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And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

I often recall those lovely lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, from when I first met them in school more years ago than I care to admit. One such occasion was when the late Queen Elizabeth was forced to meet Liz Truss, her new Prime Minister, even though the Queen was obviously very frail and very obviously on her last legs. As her late husband, the love of her life, said about her, as long as it ate oats and farted, it had a friend in Queen Elizabeth, whose charmed existence could be easily shoehorned into The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith‘s gentle remembrance about bucolic life during Ireland’s Penal Laws apartheid era, which greatly benefited him.

Tennyson’s lines also crossed my mind on Saturday 29th June when the funeral took place of former GAA sports commentator, 93 year old Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who was described as being like “a grandfather to the [Irish] nation”; his funeral took place at the same time as Taylor Swift was ”playing” to a packed Aviva Stadium, to fans, who had flown in to Dublin from far away California and Guatemala to catch a glimpse of their PVC bedecked Messiah.

Although Taylor Swift may have talent, because her audience is primarily of young girls just reaching puberty, grumpy old men like me should not go within a country mile of her, or of them. All very well for me to say, but Sir Keir Starmer and other war mongers have to pretend to be inspired by her to appear to be relevant to younger voters.

Because Swift has such a huge audience, barnacles like Starmer and Genocide Joe must latch on to her. That is why, at the start of NATO’s Ukrainian war, the White House ordered all America’s leading tiktokers and snapchatters to back Team Genocide. Although these SCF articles here and here drew attention to this War of the Ages, it is one most of us are largely ignorant of because the past, which defined us, marches to a far different drum than Taylor Swift’s groupies gyrate to.

Because the past is a foreign country, so too is our interpretation of it, and its receding relevance to today’s world. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa‘s The Leopard might have said, had he spoken French, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. At one level, the only material difference seems to be that those, like Starmer and Mr Sloppy Pants, who wish to lord over us, have swapped the Elmer Gantrys of old for Taylor Swift and the Pussy Riot and Femen cultural mercenaries of today.

We now have, in essence, a range of influencers, from Kamila Valieva and Shaman on the one side, right across to talentless yokels like Zelensky, Femen and Pussy Riot on the other, with Taylor Swift and gaggles of lesser mortals popping up like Dublin Bay seals somewhere in between. Because Zelensky is a middle aged cross dresser, no one in their right minds would give him a second thought, unless the CIA had first scrambled their antennae beyond repair.

That is where Norman Lebrecht and similar termites enter the picture. The CIA’s job is to methodically groom our children and grandchildren, so their thought processes end up as colonised as those of the man on the Clapham omnibus in George Orwell’s 1984. One only has to look at the freak shows, who compete in the Eurovision Song Contest or these flaccid American global music diplomats to see the relevance of this.

Although America has a great musical tradition, those knock off Charlie Chaplin clowns do not reflect it. Rather, they are evangelists for a plastic world order, the script for which was not written in Nashville, but within the deep state bowels of corporate America, which wants a global market, where plastic products like Taylor Swift, along with their pre-packaged messages delivered via Zelensky, Femen and Pussy Riot, subvert the cultural landscape.

One of the noteworthy features of Taylor Swift and one she shares with Madonna of the Medusa facelifts is there is no interaction with the audience. Although that is a feature they share with the transient teenage stars of J-pop and K-pop, those east Asians are not trying to evangelise or brainwash us, or to muscle everything else out from our common space.

But that is precisely what the CIA and its little helpers do. Consider again Mossad’s North London freaks, who report on the entire Kiev (Kyiv?) symphony orchestra settling in Munich of beer hall infamy. Although Ukrainian military intelligence is correct to remark that some Russian trolls are making hay on how these draft dodgers are thereby dodging Russian bullets, it seems to be one law and a guaranteed future life for Nazi orchestral players, footballers and Olympians, and a Russian bullet through the heart for those Ukrainians lacking friends in high places. In that connection, it would be interesting to know how many of those fortunate ones are from ethnic minorities and how many of them are, on the surface at least, full-on Reinhard Heydrichs.

Though I am happy for all of those Ukrainians, Heydrichs and humans alike ,who have dodged an early grave by one ruse or another, the inescapable fact is others less fortunate will continue to fill the body bags until the fraudulent Messiah Zelensky has his wings clipped. Though I dearly wish that influencers like Taylor Swift would denounce that g string wearing anti Christ from her vast pulpet, I know she would be quickly muted in the same manner that the Dixie Chicks were for denouncing NATO’s Iraqi genocide.

The past is, indeed, a different country as other norms, such as a respect for talent, used to pertain within the Pale of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. But because my own roots were planted far from Goldsmith’s over-groomed Pale plantation, we have this perennial struggle between aspiring artist and aspiring jailer.

And, though the past is forever gone, Lebrecht and his heavies are there to ensure the best amongst us are never allowed to quite rise above it. Take far-famed Russian violinist Daniel Garlitsky, son of far-famed concert master Boris Garlitsky, son of far-famed violinist (and founder of the step by step violin method) Mikhail Garlitsky. Imagine the panoramas they and thousands of Russians like them could release, if Lebrecht, Heydrich and Pussy Riot were not on their case.

Though King Arthur was correct to state that the old order must make way for the new, he never envisaged the corroding barnacles of Lebrecht, Pussy Riot, Femen or Zelensky as celestial elixirs, no more than God imagined the serpent in the Garden of Eden was the hero of Genesis.

All of us, from the late Queen Elizabeth to today’s martyrs of Russia and Ukraine, long for our own version of Goldsmith’s bucolic Deserted Village, our own Garden of Eden idyll, much as Dvořák, Sibelius and Stravinsky painted it. Unrealistic though that may be, and however grating Taylor Swift and the other follies of today’s teeny boppers may be, the hope has to be that NATO’s Femens, Pussy Riots, Sir Keir Starmers, Mr Sloppy Pants and Kiev/Kyiv Phils in convenient exile will give it, and us, a rest from their social, cultural, visual and auditory pollution, so more of us may live to enjoy the present, reminisce on the past and look eagerly forward to the morrow.

This is not a call to join John and Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band in singing give peace in Vietnam a chance and nor is it a plan to go to San Francisco and wear flowers in my non existent hair, or to go back to 1963’s march on Washington and sing We shall Overcome with Joan Baez. And it is certainly not a call to sing that same song of freedom in Dublin with that Barak Obama worshipping Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen fraud.

If anything, it is to join in with the Beatles and wish for, if not sing, All you need is love, a song arguably goofier than Taylor Swift’s oeuvre, but one, like peace itself, that NATO deny to so many.

Simple as that song is, it sent out a message of love to an audience of some 400 million, when it first aired in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam genocide. And, though the Beatles, Joan Baez and Roger Waters may or may not transcend the generations, it is important that, as Lincoln described it in his first inaugural address, the better angels of our nature, do.

Come January, a new Yankee President, perhaps another Republican, will be making his inaugural address, perhaps heralding that NATO intend to turn its guns on China rather than Russia, and that the vultures, who profit off NATO’s wars, should up sticks from Russia’s Western Borderlands and fly once more to their abattoirs in South East Asia. And, if they do, perhaps Taylor Swift or some other hot ticket will jet off there to entertain them in between newer turkey shoots that are just hi-tech reruns of those the Yanks committed there when John and Yoko sang their silly song.

Perhaps Taylor Swift will, as Psalm 96:1 says, sing a new song unto the Lord. Who is to know? What we do know is this: no matter who wins the plethora of NATO’s pending elections and no matter who gets to occupy the White House in 2025, NATO’s killing machine will continue to murder the innocent in Asia, if not in Ukraine. Whatever about Taylor Swift, as regards NATO’s lust for blood, Ecclesiastes is so very right: there is, alas, nothing new under the sun no matter whether we listen to Joan Baez, the Beatles, John and Yoko or Taylor Swift. There will always be too much money to be made in NATO slaughtering people and all the tone deaf Taylor Swifts and Bruce Springsteens in the world will never drown out that sad fact.