said Virgil of Greeks giving Troy a giant horse.
We must learn from the past not just see it. Peter Thiel the, venture capitalist, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir was given a private view of the Bayeaux Tapestry on show at the BM. Thiel is a supporter of Donald Trump and wants to infiltrate the NHS. Beware billionaires who support an ego maniac who judges everyone by how much they worship him. The value of human life to Donald Trump is not weighed in the balance of climate crisis, dangers of AI to human life, and war on unarmed people but on all the world bowing down to him and giving tribute by naming everything after him. As well as Virgil 2000 years ago, in the C19th,Shelley understood the syndrome.
Let’s rename his poem:
The description fits including the frown and wrinkled lip
Ozymandias Trump
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Another billionaire wants us to be grateful to billionaires and appreciate the dregs from their tables.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm0463619r1no
Radcliffe says we will lose rich people’s spending in the UK. That’s the TRICKLE DOWN economics of Milton Friedman et al in the seventies and it has taken over the world. BUT the reality is TRICKLE UP economics. It is why the richest one percent of the population own as much as 50 percent of all the people in the world. Is that good economics? Let’s find a better way and say ‘NO THANK YOU’ to the drops from the wealthy.
Claret Press published my memoir because its CeO Katie Isbester said it wasn’t so much about me as about our changing society and how it impacted on my life. This extract speaks volumes.
The generation of 1945-1975 was one of enormous class mobility due to changes in government policies and the resulting decline of inequality. In 1945 the richest 0.01 per cent of people in Britain had 123 times the mean national average of income. By 1965 it was halved to 62 times and by 1978 it was at its lowest at 28 times. By 2007, it had once again risen to 144 times and is rising still. (New Statesman “How Social Mobility Got Stuck” by Danny Dorling July 2013).
I benefitted from growing up in a world where we were becoming more equal.
My grandchildren are growing up in world becomes less equal every year.
That is why there is unrest and violence and war.
WE NEED CHANGE
