Normcore

“There is a very fine line between what Freud called the psycopathology of everyday life and what Fromm called the pathology of normalcy” said RD Laing.

When you find yourself saying “this is too weird” on a loop, when a thousand American writers start another article “this is not normal”, when you feel disoriented and dispirited by the moral failure of politics and your own complicity in spectacle and consumption, when Ivanka Trump sits in at the G20, when a trillion ton iceberg  breaks off the West Antarctic ice shelf and gains a days newsworthy notice, when Hinkley C gets commissioned and Boris Johnston is your Foreign Secretary, when you can watch police violence and consume virtual snuff movies online daily, when foodbanks have become part of every community, when migrants are crossing the Mediterranean and dying in their thousands as people holiday next door…. you realise you are adjusting yourself to a madness.

The mundanity of capitalist barbarism becomes normalised into the everyday. The dysfunctional becomes acceptable.

This madness is focused and boosted if you view it all through the prism of the corporate media, which have a global ambition to produce not free thinking citizens but obedient customers. Add to this the realisation that many of our institutions are not just “not fit for purpose” but purposely fit for someone else’s, institutions like, you know, the law?

Remember when the kid was jailed for six months for stealing a bottle of water out of Lidl after the riots?

Now, in what’s being called a case of misogynoir Rhodri Philipps, 4th Viscount St Davids, has been jailed for 12 weeks for offering cash on Facebook for someone to kill Brexit campaigner Gina Miller. Not only did he offer £5k to kill Gina miller, he offered £2k for someone to ‘carve [a council tenant] into pieces’.

It’s thought he’ll actually serve six, tops.

So far so class-ridden legal hypocrisy. Double the time for stealing a bottle of water than for trying to have someone killed. Mind you when you see the Scottish Courts jailing Brian Quail and Angela Zelter for protesting at Faslane, its confirmation this is all insane.

Yesterday the White House Communications Director Anthony Sacaramucci told a journalist in an on the record briefing that Steve Bannon the White House Chief Strategist “Sucked his own cock”.

These are days when you are left yearning for the ethics of Nixon or the wisdom of Dan Quayle, who couldn’t spell “potato”.

Welcome to Normcore.

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Comments (2)

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  1. Davie Park says:

    Thanks for the fillip, Mike 😉 Despair is an indulgence we can never afford.

  2. Pogliaghi says:

    Hinkley C getting commissioned is actually completely normal though because we’ve been getting about 20% of our electricity (more like 80% in Scotland) from nukes since the 70s. Sorry but this truly is “business as usual” stuff folks.

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