A Cathedral of Onions (2)

Emphysema update: I mentioned early in this blog that I was turning into a barrel (come to think of it, I may have sent that post to the Draft Limbo). If you can recall John Hurt from the first Alien, you'll know what a "chestburster" is. Well, when you have this, your lungs are the chestburster. The interesting part is what happens to your arms. They sort of slide outwards to accommodate, rather neatly considering: there are various frictions and creakings, but on the whole, the bones cope rather well, or have done so far. Sleeping is a bit of a problem, and has to be accomplished via a strategic arrangement of pillows. The main thing about having only a tiny, residual lung capacity is it forces you to avoid anything that might raise adrenaline levels or pulse rate. Also, your thinking becomes woollier by the day, due to long term oxygen depletion. Whole branches of logic become closed to you, and you have to keep going largely on random associations of ideas. That's why, lately, I'm keen to get things down. Time is running out on my capacity to make sense, or to pursue an idea even halfway to its reductio.

I mention this because I don't know how much longer I can put myself through all this Guardian reading. (My stalking horse in the old blog used to be El Telegrafo, but that was easy by comparison.) Guardian columnists don't usually send my adrenaline through the roof, but they do, routinely, force it up to slightly uncomfortable levels: it's getting to the point where I keep having to jerk myself out of paranoid ideations along the lines that Guardian columns are written by machines programmed to make readers seethe with annoyance and thus distract them from the Illuminati's plan to replace all democratically elected politicians with fetchingly attired and coiffed earwigs. Honestly, since leaving university I don't think I've ever met a single real human being even one tenth as obnoxious as your average Guardian columnist: if they really aren't dastardly collections of ire-provoking algorithms written by moustache-twirling Skinnerians, then I can''t for the life of me figure out how they manage to be so reliably repulsive. Are they like this in daily life, and if so, how does anyone put up with them? Here, for example, is an article from today's edition:

If paying for sex is wrong in Haiti, why do we still tolerate it in the UK?

Oxygen-depleted as I am, I can remember a time when a title like this would have been considered Pythonesque, or at least transparently satirical, in its implication that Haiti ought to be regarded as some sort of model regime whose legal system plainly represents an ideal to aspire towards. I wonder if Ms Bennett would see anything at all wrong with the following:

If Haitians can get by on $480 a year, then why can't we?

No, I don't suppose she would. Anyway, I'm not going to launch into a critique of the article, on the assumption that anyone foolhardy enough to end up reading this blog will nevertheless be sane enough to understand that paying for sex isn't "wrong" anywhere, that a simple recognition of prostitution as a legitimate and respectable profession is all that's needed to ensure the sort of workers' protections whose current absence leads to the abuses she claims to care about, and that Ms Bennett's express desire to exercise control over women's bodies and push them into the murky back streets simply to get at men places her in the same spiritual or psychological camp as the anti abortion crowd, only with less in the way of rational justification. Ultimately, the arguments here aren't really the point, at least not for me, not any more: unless someone starts reading me, I can't be doing, at this stage, with all the polemics, which are perhaps a younger and certainly a healthier man's game. No, what exercises my mind is, as stated, the conundrum of how some people can get to be so horrible, so authoritarian, so intolerant, so illiberal, so thoroughly and depressingly nasty.

I don't have a ready answer to this, but as long as I am forced to stay alive (why is death taking so long? what's the matter with it?) I intend to keep worrying around the question. Meantime, and in explanation of the title of this pathetic, go-nowhere post: Cathedral refers to this, and onion, well, perhaps Lennon's glass one (was there ever anything so astringently spiritual as the White Album?) but mostly, just another alternative approach to my basso ostinato theme that people are all individuals, but that individuals are, in turn, dividual, which is to say, they have layers, and until you get that they have layers you are in communicational terms, a terrorist, which is what Ms Bennett self-evidently is. And if I don't take this further it's because, right now, I need sleep, I need distraction, I need to get out of this downward slide somehow. Let's hope the rain starts up again.