Gov-mum Neurosis.

Remember those awkward years of ’Mother knows best’ before you finally told her to sling her hook? It’s just the natural hand over of power to the next generation as you shakily plant your flag on the new, barely known territory of your own life. It doesn’t always happen though. Some mothers cling onto the upper hand and continue guiding, shaping, protecting, supporting and generally knowing best. It’s then a neurosis occurs; the unconscious knows this isn’t ‘my territory’ and can’t build on it, while the conscious builds flights of fancy, negotiating fallacies of safety and comfort as if they were your own. It takes the belligerence and tenacity of a chick in its shell to crack open what is protecting it to get to the rude, real world. And so to the forthcoming election of our new government ‘mother.’ Everything our gov-mum touches institutionalises this neurosis as it tries to guide, protect, support and shape our society. It’s hard for David and Gordon to believe we have the wherewithal to shape our own destiny without their constant intervention. How can teachers teach without directives? How can hospitals be efficient without targets? How can the public survive the slings and arrows without the protection of paedophile laws, CRB checks and speed cameras? As a society we do what mother says and keep our secret thoughts, aspirations and energies to ourselves. She wants us to be enthusiastic, educated and energetic but blocks our desire to follow our own growth at every turn. Our talents are killed in the regulation she has invented to protect us. Just like a protective parent gov-mum won’t tell us the truths we ‘can’t cope with’, won’t allow us entry to the adult world; the foster children of a perpetual divorce haggled over by parents of left and right, neither of which will crack their façade of adulthood and let us grow up. As a result we are in the constant turmoil of ludicrous strictures and rules, becoming ill and demoralised, devoid of initiative. So remember, when David asks us to help him run the country all he’s really saying is, “Put your cross in the blue box and fuck off.”