Dreams are made not to come true

Last night I did as usual, picked up a book for a read as I drifted off into my slumbers. However, I put down my Philip Kerr novel and took a book of ‘fairy tales’ from the shelf. I have a whole shelf with a wide range of that genre of fiction from Hans Andersen, the Grimms, through Charles Kingsley, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling to J.R.R. Tolkien. I chose Peter Christen Asbjørnsen’s Norske Folkeeventyr, East of the Sun and West of the Moon. I began to quickly realise the metaphors within those tales still hold good today. Then something clicked in my head. Some of them are just like politics.


One important part of politics is that there are opposing forces, often good and evil, in politics there are opposing parties. Many of the folk stories are about agreements, deals or promises that are broken which sounds like the words of politicians before elections and once in office. There is often but not always a happy ending, indeed many of them actually end with the ‘bad guy’ being dealt with consequently, just like the politician who has made many promises voted out of office. Suddenly fairy tales became an allegory for what is happening around us, for instance the king who is ever present but does not do much is a bit like the president. The wicked fairies, well we know their names don’t we: Royal, Aubry, Morano, Trierweiler and a bevy of others and the really bad guys, Le Pen, Strauss-Kahn, again an endless list. There are the corrupt, the misers, the enchanters and the ‘shapeless’. It is all there.


I thought about the parable we are living in until recently where the king married the fairy tale fairy and magically changed her from an Italian to a good patriotic French woman with a wave of his magic wand. Now a slumbering king reigns over a kingdom where enchantment is lost and all seems to tell a tale of the conflict of good and evil in his palace. I think I should move on to Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment very quickly in order to improve my means of analysing politics. So everybody, once up a time there was a…

Oh my Dog! Jospin, sort of a Swan Lake ballet dancing one with his political career.

Gut, das tue ich - High German or good, that's what I'll do - or roughly speaking in real English, 'yeah mate, doin' it'

If we collected all "THE UGLY SISTERS" of banking, media and politics together

the prince charmings would look lost and alone.

Outnumbered.

Are there any prine charmings left?????

jut, ditte mache icke!

Dr. Timothy Leary, rather than Marcel for me. Of course I am concentrating on Thomas and Heinrich Mann right now, especially the latter's Professor Unrat, wherein not so much Lola Lola as Unrat himself will give me my Merkel characterisation. I gave up on Goethe, apart from being asleep a couple of paragraphs in, I find most of his characters either too romantic or morose for the big production.

Jane, Delphine Batho is most people's princess but for the life of me I cannot put my hand on my heart and say I see a prince, let alone anybody capable of rescues, in the present French government. Perhpas Cate or Johnny can assist there.

And the handsome prince will fight his way through the entanglement of thorns and "cuts" his way to free the princess!

Yesterday I thought I would throw a glance into Bettelheim and by jingo, it is written to reveal the true content of the stories - so unlike policies to begin with. Whoever knows what they mean and was lies underneath their surface? Psychoanalysis and politics do not mix, the former reveals what is behind the other and uses the words ego and id very often. In the case of ego, in politics it cannot be used often enough.

Oh Johnny please, I just adore wicked stepmothers... As for those who lurk (most of the present regime) in the grey shadows (which confirms why they lurk) will the enchantment ever break? But see, there is true retribution, the good fairies visited the old king's palace today and what spells did they find there I wonder?

Just nat the mement boys and girls...sitting comfortably....THERE seem to be too many

bad boys breaking their promises and causing a lot of trouble.

Falling off their beanstalks and chasing glass slipers.

Note well, that I managed to persuade myself to write 'bad guys' instead of 'ogres'. Looking at fairy tales I have noticed at the end of the day ogres can be quite sensitive, the guys I mention are not.

Wonderful, I'm not going to develop your theme as it is yours. I simply want to say that that is one of the more thought provoking articles I've read in a long while and so beautifully written.

I was nearly asleep sucking my thumb.