I've just started reading Tom Paulin's 1992 book "Minotaur : Poetry and the Nation State", which explores the nature of government through the symbolism of the "bull-man" and other poetic imagery, from John Milton to Peter Reading. The Minotaur is widely regarded as a metaphor of political oppression, a theme which Tom Paulin - whose hinterland lies in Northern Ireland, and who has a deep interest in the Israeli-Palestinian relations - is keen to expound. Incidentally, he (Paulin) might make a very good Oxford Professor of Poetry.
On a lighter note, I very much enjoyed a BBC Radio 4 "From Fact to Fiction" programme the other day, which dexterously wove together medieval animal tale and modern political fable in the story of a "Parliament of Rooks". Here the common rooks dispatch their political brethren, led by a David Cameron-like twitterer, whose nests that have grown overly-well feathered, from the rookery. The piece owed its inspiration to Chaucer, one of my favourite poets, whose work dances along as merrily to the music of the spheres as it does to lower vibrations.
Returning to the present, it seems to me that we (the citizens of Merry England) are now witness to an uneasy dance between The Minotaur (in an overly-powerful, but deeply wounded body politic) and a media-induced frenzy of "Big Brother" "vote-'em-out-of-the-house" popularism. Let's hope this doesn't lead us back to another kind of "Big Brother" : the Orwellian kind. I have to say that the prospect of Comrade Balls taking over the reins of Chancellor of the Exchequer makes me deeply uneasy, indeed rather queasy.
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