Re-birthing Politics.

BBC Radio 4’s program, ‘Medical Matters: The First 1,000 Days’ suggests modern medicine may be fifty years too late. It suggests many of our middle age ailments are seeded in our first 1000 days after conception. That’s to say our high tech preventative medicine is like treating you for nearing the end of the line in Barrow-in-Furnace when you could have bought a ticket to sunny Bognor Regis in the first place, like locking the stable door after the embryonic foal has long since leapt the paddock fence and is now living in Kansas with type two diabetes and a bone disease. With this grand misplacement of effort in mind we attended a party last night with lovely people of a political nature. As we left the debate was about Israel, Iran and N Korea, and the rights and wrongs of having nuclear weapons. I was all set to interject with a reasoning that would have only led to bewilderment when Mothermouse nudged us homeward for Match of the Day. The debate hinged on three unspoken principles, that right wing means ‘lying fascist bastards’, democracy means ‘good’ and ‘it’s only OK for friends to have big sticks’. Stripped of political rhetoric it’s a playground fight. In my, ‘if you want to get to there I wouldn’t start from here’ frame of mind politics seemed to be suffering from the same ‘grand misplacement of effort’ that the BBC’s medical program suggested, that it’s simply a playground fight organised by the protagonists, that politicians are essentially reactionists. But to avoid accusations of vacuous smugness I must suggest an alternative. Erm. Well Reactionists say, “If you do that then I’ll do this”, whereas, for want of a better term, designer-ists say, “How can I/we create what I/we want?” and therap-ists say, “How does that feel?” Maybe re-birthing politics could be strangely similar to the medical example; not how can we react to what was put in place fifty years ago,  but how can we give a healthy birth to a trouble free adult now?