Sunday, May 07, 2006

A Prophet Is Never Accepted In His Own Land


I don't know who said that originally, but it sounds English.
Who can name an English prophet who was accepted? Without being a fraud, that is?
Or even the fraudulent ones?
The only English prophets I can think of hail from the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries; nobody from the 20th or 21st who has not first been recognised somewhere else; and then eagerly appropriated by the ignorant who want to pretend that they were human all along.
Even Winston Churchill was rejected in England, while being accepted, permanently, in the USA and by the Nobel Committee.

It is the fashion of this country to stamp on every talent so that it never becomes serious, which is to say, a 'threat';science is tolerated as long as it is useless science.
Every other sort is appropriated and eaten by the needy of the mind, to keep their gardens green and their roasts in the Sunday oven.
And the producers are forgotten.

How different from the Armstrongs and Stevensons and Brunels.
We don't want to see their like again do we?
What's that?
What about the modern icons?
Trevor Bayliss?Dyson?Richard Branson?
These saints of modern day 'industry' have usually invented trivially and meanly, with the exception of the (rejected) hero Dyson, who invented something which all the dozy bums of the status quo have tried to imitate, undercut, or generally appropriate in a fit of shame-faced yet shameless admission(yeah, of course it works, we thought of cyclonic vacuum ages ago).

They all want a piece of him.

Last year he moved his factory overseas.
Trevor Bayliss is trotted out weekly as an 'authority'.
He invented the clockwork radio.
Wow.
Revolutionary.Now we can programme people who don't even have power!Hero!

Branson?Well done on making all that money. But I fear that he is now somewhat cozy with the powers that be, the powers that never helped before and won't help now.

The chameleon of the status quo innovates frequently; it changes the names of its new best friends every generation or so, keeping them under control and forgettable.

Ever wonder what happened to Sinclair?
Do you even know who he was?

I'll tell you: just another temporary ally, used then thrown aside by the society he revolutionised.

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