Canto XXI and Counting...

Our journey through the Circles of Hell [™Dante Alighieri-ish] is about to enter the Ninth level. We have dwelt in the Eighth for some years now, as Canto XXI outlines: the political grafters, serial liars and fraudsters have held sway over our lives for long enough for the cracks now to be obvious as yawning, and widening daily. To hear Re-Smog wiffling on about being loyal to one's [Tory] party after said institution has effectively fucked one and one's career over, in the desperations of defending the indefensible, is pathetic and welcome in equal measure: we know the party's over when the host has pissed his pants and insulted most of the guests in the service of his own ego and fading influence. Schadenfreude is such a wonderful concept in this context.

The Ninth Circle, of course, is Treachery, to which I think Lord Snooty might have been, without the slightest hint of subtlety or finesse, alluding to. This lot will back-stab their way out of their now degraded and debased offices, taking down anyone in their path, in the vain hope they might still have a post-political career to support their sorry backsides, doing media deals for piles of cash on their way out. Or downwards, as they are actually, already, in the Hell of their own making. Of course, there are precious few upsides to this Danse Macabre for society in general: ten-percent of UK homes can now no longer afford heating: how long before food and sustenance itself becomes a luxury? That fact alone should make one start in horror: one in ten homes. I've been around long enough to know, from first-hand experience, that this is a most monstrous aberration in what is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It simply shouldn't be happening. Period. But the self-styled Masters of the Universe have conspired amongst their grubby little selves that it should be so: their livelihoods are predicated exactly on the suffering of those people, and many, many more who simply don't appear on the statistical radar.

We are on the cusp of multiple chaos's, Old Testament-like in scale and nature: except that the wrathful God of the pre-Christian Bible has been replaced by natural consequence: the logical end-of-days, rather than the spiritual. We as a species have created this almighty mess by ourselves, and no Christian God or otherwise will raise their heads or hands to sort it out for us. It is of our own making, and it is by our own will and volition solely, that we can hope to stem the tide of human chaos made inevitable by human greed and stupidity.

It's too much to hope for a return to a prelapsarian paradise of human perfection in the eyes of a benevolent God - whatever your personal deity might be - we have seconded the spiritual in the service of Mammon at our own cost and without the help of a God. I speak as an anarcho-syndicalist Zen Buddhist socialist, of course, as we are now, officially, a non-Christian-majority country. At the end of it all, though, we ourselves are to blame for allowing ourselves to be suckered in by the personalities of the myth-mongerers and snake-oil salesmen that we employ, supposedly, in our service; but who so often turn out to be people with feet of clay and their pockets full of our gold.