What I Would Write About In 10 Titles If Only …

… the powers that be would make it worth my while

The best things in life are free.

But you can give them to the birds and bees.

I want money.

So go the lyrics of Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford’s oft-copied classic, Money (That’s What I Want).

I Want Money!! Nah, not really, well, just a little. Enough to make being a writer a viable use of my time. Enough to know in the most tangible of terms that I’m moving forward. Enough to feel like my most serious and substantive pieces, my 10-minute political specials, that demand oh so much time and energy, are being fairly recompensed.

And let’s call a spade a spade and play the ball exactly as it lies: five to ten bucks just don’t cut it when it takes days to write, do the research, and compose my arguments for these kinds of pieces.

You may say; ‘well, make them shorter, do less research, use fewer hyperlinks, write in plainer English, spend less time laying out your polishing your points and laying out your positions and arguments.’

And I would either give you the short answer; ‘no, I’ll do what I want; do what thou wilt.’

Or the long one; ‘no, these pieces are meant for the world beyond this platform. They are a showcase of what I think, where I stand, and what I can do. More to the point, to write about serious issues and not do due research and back up my positions with fact and argumentation would be a serious dereliction of duty and would not at all sit well with me.’

Nope, the Big M needs to get its big fat cheque book out and put its moolah where its mouth is.

Accordingly, the following are 10 articles I would publish, and may yet, were there to be a decent chance of a fair return on my investment; and no one should need to trust to the fickle and fleeting attention of a boost.

I have no illusions that I’ve stumbled on gold dust with my titles, but nor do I think they’re wholly without merit, hence the following titles are copyright of Harold De Gauche, and I may not give the full heading for one or two.

© Harold De Gauche 2024

1. The death of customer service

Pretty self-explanatory. This one’s been brewing for a while owing to the unrelenting ever-repeating shit show that service has become.

The customer is no longer king; the customer is no longer always right. Now we’re peons and almost always wrong. We’re cattle that need to be cattle-prodded into submission and stupefaction, who know neither what they’re talking about nor what’s best for us.

If you think something’s wrong, you’re right, it’s you and your opinion.

If you’re not happy, go use another company.

And if you want to complain, you’re completely free to take your chances with the million-mile maze of teleservice and social media, where you will spin around for eternity.

Absolute bollocks!

2. A Hegelian reading of the Russian position

This will be the Hegelian dialectic applied to the fate of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia tried to go towards the West; it was not accepted as a friend. It tried to go toward the East; it became an enemy of the West. Thus, the only option left was for history to repeat itself with the hope that this would generate a meaningful resolution to allow Russia and the West to evolve beyond their death embrace.

This piece will be an examination of Russia’s failed transcendence, what could have been done to prevent it, and what has to come next if we are to move beyond this cycle.

3. Rory Gallagher — the greatest blues guitarist of all time, probably

Well, variety is the spice of life, and so, I’m something of a poprygunya as can be said in Russian, which carries several connotations but can be understood as someone who jumps around, from this to that, this way and that, and back again; as regards to my themes and topics here.

Rory Gallagher was Ireland’s first rock star and one of the best blues/rock guitarists of all time. Never has a person more aptly been called a triple threat: singer, songwriter, and of course guitarist. Let me tell you about it in an article.

4. If gender is solely a social construct, then why do you need a sex change exactly?

Given the times, I have a fair suspicion that this one wouldn’t be permitted to stand on the Big M. I also think, and kind of hope, that the woke army will come for this one with all their bile and venom, ripping me apart for daring to question their logic and ideology.

I see gender as partly a social construct and partly a physical and physiological truth. Both extremes are just that, extreme; both the religio-traditional and the radical woke viewpoint. To wholly discount either the physical or the social is both dumb and dangerous. Somewhere in the middle is the only natural position for the sane, serious, and sensible person.

But if you do believe the physical means naught, then why pay it any mind whatsoever?

This piece will be my thoughts on what seems to be a fundamental paradox.

5. Power and Legitimacy — The Twin Towers of …

There are two central forces atop which political orders must stand: power and legitimacy. This is true for domestic politics and for within single states and societies.

It is all the more true for international political society, where multiple nations vie for dominance and fight to protect their interests, where countries work both with and against each other, where no single set of values is universally agreed upon and nations often diverge on first-order principles, and where the lines of power and legitimacy are forever being contested and redrawn.

Power without legitimacy runs the risk that every disagreement will turn into a confrontation with battle lines drawn.

Legitimacy without power excites the spirit of moral indignation at every turn, and, simultaneously, makes words seem empty and devoid of substance; these two inclinations stir up trouble where it doesn’t need to arise and invite challenges.

Neither of these arrangements bode well for international order and stability; neither is likely to perdure indefinitely.

Pax Americana is suffering on both fronts.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has demonstrated the power of the USA, economically, logistically, and in terms of soft power, but it has also demonstrated its powerlessness; outside of Europe (which is itself not in full agreement) and North America, most countries are ambivalent at best about the US-led-West’s role in provoking the war, in prolonging it, and in preventing peace talks to end it.

Israel’s ever-escalating brutalisation of Gaza and the USA’s continuing support for its ally may be the straw that broke the camel’s back apropos any shred of remaining legitimacy. Its seemingly never-ending wars across the Middle East have severely damaged the Liberal Order’s legitimacy and moral credibility; the ongoing massacre in Gaza and Palestine has not only killed some 25,000 people, 8,000 of them children, but it has likely killed its legitimacy as an order.

6. Jimi Hendrix — the greatest musical genius of the twentieth century?

There are many ‘greatest musical geniuses of the twentieth century’, but ‘one of the …’ sounds a bit lame and a bit limp, hence my title.

Hendrix was a virtuoso guitarist who fundamentally altered the electric guitar. In electric guitar, there is BH and AH — Before Hendrix and After Hendrix. Yet, he was much more than this. To my mind, he was a genius composer of music above all else; a Beethoven or Mozart of the twentieth century.

He was the first musician whose music I ever fell truly and madly in love with, and that love burns just as true and as mad to the present day. This is a piece detailing just why I think he is one of music’s great geniuses and just what his music means to me.

7. Pronouns over … — the messed up values of the woke left

Despite being more or less a traditional leftie, I am often more flummoxed and frustrated by the ever-continuing ever-intensifying metastasis of wokeism; the cancer that festers at the heart of left-wing politics.

Things like poverty, imperialism, war, and socioeconomic equality used to be concerns of the first order for the left. Now we have who should and shouldn’t use which toilet, the aggressive and never-tiring transmogrification of language, and the never-ceasing crusade to identify privilege and inequitable power relations.

There was much good in what the woke movement started out as; Black people, People of Colour, Indigenous peoples, and many minorities suffer far more than white people in countries right across the West. Until radical white liberals and some deluded Black academics infected it from top to bottom with stark raving mad lunacy.

And now we have wokeism: wickedly indulgent, wildly intransigent, often doggedly undemocratic, and deeply allergic to dialogue, discussion, and the dying art of dialectics.

I have written about this before, but there’s far more that needs to be said.

8. Truth surrounded — my truth/post-truth

I include this in my 7 Deadly Sins of Modern Civilisation7, and it represents a foundational assault on the universals which sustain different civilisations and human civilisation as a whole, and, at the same time, a foundational assault on objectivity and fact.

We are all trapped in our heads to some degree. We are all anomic and alone in many ways. We are all half comprised of the subjective which stems from our own unique experiences and interactions.

Fact, objectivity, and universal truth are born of that which we share, that which we have learned together, and that which we have dug out from the world to help us feel more at home in it. There is a component of this that is ‘imposed’ upon us and some element of power that is always at play, but much of this is humans teaching humans how to be human.

The phenomenon of post-truth canonises the subjective and solipsist in us at the expense of the objective and universal. There is nothing to prevent anyone and everyone from saying, ‘Well, all that means nothing to me; I will decide for myself what I want to be true.’ When the subjective self is the sole arbiter of its own reality, nothing beyond it really matters.

The phenomenon of my-truth-your-truth does much the same in a different way.

One is a radical species of solipsism.

One is a radical species of self-ascribed essentialism.

The two together stand as threats to the first order of thought, science, and society.

9. Henry Kissinger — thoughts on a great man with a great deal of blood on his hands

Kissinger was a dangerously sharp and shrewd man. He knew how to play the game from within and how to understand it from without. Few are the people who understand the tectonics of world politics better than Henry Kissinger.

A testament to his perspicacity and intellect is the reverence that both China and Russia hold for the man. Enjoying the respect of one’s enemies is a sign of something deep and meaningful.

Kissinger was a great man, yet he was not a good man. He left behind him a legacy of barbary and a litany of unconscionable acts committed against his fellow man and woman, most often against the poorest and most vulnerable of peoples and states.

This is my examination of Henry Kissinger.

10. Warmongers VS Hatemongers — the worst choice in American history

An ultra-aggressive strain of liberalism holds dominance in the Democratic Party. The Republican Party is also infected with this deadly ideology, but it is less all-pervasive and countered Trumpism. I call it megaloliberalism.

Liberal democracy, with its rights and protections, its openness, fairness, and irrevocability, has a great many advantages, when it works as intended. Notwithstanding, it is a system for managing domestic politics, and not for shaping world order.

Megaloliberalism desires to impose this system upon the whole world, with the US as judge, jury, and executioner.

It sees the spread of liberalism as coterminous with the spread of peace and prosperity, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Thus, it justifies all war in its own style as good for the whole of humankind; it matters not that some humans fail to comprehend this.

Megaloliberalism is morally absolute and can neither tolerate rival interpretations of order nor budge or bend to accommodate other worldviews.

This hyper strain of liberalism is making World War 3 all the more likely for the reason that we are in a multipolar political ecosystem as things stand at present: moral absolutism and rampant expansionism will eventually lead to massive confrontation within a multipolar political ecosystem.

Megaloliberalism is more dangerous for the world.

Across the hall, we have the hatemongers. Trumpism has gained massive ascendency within the Republican Party and the allure of short-term gains at the expense of long-term disintegration has meant that many in the party are fully on board with it.

Trumpism is a virulent populist phage that allows for no constraints on what it will and won’t do and say. It trades in the currency of hate, and the more you hate it, the more powerful it grows. It will promise anything to anyone if it is expedient to its ends, before breaking that very promise tomorrow, even to its own supporters.

It will tell you it will make America great again, but all evidence points to a deeply entrenched unwillingness to do anything about Wall Street, the megarich, and big business, and an almost fetishistic desire to torture the weak and vulnerable.

It is a slave to the subjective, and so denies the most singular and important fact of our age — climate change.

In the hands and head of Trumpism truth becomes an ever-revolving door that spits out whatever form of hate suits the moment; nothing matters beyond this; not fact, not objectivity, not morality, not history.

Trumpism and radical post-truth populism are more dangerous for America and the planet.