ John Gray calls the ‘woke’ expression of a strain of liberalism often referred to as progressive. ‘Believe all women!’ the MeToo Movement preached. The sermon sounded nonsensical to those persuaded that a practice of believing some women remained more judicious. ‘Defund the police!’ directed another group. And once that was done? Call the police seemed a safe bet. ‘Not in our name!’ stipulated a group against the second Gulf War. But the words rang sanctimonious, focused as much on self-exoneration as on opposition to that heartbreaking episode of state madness. Claims to be on ‘the right side of history’ can provoke annoyance, as can reflexive references to ‘our democracy’. Why ‘our’ democracy? Who are ‘we’? Who are the benighted ‘they’? Is ‘our democracy’ really such an exemplar? Such whiffs of progressive self-righteousness help explain journalist Rod Liddell’s reference to liberals as ‘the people who foist upon us all manner of right-on, reason-defying idiocies.’

Whatever one’s answer to that question on whether we are at a turning point in history, there is widespread consensus that something is profoundly wrong—that we are on the cusp of the end of something. We do well to remember that a sense of decline and upheaval is nothing new, that turning points in history are old as the hills. Hamlet despaired that the times were out of joint and that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. Generations of readers have shared the fictional prince’s glum impression. Imagine the feelings of a person living in Baghdad or Isfahan at the time of the Mongol onslaught… In Europe during the height of the Black Death or under a wave of Viking depredation… In Tenochtitlán as bearded strangers mounted on alien beasts rode into your world. Imagine living today in the drought and war-plagued Sahel, unsure where the next meal is coming from… In concentration camps or torture cells or neighbourhoods hammered by war… Over and over throughout history, individuals or entire peoples have been up against what appeared to be the end, forced to endure a world turned upside down. What seems different in 2025 is that extreme fear and uncertainty are not confined to the globe’s most troubled corners. Practically everyone’s afraid, uncertain, on edge. It is a bad time to be an ash tree, an insect, a bird, a bat, a human being. Even those rolling in privilege and wealth who style themselves winners in the game of life may find themselves beset by feelings of insecurity, by a sense of vulnerability, as anxious (if not more so) about history’s next act as the players they tend to regard as expendable extras—the poor, the powerless, the dispossessed—the losers.

‘More than at any other time in history,’ begins Woody Allen’s wry parody My Speech to the Graduates, ‘mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly’. This ‘inspirational’ speech still draws a smile. However, the smile in 2025 feels somewhat different from the one in 1979 when the piece was written. Back then Allen’s dilemma still seemed laughably, absurdly distant and improbable. The future looked bleak enough, but surely the human race would summon the wherewithal to avert such a desperate cul-de-sac. Today’s smile is sadder, far less assured. Allen’s absurd crossroads feels too much like the place we’ve come to—a dead end of history, a crossroads to nowhere. It would seem the joke is on us.

Written over the last several decades, the following poems reflect liberal inclinations, dreams, ideals, disappointments—liberal with a small letter, which to me simply indicates a type open to a persuasion that the world can and should be a better, freer place than the one we consent to call real. Perhaps the poems shed light as well on Liberalism with a capital L—a set of principles, a way of life, which depending on whom you believe, is either dead, dying, or evolving.

Eleventh Hour

It’s really here. We knew all along.

Why did we come this way? Indolence.

Lack of courage. Complicity. Folly…

a lengthy list, just a matter of time.

The writing was there on the wall.

All along. No turning back now,

or even away. No buying time,

no stay of execution. No haven, no reprieve.

No way out of Dodge, no sunset to ride into.

No sweet ranch tucked away like in the movies,

branch water, rich pasture, snow-capped peaks…

Painted into our crapped-out corner, what now?

Repent? Evolve? Invent? Create?

We really should, though it’s somewhat late.

More likely we’ll just call it fate,

stick to the same lame bag of tricks:

depleting, blaming, competing,

kneeling to machines, vying for money,

edging ourselves out further along

this dying branch of the family tree.

Election Process, 2016

For years they’ve been promoting

shifting versions of themselves.

Preening, primping, ruffling feathers.

Bluster and brag, bravado and spin.

May the best liar win…

(Make America Great Again).

‘Never,’ H.L. Mencken quipped,

‘underestimate the stupidity

of the American public.’

We concede a tight-lipped smile.

As ever, though the joke’s on us,

just look what the cat’s dragged in this time

after so much outlay, strain and fuss.

‘Why,’ as a Moroccan adage goes,

‘such a big funeral for such a small mouse?’

The people have chosen.

Bring on the implosion.

Set fire to the house.

Without a Fight

Sunday morning in the kitchen drinking plonk.

But Make No Mistake (as the politicians say),

I am no mere drunk. The year is 2023.

They’re all the same, a waiting game.

Apocalyptic chatter is in—end of line,

the yawning pit, the dying planet, et cetera.

And does it frankly even matter? Et cetera.

Pundits concur it’s too late to save the Earth.

We zombie on, making senseless rounds,

kneeling at empty stations of the cross,

bound to dead routine. We make for the end

unwilling to turn, or unable, bewitched,

watch the house burn, resigned to pretend

there’s no way out. Half-itching for war,

reluctant to learn. Faith in a Good War

to save our skins persists despite 5,000 years

of evidence against. In any case, bottle empty,

I venture forth reckoning some exercise

might do one good (wine shop beckoning).

In the field past the latest Development

(gouged orange earth girdled in billboards),

the lupines have come on, blue whimsy

refuting the flimsy lies of Progress,

the yellow mustard too, defiant,

scrappy and alive, fighting the good war,

what’s our excuse?

Small Change

Having spent a lifetime

aspiring to say it all,

and by the end having

said nothing at all…

Now back to the wall

and face to the grave,

I offer up the small change

in my pocket: don’t try

to Save the World,

the Planet, or anything else

with capital letters

that smacks of Campaign.

Go plain and unobtrusive

under the radar leaving

the earth a scoop of compost

richer, or a thimbleful.

Labor in league with

the earthworm and bee,

look past the self,

beyond the nose.

The World goes on falling apart.

Nothing to show but the nectar

sown in golden combs of the heart.

Reading or watching the news so often feels like a form of violence, an act of complicity, a voyeuristic looking-on. We desire to be informed, which up to a point is natural. Yet the loops of cruelty carry us well beyond that point. How did it feel, watching ‘Shock and Awe’, the name given to the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003’s instalment in that series of military follies staining American history? Watching war live on television as if it were a sporting event, with breathless commentary from our friends at CNN. A front-row seat in the comfort of a living room halfway round the world. A unique perspective on events as they unfolded, or state-sponsored pornography aimed at keeping its audience in thrall to American power? Spectacle as sadistic as anything launched in the Colosseum of Rome being pitched as a righteous cause, a vital link in the Bush administration’s crusade against Evil, its Global War on Terror.

A quarter century later, the Trump administration opted to apply the same brand, ‘Shock and Awe’, to its angry reoccupation of Washington, DC. Americans are notoriously resistant to subtle twists of irony. We do somewhat better with plain homespun adages—‘what goes around comes around,’ for instance. It will be interesting to see which version of ‘Shock and Awe’ proves more shocking and awful once the smoke and mirrors clear. The Trump administration’s assault on a country it claims to be making great again and the Bush administration’s on one it claimed to be liberating will both go down in American history (assuming American history does not go down first) as case studies in political self-harm. It might seem logical to conclude that liberals were firmly and forcefully opposed to a dubious war being peddled by ideological adversaries. After all, George W Bush and his entourage were Republican. They were conservative, a term in America used to describe those pitching their tents on the side of the ‘Great Divide’ opposite the liberal encampment. Not just conservative—they liked to remind voters they were ‘compassionate conservatives’. A faction described as neoconservative, less bothered with compassion, supplied the war’s architects. Like those behind the Vietnam War some forty years before, the architects of this fresh study in calamity were described as the ‘brightest and best’. They were intelligent ambitious men with degrees from elite universities. They sat in influential think tanks. They’d held top positions in various administrations. Yet they pushed for a military solution (military missteps are invariably termed ‘solutions’ for some reason) that defied common sense, driving as resounding a nail into the coffin lid of American democracy as anything its enemies in the ‘Axis of Evil’ could have managed. What went wrong?

The planners of the Iraq Invasion (Operation Iraqi Freedom, as they opted to spin it) no doubt excelled at the first two of what Ibn al-Arabi designated the three forms of knowledge: intellectualism, a capacity for developing concepts based on the gathering of information and facts; and emotionalism, what could be called a heightened awareness or grasp for a subject based on personal feeling. A Paul Wolfowitz or a Donald Rumsfeld had access to a trove of factual information, and felt passionately by way of emotional response as they pondered how best to dislodge the thorn of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from the world’s side. But a crucial third form of knowledge escaped them—what Ibn al-Arabi called real knowledge, or the ‘knowledge of reality’, through which a person can ‘perceive what is right, what is true, beyond the boundaries of thought and sense’. Without it, one’s beliefs will merely amount to what the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali termed ‘coalesced opinions’. It wasn’t just conservatives who gave their support to that coalescence of opinion dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom. Influential liberals in Congress from Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden jumped on the bandwagon, as did prominent liberal intellectuals and journalists. Even then, the invasion might have stalled if not for the dogged backing of Britain’s liberal prime minister Tony Blair. A perception that liberals were more dovish than their hawkish conservative counterparts, less likely to have what Blair called the ‘stomach’ for war, proved false yet again. Those charged with whipping the dead horse of the Vietnam War to its feet under the Kennedy administration were neither Republican nor conservative, but Democrat and liberal.

Among the absurdities plaguing our politics today is a contention that one is either liberal (which in America is held to mean Democrat, leftish) or conservative (held to mean Republican, rightish), and never the twain shall meet, or remotely overlap. An intelligent insightful observer of American politics and culture, Alistair Cooke was well aware of this divide fifty years back when he was dispatching his Letter from America to the BBC. Cooke sensibly styled himself a liberal-conservative or conservative-liberal, but Americans are rarely tempted to be sensible, and this levelheaded approach to bridging the Continental Divide (another Great Divide) never really took off. We remain doomed to the flawed rigidity of a one-size-fits-all template demanding that a ‘Liberal’ shall be an impotent politician who favours a range of what are regarded as left-leaning issues—gun control, abortion rights, a minimum wage, universal health care, the abolition of capital punishment, and welfare, to name a few; whereas a ‘Conservative’ shall merely be a right-leaning politician who favours an opposing menu of issues, not owing so much to any particular insight or conviction as to a tribal devotion to hobbling the other side. Lobbyists and pressure groups work both camps, handing out money and gifts in an effort to curry favour. Little is accomplished, meanwhile, apart from a clamourous and very expensive spinning of wheels as each party strives to cancel out the other. Another mass shooting brings another liberal wringing of hands with emotional pleas for gun control, along with another conservative ‘outpouring of thoughts and prayers’. The only guarantees are that nothing will be done and that it won’t be long before the next shooting is supplying a fresh occasion for hand-wringing and further thoughts and prayers.

Under a divided politics, liberals and conservatives manage little beyond posturing, while glaring problems like the growing chasm between the very rich and the very poor, unemployment, drug addiction, violent crime, environmental degradation, and homelessness are left to fester or spin out of control. This seems particularly sad in a nation whose people are not particularly violent or cruel by nature. Given half a chance, the American people prove to be as generous and caring as any on the planet. This could change, and with a vengeance given the lurching grievancefuelled tack the ship of state has adopted under a self-worshiping captain who appears to confuse disdain with power, provocation with courage, coalesced opinion with insight, perpetual disruption with activity, cosmetic fiddling with change, civility with weakness, money with wealth, cruelty with authority… The Trump takeover, season 2.0, does not bode well for the US or for the world. Fresh plumes of chaos pollute the air on a daily basis. Though he’s publicly reckoned himself to be the smartest man in history and ‘not a fan’ of war, Trump seems plenty thick, callous and reckless enough to barge or be baited into one. Demonstrably brighter and better specimens have managed it.

Despite a sporadic fondness for styling itself a peace-loving nation, America has had a hard time staying out of military entanglements. Coming on the heels of economic depression, the country’s entry into World War II and eventual emergence as chief ‘beneficiary’ reinforced a national persuasion that wars are good for the economy, that they ‘bring the country together,’ and otherwise contribute to national health. Due to a relative geographic and geopolitical isolation, the US escaped the degree of destruction endured by the Soviet Union, Britain, Poland, the rest of Europe, or Japan. Some in the US took to referring to the Second World War as the ‘Good War’ inasmuch as the cause felt heroic, damage to the homeland had been minimal, and the economy was on a roll. This notion that the war was good to us and good for us in part explains why so many Americans remain quick to regard military intervention as an opportunity—and quick to believe, against a deluge of evidence to thecontrary, that violence does not cause or prolong problems, it solves them.

Nation-states opt for violence routinely enough that it comes to be seen as a normal, practically default feature of political problem-solving. In our day, the world has been instructed to sit and watch quietly, even approvingly, as an allegedly liberal Jewish democracy demonstrates that after seventy-five years as an official state, the only path to ‘security’ it’s been willing to imagine feeds on violence even as it breeds it. In relative silence, the world has watched an allegedly Islamic republic and an insecure oligarchy aid and abet in the destruction of Syria. In relative silence, the world watches war on Ukraine. Less noticed but no less brutal conflicts fester on meanwhile, in Africa and other parts of the globe. What a waste of money, blood, time, potential, and spirit war amounts to—and what passes for peace during gaps in the savagery often seems little better. Based on something read as a schoolboy, I fell under the impression that eighteenth century armies in uniform used to gather on a battlefield, wait for a signal, and methodically open fire until enough soldiers had fallen to declare a victor. It sounded like utter lunacy, yet a version of lunacy that seems commendable set beside today’s style of slaughter, so efficient at killing civilians, children in particular. We grow numb. It is instructive to recall the initial reaction to American writer Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, published in 1966, describing the killing of a couple and their two teenage children in rural Kansas. The murders were pointless and cruel, and readers found the account unsettling. The book held the nation’s attention for years to come. Today’s America and today’s world, less easily shocked, would find such a story on the dull side. Just four bodies? Cold-blooded killings are a dime a dozen now.

One would think concerned liberals and conservatives could arrange to come together long enough to offer a practical plan to make our streets, schools, and public gathering places safer. In practice though, violence and cruelty are apt to be courted by legislators and politicians of all stripes. Recall liberal Bill Clinton going out of his way to insist on an application of the death penalty in his home state to assure voters of his toughness on crime. Listen to Madeleine Albright, former US Ambassador to the UN, in a 1998 address: ‘if we have to use force it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than any other country into the future’. Two years prior to that, Albright, a distinguished professor of political science with impeccable liberal credentials, and a future winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was asked whether the deaths of an estimated half a million children due to US government sanctions on Iraq were worth it. She barely hesitated: ‘we think the price is worth it’. It took twenty-four years for Albright to publicly admit the remark had been ‘totally stupid’. In the 2024 presidential campaign, liberal Democratic candidate Kamala Harris repeatedly went out of her way to declare herself a ‘proud gun owner’, repeatedly pledged to make America’s military ‘the most lethal fighting force on the planet’, repeatedly pledged military support to Israel with hardly so much as an eyebrow raised at the fact that infanticide should figure so prominently in that fractious state’s latest offensive display of its ‘right to self-defence’.

And yet, it is one thing to deride the often cruel, often bloody decisions of those in power, of those individuals ostensibly calling the shots. It is more challenging to reflect that if we were in their shoes, we would possibly be doing as badly or worse. That holds for even the most egregious offenders—the Netanyahus, the Assads, the Stalins. Hating what such individuals do may have some practical constructive application. Hating them personally, passionately, singling them out for the world’s depravity, wanting to wipe them from the face of the earth with a cleansing counter-dose of violence and cruelty—that sort of hatred risks being a waste of time and energy, a concession to the haters, an agreement to play their game on their terms. ‘If only it were so simple!’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago by way of explaining why he chose not to turn the work into a political expose. ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ The rush of blind hatred towards even the most qualified of recipients does nothing to diminish the fever in our own hearts. It seems more useful to extend a degree of compassion even to a Hitler, a failed human being, a pitiable wretch; or to a Trump, hugging himself, scowling at the cameras, stonehearted, bone-headed, pitiable, another wretch.

A week or two ago I woke in a sweat from a nightmare in which I was trapped in a confined place, short of air, no room to turn. As sometimes happens in the wake of dreams, I recognised this one’s source immediately. I’d read a news story about Marion Bowman, a South Carolina prisoner transferred to ‘execution watch’ for six months to prevent his cheating the state of its upcoming recital of capital justice. The new cell was so narrow he could not extend his arms without touching the walls. The lights were never extinguished. The prisoner was under constant camera surveillance, denied all human contact. He had maintained his innocence for twentyfour years, the length of time taken by the State to get around to setting an execution date. Wouldn’t six minutes in that claustrophobic cage have been adequately barbaric? Why six months? The State could not explain exactly, apart from that it was protocol. And thanks to protocol, Bowman was granted a choice—he could die by electric chair, firing squad, or lethal injection. It was his call, his individual right, another sample of what we like to call freedom of choice. It took Bowman twenty-three minutes to die by lethal injection. Observers spoke of evident distress, including what appeared to be feelings of suffocation or drowning. The next man up for execution in the State of South Carolina has elected to go by firing squad. ‘It’s a free country’, as the saying goes. My nightmare changed nothing. The news continues loop on loop, cycle by cycle, delivering its daily and in some sense lethal dose of mind-numbing, heart-numbing depravity. A catatonic world goes on watching.

UPI Poem, 1986

The newspaper holds an anthology

of twentieth century poetry, for example:

‘Strapped to a gurney

Bass looked at the ceiling

and glanced at his family

moments later he gasped

and lay still; he was pronounced

dead eight minutes after getting

the shot of sodium thiopental

pavulon and potassium chloride.’

A Christian Administration Reassures the Iraqi People

800 Cruise Missiles pre-emptively raining down

we assure you well-intentioned, regret any inconvenience,

nothing against you personally. Bear in mind

that Big Rock Candy Mountain of Democracy

around the corner but first a taste of Shock and Awe,

Freedom’s messy sometimes, small price to pay

for Liberation, trust you understand

no gain without pain, gotta break a few eggs

as the saying goes, pray consider the omelets

to come as your present is scrambled

collateral damage; regrettable, inevitable,

suffer the little children.

Triumph of the Lie: January 1991

You have what you desired

bombs dump on Baghdad

tracks of fire trace the night

this sky your dream

your ultimate video game

bombs dump on Baghdad

and lie upon lie dumps on

America, Jefferson thumps the grave

with clenched fists

Thoreau sits soul-sick by Walden Pond

Whitman walks the Manhattan shore

calling lost camerados and lovers

Whitman in despair, who could have imagined?

Odor of liars has drowned the lilacs

a vision of death he never dreamed

breath of the wolves of apocalypse

binding the blood of a nation of sheep

Old Walt crosses Brooklyn Ferry alone

for Camden’s lonely sleep

you have what you desire

your words infect the night

drown the surf, blight the stars

cementing down your world of war

breath of wolf sprays from a billion TVs

resistance bleats tamely in the fold

lies fall like bombs on America’s soul.

So far, so bleak. A new breed of technology-enhanced somebodies styling themselves influencers scrambles to get a taste of calling the shots, running the show, and in the Age of Trump making the deals. The end feels nigher, corruption more brazen, the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever. You and I, meanwhile, feel more insignificant than ever, aware we have done too little, are doing too little, and can do but little. The human race is either toast already or at a crossroads offering a choice between despair and total extinction. ‘Enjoy!’ as waiters say in American restaurants once they’ve plopped the unpalatable fare down in front of you. Albert Camus may have been onto something when he suggested that the rational course of action for a modern human being was to commit suicide. But this digression only brings us back to ‘Go’—the world is a shambles; is anything to be done about it? Can anything be done about it? Far more accomplished people than most of us have been afflicted by such questions and haunted by feelings of inadequacy and shortfall. In William James’s remarkable The Varieties of Religious Experience, Robert Louis Stevenson is quoted, ‘whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fare allotted. Our business is to continue to fail in good spirits,’ inviting yet another resurrection of Samuel Beckett’s much-resurrected ‘ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’.

If the somebodies of the world insist on laying claim to being its quintessential winners, perhaps the company of losers is not the worst fate. ‘I’m nobody!’ confided the nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson. ‘Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.’ Be grateful to count yourself part of a community of nobodies. An Emily Dickinson makes distinguished company, after all. The movers and shakers—the winners—the world’s poster children, the influencers? Take a closer look. Are they truly more enviable than pitiable? ‘Why,’ al-Ghazali wondered, ‘do people seek knowledge from celebrities?’ Why, indeed. There’s work to be done at the nobody level, meanwhile. What sort of work? Often quiet and unrewarded, much of it the work human beings perform as a matter of course. We’ve all been on the receiving end somewhere along the way. My parents looked after a typically ungrateful child, my teachers taught a dependably obtuse student, my friends tolerated a reliably exasperating presence… Such people every so often turned the straw of everyday existence—cooking, cleaning, gardening, tending to the duties and routines necessary to maintaining a household or school or community—into gold. Now and then they worked quiet wonders, transmuting little or nothing into something precious, pulling off a sort of alchemy.

I often used to turn to a 1976 volume entitled More-with-Less: Recipes and suggestions by Mennonites on how to eat better and consume less of the world’s limited food resources. The cookbook occasionally sounded like the one Jesus must have consulted on being asked to feed the four thousand with seven loaves and a few fish. The odd recipe proposing to feed four to six people on a can of tuna and cup of rice could be taken with a grain of salt, but one was drawn to the book’s general premise—that in a world so often delivering less with more, encouraging waste, haste, and outsized portions reliant on a preponderance of grease, sugar and salt, one might develop an approach to food preparation and diet that delivered more with less—more flavour, more nutrition, more time to share and appreciate a meal, more satisfaction…. less dependence on processed ingredients, less expense, less waste, less stress. One learned what a pound of lentils or oatmeal had to offer. One learned to make large pots of flavourful nourishing soup at less cost than a few cans of uninspiring soup from the supermarket. By extending the approach beyond the kitchen, one confirmed that riding a bike to the library was cheaper, simpler, cleaner, more therapeutic than driving, and faster too given the traffic and limited parking. More-with-Less may have been a slogan, but it drew from the simple, balanced, common-sense refinement of lifestyle Thoreau called economy, not to be confused with the bloated concession to greed, inequity, waste and debt referred to by so many nation-states as Economy.

Once upon a time US-Americans were by and large a frugal people fond of practical sayings like ‘haste makes waste’ and ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. Somewhere along the line, most Americans ditched their Almanacs and subscribed to a notion that thrift was obsolete and waste, like war, ‘good for the economy’. Other countries were quick to emulate the fashion. Before long the American brand of consumption would become a global standard—waste was not merely tolerated but applauded in the name of convenience, development, modernity, and ironically, prosperity. Less-with-More was becoming the way unsound men did business, the norm. ‘A sound man is good at salvage,’ Lao Tzu observed; ‘at seeing that nothing is lost.’ In today’s brave new world, thrift might be okay for oldtime sages or present-day nobodies. But those intent on being somebody know you don’t get ahead of the game by seeing that nothing is lost. You condone a style of change better described as vandalism, you follow the money, you make a splash, you push to the front. As the government in the 1950s started telling small farmers and small fry in general: ‘get big or get out’. It was the way of the world—you went with it or got left behind with the rest of the losers. Going against the world’s grain was a sign of backwardness, folly, maybe insanity.

In this madness, we are left asking ‘what are we here for?’ What were we born to achieve? What is the purpose of this life? Or supposing that there is none, why should the human race dedicate so much time and energy to making this life miserable? Such questions are constantly being set aside, neglected, avoided, slipping away over time. Little wonder. Many human beings find themselves struggling to feed themselves and their families, struggling to make a living wage, struggling to see beyond a daily battle to survive. Others who maintain a relative degree of privilege may rise, work, eat, read the news, consider going on holiday, watch the match, go out for a drink, worry about the future, stress over money and taxes and over the constant battle to hang onto what one has, to round the corner, to arrive once and for all at a place one can rest easy. We eat. We sleep. We rise. We do it all over again. Sooner or later we die. The real questions may be lost in the process or go inadequately addressed. The Quran suggests one question that will return to us or that we will return to on a day of reckoning. ‘…And on that day you will be called to account for [what you did with] the boon of life!’ (102:8) What have we done with the boon of life? Does a more relevant question exist?

Nothing Accomplished

He sits trimming leeks, peeling potatoes,

getting an evening meal around.

The powers that be tend to agree

he is generally unsound,

has lost the plot, soup doesn’t pay.

Is it any good? Who’s to care or say,

who will ever know? He doesn’t

have so much as a recipe to show

for his pains. He’s out of step.

The Economy sighs; no gains in soup.

His accomplishments add up to sweet fuck-all.

He doesn’t seem to be playing the game,

he’s let the side down; he’s dropped the ball.

The World’s ashamed to say his name.

This isn’t easy, accomplishing nothing.

December Ditty, 2024

Here comes an enterprising man

who tells us all is going to plan.

He sees the future; he’s rich as a royal.

He’s frozen his semen, it’s worth more than oil.

He builds expensive god-awful cars.

He recommends we live on Mars.

He’s held to be the wealthiest ape

to ever rape the planet Earth.

This Christmas let us bow and scrape,

give thanks for Musk Our Saviour’s birth.

Note to Dear Leader: 2019

I find you repellent and vain,

unintelligent, perhaps insane.

Yet what have the smug

on the Right Side of History

(a fatuous phrase, their own arrogant coinage)

done better than you?

America’s wars on far-off lands

and on itself

draw a wringing of hands.

We decry your shameless love of pelf

but our snouts too

find their way to the trough.

You at least maintain a knack

for being unapologetically crass…

A horse’s ass, but hardly alone,

shamefully helped to

your peacock throne.

2021: Didn’t Have to Be This Way

The human race has taken some flak, and rightly so,

largely meriting its crap reputation. As species go,

we’ve got answering to do. For all the talk of civilization,

we’re mighty partial to the slime. Yet given half a chance,

how people rise to the sublime, seem worth a shot at evolution.

Over and over, kindnesses I can never explain…

Wrapped in black, the veiled lady on a bus in the back

of beyond handing me one of the boiled eggs she’d tucked

away for her dinner. And then at a layover when I asked

a villager with a stack of bread hot from the oven

where he’d got it, he pressed two loaves into my hands

for answer before hurrying on without a word. Egypt,

Mexico, Scotland, Kerala, Morocco, Spain, Alabama…

From London to Ijoukak, New York to Muscat,

Over and over, people have been better

than they’re supposed to be,

one can’t say enough for them.

For sure we’ve had our share of shits,

and shown such capacity to appal

for fear of losing what we cling to, call ours…

We’re better than this given half a chance.

It didn’t have to be this way.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Postponement

Death was in the bedroom last night,

staring, who knows how long,

I woke not sure I was meant to,

heart thumping in rib cage,

last clatter of pump seizing up?

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Death said,

in no apparent hurry, making to go.

Could you do it while one is asleep please,

the old didn’t-know-what-hit-‘em package?

I put in. If at all possible?

But Death seemed uninterested

in fielding instructions,

was already halfway down the hall,

places to go, people to see.

The Invisible Mountains

One goes there in dreams

across the high passes.

No coordinates exist,

no photographs, no maps.

Yet who has not sensed

the invisible mountains?

Prayer for Conjurers

These words are written on the blank side of

a wrinkled page that held 150 grams of rosemary,

paper salvaged from the trash, resourceful packaging

twisted into a cone by the spice guy in Rabat medina,

delivering more with less, like a serviceable poem,

conjuring something from nothing, alchemy of need.

The faction of the world that calls the shots, meanwhile,

delivers less for more… thrift devolving into greed,

economies built on waste, follies of Progress,

stampede to extinction. Strange that those

grown fat by this arrangement seem most afraid,

feel as deprived as those they deprive, are terrified

of losing power, money, privilege, prestige.

All they’ve amassed seems under siege.

Fear is familiar in their world of less with more—

one thing they’re forced to share with the poor,

the hungry and weak, the ignored,

groped by the obscene hand of war

some in ill health they can ill afford,

taxed to distraction, made to pay dear

in the helpless hour of the body’s implosion.

Rich and poor alike strapped to the wheel,

desperate for money, living in fear.

God help us through our dark night of the soul.

Teach us ways to turn straw into gold.

Are we at a turning point in world history? Very likely. Again, there’s nothing new in that, we’ve been there often enough. Motadel’s article sensibly concludes, ‘noticing that we are at an inflection point is not enough. To overcome it, we need to tackle… underlying structural problems, which inevitably will be a slow process, not a dramatic deed. History is a long game’. These words suggest that the flurry of apparently dramatic deeds thrown at the world in the last few months during the second coming of the American President may not in fact amount to much beyond a handful of dust. Most people, gullible though we are known to be, are aware that an ‘executive order’ transforming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America with the flourish of a pen is not a solution to what ails us, does nothing close to tackling those underlying structural problems. It merely amounts to a cheap trick, a brazen sample of less with more, hardly the alchemy we stand in need of.

History may be a long game but if there are no human beings around to play it, the end of history will have arrived at last, whether with a bang or a whimper. One would like to imagine that the human race has an enterprising future before it, that we are yet destined to put in a fruitful stretch at the loom of history, but this is by no means clear. The tapestry has been sorely neglected of late, looks frayed and faded, the cultures that once contributed to its more beautiful sections long gone. The artistry has suffered, while our wilful courtship with the end continues. Meanwhile, an overtly illiberal style of leadership shows no interest in or aptitude for the slow process of addressing underlying structural problems. The one problem that does appear to exercise the neo-strongmen and their supposedly Populist base is that one does not seem to be as rich as one once was. They’re out to aggressively correct what seems to them a gross injustice, out to make us great (rich) again. Turning their backs on the long game, they’ve left us stuck playing a con game. The looting has started. A handful of impresarios grows richer and more powerful—where unfettered greed may lead us does not concern them, nor the wreckage left in their wake, so long as they continue by their own reckoning to be winning, to be raking in the spoils. Even the thought that extinction must signify ‘Game Over’ is of minor concern to them. The impresarios believe themselves to be on history’s greatest roll and are open to suggestions that a technology will be developed enabling them to buy their way past whatever’s coming, mortality included. As for the losers who can’t, well, that kind never could. They’ll just have to get on with dying the old way, the sooner the better.

The looters and wreckers breaking into politics a quarter way through the twenty-first century have no intention of delivering freedom, peace, prosperity or any of the other blessings that liberalism promised to deliver. They make no promises apart from to grab, they indulge in no handwringing, they offer no apologies. Liberal democracy, meanwhile, appears to be slipping from its pedestal. According to Gray, this has not been due to communism, fascism, conservatism, populism or any of liberalism’s traditional enemies so much as due to liberalism itself. It has been a victim of its own ideology. Too often liberalism tried to pass true freedom off as unfettered choice, sacrificing common sense and moral intelligence in the process. Anyone who has walked down certain aisles of a Western supermarket may be awed by the super-abundance of choice—box upon box, brand upon brand, shelf upon shelf of breakfast cereal, much of it nutritionally wanting, expensive, overprocessed, and scarcely edible. After a certain point, the freedom to choose becomes a sort of absurd bondage, a joyless imposition. I think again of the people on death row, offered a range of execution packages to choose from, as per their rights as consumers.

Too often liberalism promoted a veneer of rights sanctifying the imposition on people of values they didn’t in fact share. As with the fetishization of freedom of choice, being granted rights to things it had never crossed one’s mind to want could seem merely absurd, more burden than blessing. Finally, liberalism helped dig its own grave by championing a blind faith in what Gray calls the cult of Technocracy. So much so that, in 2025, the sight of people staring dully into screens may seem more familiar than the sight of people staring, dully or otherwise, into the face of a fellow human being. The cult of Technocracy incubates its share of absurdity. People unable to purchase tickets without a phone, restaurants that hand you a QR code instead of a menu, places that keep you waiting half an hour if you betray a wish to talk to a living person, machines that take what’s left of your soul and wring it dry because you’ve forgotten a password—it’s always miserable, and it’s always for your convenience.

As they waited for the blessings of liberal democracy to trickle down and for government to ‘do something’, people frequently sensed they were in fact getting less with more. ‘Freedom’, ‘Peace’, ‘Prosperity’—they tended to feel like those billboards surrounding a building site. Visions of a better tomorrow that never quite seemed to materialise, or that didn’t live up to the hype. The world watched and waited and wearied of billboards. Doubts arose… Liberal democracy might not represent the universal answer after all—not if one happened to notice the futile, hubristic wars the West seemed to find irresistible. Unchecked market forces and an allencompassing free market might not be panaceas for prosperity—not when they led to financial crises and banking scandals whose perpetrators seemed as likely to be rewarded as punished. The ‘rule of law’ had a way of being flexible. Tariq Aziz, an Iraqi politician who held many posts as a close advisor to Saddam Hussein, was imprisoned for crimes against humanity; Donald Rumsfeld was not. Waste, poverty, and corruption were holding their own. There were pleas for universal Tolerance and universal Justice, but sometimes these too brought the billboards to mind. Tolerance could feel remarkably intolerant at times. Justice could feel remarkably unjust. Liberalism, it transpired, could be remarkably illiberal.

Francis Fukuyama believes or professes to believe that liberalism may stage a return, may learn from its mistakes, may yet recover its former standing. In any event, we do not appear to have arrived at what he meant by the ‘end of history’ just yet. The golden age may have to wait awhile. If it is not the end of history, there does seem to be a common consensus that we are at the end of something. That something varies depending on where you look. America? Democracy? Planet Earth? Civilization? Europe? The West? Cash? Homo sapiens? Capitalism? Religion? Books? Families? Our ropes? One thing is certain, it feels safe to say. We are nearing the end of this essay, and it is not a particularly satisfactory one. The twentieth century poet T S Eliot’s words from Ash Wednesday keep coming back: ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’ Learning that last art is a particular challenge when we know with some certainty that tomorrow’s news will report another rug being yanked out from under us. ‘Faster, faster!’ Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen urges Alice, even though for all the commotion, they are going nowhere. The world we’re living in features Looking Glass absurdity often enough.

Teach us not to care? I find myself not caring as much as I might that liberalism is one of those rugs being yanked from underfoot. Perhaps it was never really there in the first place—compelling arguments have been made suggesting that whatever liberalism was, it was not truly liberal enough to be accused of having really existed. Maybe it is just another billboard going down. And like the 1964 Muddy Waters song says, ‘you can’t lose what you ain’t never had’. Perhaps then, liberalism with a capital L, the ideology, the system, the coalescence of opinion, can be spared with no great loss, and we can grow into something better. That we could sink into something worse is of course the dread. I find myself caring very much if small-letter liberal values are trashed or dismissed—the dedication to freedom, to liberty, to tolerance, to a faith that a world out of kilter, while it cannot be perfected, can at least be brought closer to balance as surely as a malfunctioning engine can be tuned. To do the job properly, the values of small-letter conservatives will be equally necessary—pragmatic types who want to hang onto the good things we have, who are not keen on change for the sake of change, or on institutionalised waste, or on throwing the baby out with the bathwater… who wish from a somewhat different perspective for a better and freer world than the one we’ve come to.

I am as adept as the next person at biting a hand that’s fed me, and do not wish to appear ungrateful. I do not blame people like Fukuyama for holding high hopes for the future or dreaming of the end of history, or for seeing liberal democracy as the best thing going. But as with all the wars America has ‘won’, the Cold War would inevitably bite us in the tail—after a rather graceless gloating period at the Soviet Union’s loss of that war, America is just getting round to losing it now. In many respects I have benefited from liberal democracy, more so than had I been living under most of the alternatives, and I have led a privileged life. A good life, in some ways, but not good enough in others. As an American, I’ve enjoyed a degree of peace, of freedom, and of prosperity of a sort that far too often came at someone else’s expense. When the Bush administration justified waging an unjustifiable war on Iraq on the premise that if the violence was happening there, it would not be happening here, whatever peace I was enjoying was not worth the cost or the name. Too often the kind of prosperity encountered in a world where poverty was the rule, despite liberal outpourings of sympathy, brought William Blake’s words to mind. ‘Pity would be no more if we did not make somebody poor.’ Too often ‘Freedom’ was the billboard variety, and real honest-to-God freedom a rare commodity.

The tectonic plates of political power seem to be shifting worldwide, with an ominous rumbling. There is almost certainly a rough patch ahead, if the rough patch we’re in is any indication. May liberal-conservatives and conservative-liberals go beyond intellectualism and emotionalism, in an effort to approximate the knowledge of reality. May we come to a place where the imagination can anticipate the end of something worth ending—war, violence, poverty, ignorance, bigotry, greed. May the end of something lead to the start of something better.