16 May 2004
Realpolitik
'an injunction not to allow wishful thinking or sentimentality to cloud one's judgement'.
After a week of conferences (abstraction, dialectics, politics, history, value-form, psychoanalysis, literature, disappointment, enlightenment, music, art, theology, religion, nature and weetabix), I'm off to listen to some Beethoven (the Missa Solemnis) at the RFH. Hopefully no one has taken Ballard's proclamations from 'Millennium People' too seriously, so it won't get blown to bits by middle-class anarchists. (Why does one always get the feeling that's it's not a good idea to write things like that? See, they're breeding a culture of fear, I tell you. How else to explain Casualty's primetime slot or Jack Straw's mouth).
Anyway, have some pandas. I don't believe in realpolitik at all. But I do believe in making friends again with people you've made cross. Nietzsche would not be very proud of me, I suspect. But, you know, remember what happened with the horse....I suspect that he would feel the same way about the pandas if the carriage they were pulling broke and they scraped their furry knees.
