Weekly news - Western Australia shark cull / North Korea / Ukraine

The last week was one wretching at the gullet with news, most of it stinking of idiocy and insouciance. In particular, the reports of the Western Australia shark cull reminded me of Dostoyevsky's quote from 'The Brothers Karamazov':

'Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you.'

Despite the fact that shark attacks in Australia have fallen to their lowest level in five years (2 fatalities in 2013), this has done little to dissuade fishing contractors from hunting large numbers of tiger, bull and great white sharks and shooting them dead in the water. This wanton profligacy is nothing less than a masculine inclination to exert superiority over anything perceived as a threat to status and machismo. As it is to sharks, so it is the attitude adopted to most everything seen as 'other' or 'dangerous' in our increasingly risk-averse culture.

Destruction is so much the easier default setting than tolerance and coexistence. The respectful acceptance that oceans are the rightful domain of shark species, and were for millions of years before man lumbered up onto the shore, should be sufficient for humans to live with and accept the inherent risks of that habitat. The mass cull of sharks to prevent a small number of attacks is as futile as levelling difficult mountain ski runs because a few have fallen foul of the risk entailed. Just because humans are the de facto dominant species does not necessitate proof through pointless destructive acts such as these.

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Apart from destroying endangered wildlife though, human kind is also exemplary when it comes to dredging the deep ocean trenches of inhumanity. The UN's commission on human rights in North Korea published this week sickening details of state sanctioned mass starvation, political 'disappearances', forced infanticide, abduction, and widespread civilian indoctrination.

The story made headlines for all of roughly one day and was greeted with little more than a contrite shrug from the international community. But why wouldn't it? North Korea's brutal despotic regime is propped up and endorsed by China who would likely veto any attempts made by the UN Security Council to impose any change.

Aside from the practical impediments, on a world psychological level North Korea has long since retreated into a province of complete indifference. If anything, North Korea has been treated as a great joke for years through films like 'Team America' and emphasis placed on the pint-sized tyrant Kim Jung-Il. Indeed, it is a country with so few parallels that people's empathy and ability to perceive possible resolutions are stretched even tauter than in other foreign crises. As the 18th century essayist William Hazlitt perceived, 'the least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.'

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That said, I'd be reluctant to promote any interventionist policy from the outside world; of course pressure needs to be placed on China but the societal shift can only occur from within. With this in mind, it is surely all one can hope for North Korea that at some point there is a mass civilian uprising as is taking place concurrently in Thailand, Venezuela, Bosnia and of course, Ukraine where the battle for legitimacy scaled new peaks of aggression this week.

Despite a total of 88 fatalities, with the disappearance of President Yanukovych and now the imposition of a temporary government, there is at least the semblance of victory for the protestors. It's hard not to speculate on the underlying power play at work though. Russia, desperate to ensnare Ukraine, have remained suspiciously mute of late (too busy preoccupied with their ice carnival of suppressed homosexuality), leading me to predict that the Russian long game is not to step in and assist the pro-Government faction against the insurrection, but to sit back and let chaos reign.

Once the two sides have exhausted one another, Russia could sidle in largely unopposed or install a puppet government to do its bidding. This is much the same long-term scenario predicted for Al Qaeda's influence in Syria once the opposing factions have wrestled themselves into inertia, like the unrequited lover seizing the amorous opportunity after a relationship breaks down.

Tearing the city at the seams # 18 - The amazingly dreary Elephant & Castle

At night the sound of traffic swirls with a waterfall constancy, as vehicles are sucked in to complete revolutions of this enormous plug hole.

I have recently moved to Elephant and Castle, one of London's major roundabout intersections. Staring out of the window at this cacophony of cars is compulsive and strangely hypnotic, flaring up all kinds of imagistic potential - red buses lurching like whales around shoals of nimble cyclists; vehicles thrown into and expelled from the junction as though it were a pinball game exercising its slingshot effect. And so on.

Yet on an overcast, miserly February day (such as when I write this), I can't help but deduce that this must surely rank as one of the most amazingly dreary pockets in the whole of London. A visiting friend made the canny observation that it is how he would have imagined the inner cities of Eastern Europe to look in the 1970s. Through the cloud and drizzle the terrain takes on the appearance of being some kind of colossal ashtray into which has been stubbed out huge concrete cigarettes.

Contemplating this scenery long enough I become acutely aware of the powerful psychological forces that begin to exert themselves; underpinning my psyche into the absolute urbanity of my situation. Just beyond the window, the unyielding climate of motion, activity and the very 'rat race' itself leaves me sweltering in an intensely contrasting state of repose, the accentuating of my sedition.

In tandem with this, its easy to survey from my vantage point, the dense proximity of myself to multitudes of other residents; the honeycomb apartment blocks that flank the roundabout exemplifying the strictures of our urban condition. (I feel sure there are all manner of psychological studies that hypothesise the highly-populated living conditions not being conducive to mental well-being and instead paradoxically heightening the sense of alienation.)

However, all I am minded to think about Elephant & Castle thus far is the extent to which it stands on the diving board of change. A matter of months from now the Heygate Estate - an archetypal monument to urban decay - will have been razed to the ground with the Shopping Centre swiftly following suit.

All as part of a concerted effort to emboss and embellish the entire area with the lifeblood of financialisation, an exercise in metropolitan assimilation that can be evinced all over London from Brixton to Hackney. Before long, E&C, with its prime location in terms of the City and the financial heartland, will have been driven through the car wash of gentrification, any existent community or character scrubbed away by the soap sponges of capital and property investors.

Walking through the shabby and dishevelled shopping centre, I get the feeling that the area is submerged in an anaesthetic fog just waiting for the cosmetic surgeons to hack away at the sagging breast tissue before injecting the silicone stream of property capital, young accountancy graduates and artisan cafes. When the work is done, the end result will be idealised, perfect and fake.

Inside the shopping centre, there is the standard cheap terrazzo flooring, the walls are painted with murals of pink elephants, reminiscent of the hallucinatory dancing elephants from 'Dumbo', a gloriously lysergic sequence in an otherwise innocuous Disney film. The few shops that remain are so down-at-heel that the whole place almost serves as a synecdoche of a society in which consumerism was rejected as being a waste of human energy.

Down in the subway, which stretches like atrophied roots under the roundabout topsoil, the implied threat of physical violence permeates as a tacit possibility just waiting to gestate into reality. The psychedelic ceramic tile arrangements and bizarre paintings depicting garden parties and thriving dockyards do little to assuage this ambience of unease, almost acting as a transference technique from the immediate threat felt by the area to the individual.

Surfacing in the pupil of the roundabout I feel a psychic connection to the protagonist in J.G. Ballard's novel 'Concrete Island', who finds himself stranded Crusoe-esque on a wasteground island surrounded by the ceaseless ebb and flow of urban infrastructure that remains oblivious to his plight.

Instead, the space plays host to the Michael Faraday Memorial, an ugly stainless steel wart that serves as a dubious monument to the Victorian-era scientist, justified as such since it contains an electrical substation for the Northern and Bakerloo lines. (The erroneous rumour that it was once inhabited by Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, I find far more satisfying.)

From this perspective one can observe the Strata tower, a prime example of the bland 'logo buildings' that have lanced up around London over recent years. I can no longer set eyes on it without visualising a giant Monty Python thumb descending from the clouds to depress the top section as though it were an aerosol spray can.

You are able to view the local pubs spaced apart at easy stumbling distance. The Charlie Chaplin (a place so ramshackle that the last time it was renovated must have been when its famous namesake had a film out in the cinema); the Elephant & Castle (the eponymous riding inn); and the Rockingham Arms, part of the Wetherspoons reclamation (for my money, with its plate-glass windows and dead-eyed clientele, possibly the most horrifyingly generic pub in London).

The latter pub is wedged in beneath the apartment complex which I now call home. The building was originally known as Alexander Fleming House and designed by the Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger, a Marxist who was inspired to create 'social architecture', of the kind that became synonymous with the subsequently derided Brutalist form.

Such ambitious social aims of the 1960s interweaved rather cogently with the Department of Health which adopted it as their headquarters. Standing there in the centre of the piazza the building embodies the overbearing, transparent form that would be expected from a building of the state. The clinical palette of the building is achieved by anti-septic white infused with ribbons of fluoride blue, as though a hospital corridor or a dentist's waiting room had been thrown up into its idealised structural form. Whereas, at night, the glazed bridges that act as bonds between the blocks appear like the gantries and gangways at a Cape Canaveral shuttle launch.

A glorious irony is present in the fact that this Department of Health structure was struck by the malady of 'sick building syndrome' - a situation in which occupants experience acute health and comfort affects and yet no specific illness or cause can be reliably identified. Most often these are due to flaws inherent in the heating, ventilation or air-conditioning systems.

Although, I wonder whether it might also have been the psychological disjuncture that began to seep in like a malignant damp, the occupants being faced with such persistent transitory displays from their position of perhaps complete statis? Might these office-bound civil servants filing records and other bureaucratic memoranda have been struck down by the malaise of appearing to be silo-ed in their interminable routine as the fast-moving world rolled on and on and on past them?

In any case, the building was eventually overhauled and cosmetically enhanced (in a foretelling of the fate awaiting the area as a whole), to become apartments for 'young professionals' and given the fabulously bland name Metro Central Heights that makes it sound like it should be situated in downtown Los Angeles. And certainly, as I observe the pulse of traffic pumping through the concrete aorta and off to a different limb of London, I can't help but be reminded of that auto-compulsive metropolis.

REVIEW - Andy Warhol / William Burroughs / David Lynch - Photographer's Gallery

And so to the Photographer’s Gallery on the 100th anniversary of William S. Burroughs’ birth for an exhibition of the extracurricular flirtations from a triptych of counter-cultural icons – Andy Warhol, David Lynch and Burroughs himself.

Warhol’s shots document the perfunctory and the mundane in everyday commercialised life, the solidifying of the liquid societal ‘spectacle’. By stitching together multiple identical prints he aims to emphasise the limitless replication potential of the image, the assembly line manufacture of the artistic object.

The whole raison d’etre of Warhol’s work is the inherently shallow superficiality of the image, the exploding of the ponderous cosmology of art itself to revel in the pure artifice, the surface of things. A worthy manifesto, albeit one explored to far greater effect with his artworks, and there is little here to merit renewed observation of the Warholian credo.

Burroughs, along with Joyce and Hemingway perhaps one of the most important 20th century writers, viewed photography as an extension of his cut-up techniques, coagulating images together into bizarre collages. Again though, in light of Burroughs’ exemplary prose, the exhibited photographs seem, at best, incidental, and at worst, a plangent exercise in self-indulgence. There is nothing that might purport to offer an alternate insight into Burroughs ‘the man’ or ‘the myth’. Putting it simply, the photographs elicit nothing more than dull disaffection.

The surrealist auteur David Lynch’s photographs, quite refreshingly, do at least attempt to demonstrate some measure of artistic skill. His images capture shadowy and inorganic industrial landscapes, wastelands of chuffing smoke chimneys, rusty pipework, cracked windows and abandoned factories.

Whilst many of the shots are, stylistically-speaking, well-achieved, one can’t help but feel that this is imagistic terrain that Lynch already colonised to masterful effect in ‘Eraserhead’, some 37 years ago, and hence comes across as little more than a tired exercise in nostalgia.

Not only this, but in the wake of the burgeoning ‘urban exploration’ scene and the de rigeur proliferation of what has been dubbed ‘ruin porn’, Lynch’s efforts seem uncharacteristically conformist and, one could argue, scarcely more accomplished than any undergraduate photography student.

The central problem with an exhibition of this sort is that by now, Burroughs, Warhol and Lynch have all been well-and-truly absorbed into the cultural landscape of the mainstream; any subversive or renegade cachet they undoubtedly all once embodied has been long since diluted by the wholesale packaging of their mythologies to become commodities, recycled and traded for as long as market forces dictate.

It is yet further evidence of the 21st century ‘cultural cannibalism’ syndrome, in which any tried-and-tested artistic force is endlessly regurgitated as a means of offsetting the risk of time or money investiture in anything new. My problem with an exhibition such as this – a focus on the indulgent, extracurricular activities of three figures firmly embedded in the mainstream cement of their own iconography – is that I can't help but wonder, why couldn’t new, younger artists be afforded such a valuable platform of exposure instead?

Weekly news - The rising tide of cancer / Uprisings in Bosnia

The week began with the sobering report from the World Health Organisation that global cancer cases are expected to soar by 70% over the next 20 years to 25 million new cases per annum.

More than perhaps anything else in modern life, the spectre of Cancer looms large and omniscient in the mass consciousness; an abominable evil that will almost certainly afflict everyone, whether personally or vicariously, at one or multiple points during their life.

The way it has assumed this pervasive aura of unbridled fear and loathing is, I think, a symptom of collective neurosis, previously assuaged by the Cold War-era threat of nuclear annihilation or, before that, the spread of fascism.

This is leant further psychic credence by the knowledge that cancer, in the same way as addiction, fails to discriminate; afflicting young and old, male and female, rich and poor, rendering its mitigation largely impossible. It also cannot lend nourishment to that other paranoid neurosis, the 'fear of the other', in the same way as contagions such as the plague or AIDs.

With the 20th century elevation of the medical profession to the stature of modern 'priesthood', cancer has come to represent that indomitable judgement wrought upon the congregation as penance for sins self-inflicted throughout life, symbolised now by lifestyle choices - whether you drink to excess, whether you smoke, whether you exercise, etc.

In an age where access to all and any informational knowledge is unlimited and the efficacy of science is unquestioned, the fact that a cure for cancer remains the 'great unknown' only adds to the potency of the fear it instills. Indeed, a cure for this shape-shifting affliction now assumes the form of a 'Holy Grail', the search for which is ultimately hopeless since the concept of a universal palliative is, if reports are to be believed, just as illusory.

The troubling statistic from this report needn't really be all that surprising. Firstly, there was a report recently from the Overseas Development Initiative (ODI), which stated that there are now almost twice as many obese people in poor countries as opposed to rich ones; confirming the assumption that a healthy (and therefore, hopefully cancer-free) life is far harder to sustain on a low income.

And secondly, it must also be seen in light of the many undeniable gains made in other medicinal fields in terms of treating and preventing diseases that years previously would have lain down the clammy hand of death way before cancer had a chance to unfold its languid arms.

The way I see it, cancer and its multiplicitous carcinogenic causes (of which the list appears to grow by the week), are to be viewed the same as any power body: hold them in suspicion until proven to be worthy of trust. Until something can be proven not to cause cancer, just assume that it does.

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As the protests in Ukraine inevitably fade from the news spotlight, this week violent uprisings were reported around Bosnia-Herzegovina to muted response.

In the central Bosnian city of Tuzla, some 5000 protesters stormed a local government building, whilst in Sarajevo (a city of particular historic significance this year), the presidency building was set alight.

Echoing the disaffection felt in Ukraine, Bosnians are incensed by the corruption, inefficiency and economic woes that have become intransigent since the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995 which heralded the end of the Bosnian War and was, at the time, championed by the US and others as a shining example of the virtue of international diplomacy (if only they could have learnt the lessons).

In 2014, the Bosnian middle class is said to have been decimated, unemployment is nearing 30%, and the political establishment is widely regarded as ruling in the exclusive interests of the elite few (sound familiar?)

It is news that went largely overlooked this week, and yet instead should be held up as a striking example of a disenfranchised collective taking to the streets and trying, whether it proves to be in vain or otherwise, to hold the political class to account, thereby giving them due cause to address their grievances.

Culture - January

Books read:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'
William Shirer - 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' (non-fiction)
George Orwell - 'Burmese Days'
Jean-Paul Sartre - 'Existentialism and Humanism' (non-fiction)

The last two-and-a-half months of my reading has been taken up with wading through William Shirer's mammoth tome 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' which, at 1150 pages, stands as easily the most imposing book I've ever approached.

That said, the scale of the book is easily justified by the vast weight that the subject matter imposes upon the world in which we live today, and with Shirer's insight you have just about the most engrossing and comprehensive chronicle of Nazi Germany (he was a foreign correspondent in Germany throughout much of the Reich and attended the Nuremburg Trials).

I was often completely captivated by the clear-sighted documentation of all aspects of the Third Reich; from its psychological and philosophical underpinnings through German history; to Adolf Hitler's meteoric rise from the Viennese gutters, a disaffected soldier of WWI to the embodiment of megalomaniacal Fuhrer. I was often blindsided by the level of sheer political genius that Hitler demonstrated in managing to brainwash not only the entire German nation but also most of the world to accepting and acquiescing with his twisted ideals. This is a staple historical text that, despite its intimidating heft, really should stand as essential reading for all generations.


Films watched:

'Moon' (Duncan Jones)
'The Castle' (Michael Hanake)
'Primer' (Shaun Carruth)
'Blue is the Warmest Colour' (Abdellatif Kechiche) (at the Prince Charles Cinema, London)
'12 Years a Slave' (Steve McQueen) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Harold and Maude' (Hal Ashby)
'The Third Man' (Carol Lombard)
'The Wolf of Wall Street' (Martin Scorsese) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Midnight in Paris' (Woody Allen)

I went to see 'Blue is the Warmest Colour' knowing little about it apart from that it was the '3-hour French lesbian film' that had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Perhaps it was the resonance with my own emotional state at the time, but I can scarcely think of another film I've seen that captured so accurately the exhilarating high of falling in love, and the suffocating low of subsequent loss.

The two lead actresses were completely believable, and the set-pieces fine-tuned to perfection - the heady cocktail of mutual attraction slowly diluting as the inevitable doubts and antagonisms drift to the surface.

Much has been made of the explicit and prolonged sex scenes; in particular, the actresses' lasting hostility towards director Kechiche who they accuse of exploitation. My own feeling on the matter is that, undoubtedly, the main scene could have been considerably shortened and probably others omitted entirely.

However, in my view the explicit nature of these scenes was not the result of lecherous intent, but instead served as the passionate primer for the gut-wrenching emotional torpor of the café scene in which the girls are reunited after a couple of years apart. They so nearly yield to the overwhelming physical desire that persists between them, and yet the ice of painful reality and circumstance resolutely refuses to thaw.

I just wonder whether the pivotal potency of the scene - demonstrating the heart's love held back by the mind's restraints - could have been quite so total had the earlier scenes of unbounded love been subject to those similar restraints. It is a scene of unparalleled heartache and, I admit without any shame, I found myself joining them with my tears.

This month I also went to see Steve McQueen's '12 Years a Slave' and Martin Scorsese's 'The Wolf of Wall Street'. Some might see it as specious to do so, but I actually see them as being oddly aligned in some fundamental ways.

Both are films holding a mirror up to the despicable practices that humans have inflicted upon one another; the worst facets of humanity taking centre stage - on the one hand, subjugation and barbaric cruelty, on the other, excessive greed and self-indulgence on a morally-bankrupt scale. Both are excellent films, whilst not being particularly enjoyable.

'12 Years a Slave' is necessarily tough, relentlessly so. Last month I wrote a piece about 'Come and See', a film in which the most unspeakable horrors of Nazi Germany are laid before you as an affectless tableau, with the audience being invited to literally 'come and see', and draw their own conclusions.

The only slight detraction I had with McQueen's direction, as scene after scene of sickening brutality unfolded, was that it wasn't quite affectless enough; it felt at times too well-primed for a precise and unambiguous emotional impact.

It set me wondering afterwards as to whether it was as good a film about slavery (a universally-acknowledged evil), as 'Shame' was about sex addiction (a relatively unexplored personal affliction)? It's a quandary I'm still mulling over now.

'The Wolf of Wall Street' on the other hand, layers orgiastic vice upon sickening wealth upon moral decrepitude like some awful calorific lasagne to such an exhausting 3-hour extent that by the end of it I felt like I myself had taken an overdose of Quaaludes.

It forces you to wallow in the filthy excess of it all with little-to-no remorse or redemption offered. Unlike the mafia gang in 'Goodfellas', DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort and his pals are hilarious whilst also being quite impossible to warm to on any human level.

With such an illustrious canon of films behind him as Scorsese does it's impossible not to hold anything new up to scrutiny against them; and whilst it more than punches its weight, it can't touch the likes of 'Taxi Driver', 'Raging Bull' or 'The King of Comedy'. That said, it's enough that he's still capable of producing work of this standard, that ruffles so many feathers, and long may he continue in the same vein.


Albums played:

John Grant - 'Beyond Pale Ghosts'
John Grant - 'Queen of Denmark'
Blanck Mass - 'Blanck Mass'
Mogwai - 'Rave Tapes'
I Break Horses - 'Chiaroscuro'
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - 'From Her to Eternity'
Broken Bells - 'After the disco'
Bruce Springsteen - 'High Hopes'


Theatre:

'American Psycho: The Musical' (at Almeida Theatre, Islington)

It is a curious place that Bret Easton Ellis' modern classic 'American Psycho' resides in the cultural firmament. With its all-surface-no-feeling sheen, graphic depictions of ultra-violence and long monologues on the artistic merits of Genesis and Whitney Houston; it's a work that, 23 years since its release, still startles with its immediacy and penetrating resonance.

In the internet age, where hardcore sex and violence are omnipotent and only the merest of finger-clicks away, perhaps we have all become a kind of pseudo-Patrick Bateman, the digital embodiment of the shallow abstraction he proclaims himself to be.

The morphing of the book into a stage musical seemed, at face value, to be misguided, and yet as soon as it got under way it all seemed like a perfectly logical progression. The Almeida Theatre on Islington's Upper Street is an intimate one, and the use of the tight stage was expertly choreographed, as were the numerous dance numbers that were often incredibly funny (the 'business card song' in which various font types were set to lyrics was a personal highlight).

As Bateman, Matt Smith did a creditworthy job, however, since Christian Bale gave such a consummate portrayal in the film version (so much so that I think he might actually be Patrick Bateman!), you can't help but feel Smith's performance to be anything more substantial than an accomplished and honed impersonation.

The first half was excellent, lively and fun, but once it got into the second it quickly began to flag. At the same point in the novel, the notoriously violent sequences begin stacking up, and whilst the movie was a great screen adaptation it did much to dilute many of the most excessive sequences. Limited to the physical time-and-space of the stage, the play had no option but to dilute the violence still further which caused the narrative to stagnate and veer off into the embellished side-plot of Patrick's relationship with his secretary Jean, before limping to an insubstantial conclusion.

Overall, it was well worth seeing; a valiant and brave attempt at a tough source novel, and probably did the best it could within the confines of a stage musical, which, although providing a fresh interpretation, failed to elevate the source material to a veritable stand-alone piece and instead seemed content to honour it as a persistently relevant cultural artefact.

Weekly news - Obama's State of the Union address / NHS 'care.data' scheme

The principle of paradoxical confidence is, constrasting with real confidence, the level of belief and trust we place in someone on the basis of their failure or their absence of qualities. All those prophets firmly, yet mistakenly, predicting the end of the world fall under this principle.

Six years after the 'audacity of hope' swept America to elect Barack Obama in an unprecedented blizzard of hyperbolic fervour and expectation, followed by his epiphenomenal receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, it is this principle of paradoxical confidence that perhaps best surmises people's attitudes towards the President today.

His annual State of the Union address to Congress this week was filled with all the hallmarks of Obama's presidential tenure. He is still a charismatic orator, still made proclamations regarding inequality and fairness for all; and yet in 2014 it is now sadly impossible to view him as being anything other than a media-friendly stooge wound up behind the scenes like a battery-powered toy by lobbyists, private financiers and security advisers.

His Address was engorged with the habitual platitudes and bland rhetoric that one is now almost capable of telepathically voicing along with him: 'the United States is better-positioned for the 21st century than any other nation on Earth', 'let's make this a year of action', and (my particular favourite bit of whimsical plumage) 'through hard work and responsibility we can pursue our individual dreams, but still come together as one American family to make sure the next generation can pursue its dreams as well'.

The thing is, I don't doubt Obama's sincerity, and I understand the fact of his near-total Congressional hobbling at Republican hands. But this cannot excuse absolutely the many issues over which has abjectly failed. He campaigned on the promise to close Guantanamo Bay (it is still open and operational); he campaigned championing the cause of whistleblowers (he has overseen more whistleblower prosecutions than the sum total of all past Presidents); his Obamacare website roll-out was a shambolic failure that has resulted in a widespread loss of civilian confidence in the inherent benefits it may well offer them; he made a pledge to tackle head-on America's arcane gun laws after the Newtown massacre (when was the last time you heard anything about that?); his environmental record is negligible save from promoting the US's oil and gas self-sufficiency. Not to mention his perpetuating stance on America's foreign wars, numerous drone attacks on those residing on his personal 'kill list', and continuing to stand by the NSA's colossal spying programme, doing little more than attempting to mollify the public with reformist vagaries.

What all of these poor performance indicators demonstrate is less a measure of Obama in and of themselves, but emphasise the desperate need for some kind of electro-convulsive shock therapy to be administered to the somnolent body of American politics. The fact that you have to be saddled with a President as artificial and insubstantial as Obama for two terms only because he is easily preferable to the oleaginous salesman Mitt Romney, is a stark indictment of America's democratic system as a whole, wherein any semblance of political power is a front for the market capitalist and big business lobbyists that paid to put them in office in the first place.

One modicum of hope may lie in the fact that Obama seemed to suggest he would use his presidential veto to enact some of his policy proposals, in the process trying to haul his current non-legacy out of the dustbin of disappointment. But then, such hope is surely just another stab of paradoxical confidence?

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This week I became aware of new plans that, so far, seem to be rumbling on with very little in the way of media attention. A new NHS scheme 'care.data' aims to expand the mass accumulation of patients' medical information under the auspices of being able to efficiently react and plan for advanced scientific research and projections through having a nationwide overview of every civilians' medical files.

Once again, we can read this as being another far-reaching invasion of privacy, just like the NSA and GCHQ, in which colossal quotas of information are trawled up in the state's dragnet under the promise that 'don't worry, this is good for you' as though it were some kind of harmless vaccination. In actual fact, the possible ramifications are manifold, nefarious and, in this particular instance, represent another flagrant attempt at commercialised amputation of the NHS anatomy on the part of the Tories.

For a start, the claims on patient anonymity are vague at best; what would be the impact if all or any of this data were to be hacked?; and what if, slowly but surely, the whole exercise became a mass marketing exercise for drug companies and insurance firms (something, incidentally, that the architects of this scheme have made no effort to officially rule out)?

My feeling is that before long we will all no longer care anymore; our notions of privacy in this increasingly online digital world are steadily eroding away to the point where the instinct to safeguard our personal information may not even be manifest anymore. A friend of mine thinks it will go the other way and younger generations will all become more security conscious and responsible. I have a feeling that it will firmly lean one way or the other, there won't be a middle ground.

Having recently been reading Anarchist theories (hello to you all at GCHQ), I was struck by one theory of Saint Simon: 'the time will come when the art of governing men will disappear. A new art will take its place, the art of administering things'. Perhaps, governing power will eventually fade into the background to be replaced by the power and influence of 'big data', the constant accumulation of everything that can possibly be known about everyone, because then it will be known exactly what we all really want and need.