The Plumb Pudding In Danger

Further to my last . . . Maybe there's always been no future in utopian revolution, before our day. Pol Pot didn't achieve much, beyond those fields of skulls. Mao was a monster. It didn't take long to get from the storming of the Bastille to the Terror (a nightmare in which (check it out if you like) the majority of those guillotined were not aristocrats, fat cats, or even the losers in the swift reverses of revolutionary power. They were far more likely to be hapless, lower middle class citizens, denounced by the citizen next door, for no particular reason except personal gain. But the odds are different now.



The plumb pudding in the cartoon above is clearly, as you can see, planet earth ----in danger of being carved-up by someone called "William Pitt", Prime Minister of what was soon to become the greatest super power the world had ever known; representing wealth creation. Who is dining out with someone you should easily recognise as Napoleon Bonaparte, the top war-monger of the period. (in our modest, domestic peril, I suppose that would be Theresa May across the table from Nigel Farage).



I've labelled them Economic Growth and War, and these are the existential bad guys attacked by the Countercultural Revolution, in the Bold as Love stories. Both of them are monsters; or have become monsters. Both of them have to go. Of course I realise Economic Growth is our society's devoutly unquestioned religion, on every scale from the sublime to the ridiculous, and so do you (you can't have missed the sausage roll in the manger?*), so maybe this is the shocking part, rather than the savage attacks perpetrated on the sinews of war, by oil-field torchers and others, all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, in Castles Made Of Sand. But shocking or not, denouncing them is not fiction, it's what I truly believe.



We don't need more money. Nobody could possibly need more money than "we" already have. We just need to spread it out more. We don't need more War. Nobody could possibly need more war . . .



What we really, seriously need is more time. We need to scratch up another hundred years from somewhere, or fifty, or even twenty, and then we might just get through this part. But without the rough magic, and the fairytale assistance of a Hard Green Countercultural revolution, the future of this living world, the only one we have, does not look good.



Remember that Third World War? The one fought with sticks and stones?



Climate change was already a wolf at the door twenty years ago for us black gold addicts. It's coming on much faster now. It's real as real. But still nobody seems to care! What's wrong with us all?



(The EU by the way, does not play a glorious role in Bold As Love. It's the government, everybody blames it for everything. That's what governments are for. But European identity is vital, Europe is where we all live. In times of trouble, the people of Europe cling together. Nobody questions that.)



The Plumb Pudding in danger: from HYPERALLERGIC



Castles Made Of Sand, first edition with the stunning Anne Sudworth cover, is still readily available.





*Okay, the outrage over equating Jesus, saviour of the world, with with a non-kosher pork snack was hysterically funny (now if only it had been a vegan sausage roll!) But what I see is the mass-market apotheosis of "greed is good"