Author: MKW Publishing

Who’s Got The Biggest…

~ MKW Publishing ~ 2 Comments

It’s an odd thing to view certain men in in the public eye and what they put forward as ‘being a man’, seeing how society paints a portrait of what this should be. Reinforced by way of media, magazines, marketing and motive. Men have been groomed their whole lives just as women have, but for a different purpose as we know. To be the providers, the protectors, fighters and workers, the head of the household with completely different expectations to those placed upon the opposite sex. Or at least that’s how it was. The requirements are changing it would seem.

But while that change occurs, it’s a bit weird and messy as the roles we have traditionally been bred for are no longer required. They don’t want women to be mothers and breeders anymore, they don’t want men to be soldiers, protectors or workers anymore. So the lines get blurred, the roles get redefined and moulded to be something different.

But the original purpose remains in the forefront of the social structure. Men want to lead; women want to breed. Those are the simplistic terms we were pretty much taught, with hormones and physiology backing it up to certain extent and driving forward that position, and is a very plain view of it. But as we know in real life, it’s obviously not entirely that simple because it’s by way of social engineering that those were the options afforded to each sex as time went on. If women didn’t marry or breed, they were called spinsters or singled out for it. Always made me think of the word spiteful, and I would then think of mean old women who hated others for having children and missed the boat of love and family. As I was meant to, they were portrayed as such in books and movies that way too. And men who never married? Well, they were bachelors living the great life, as was always shown and were often given great sympathy in these fictional portrayals for never having found a wife to love or settle down with. But a new twist on the whole set up coming into play now, on deciding you might not like the role you have been given, or the facade either, now being subject to change if one so wishes. And you know what they say, be careful what you wish for. Leading me to be reminded again of one of the lines near the end of the film in Weird Science, where they realise something after they tried to make the perfect woman (with hilarious consequences), and it seemed poignant. Where one of them said something along the lines of “We wanted to make the perfect girl, before we even knew what we wanted”. A little nod to the teenagers out there I guess who think they know themselves and what you want, based on what you think you should want from all the input you have taken in throughout your life. But with a bit of time and experience, it becomes slightly clearer. For some at least.

Although, on top of that there is an added attitude that sets the tone. Keeping up appearances and keeping up with the Jones’s – two sayings that that give away an awful lot about people and how society is set up. All based around ego and competition to me, but what they encourage seems to be something quite seedy, if not sinister, and seemingly just started out as being about Consumerism. To sell you materialistic things, give you a sense of competition if you didn’t have one, a sense of one-upmanship and of being better than others because of things you have. Spiralling ever further into thinking you are better because of the size of your house, or where you went to school, who your family is and so on. Or thinking you are less than someone because of those things, creating a strange ideal in people’s minds about what happiness is, or achievement, or of being acceptable in the ‘eyes of society’. I think of the saying ‘My dad’s bigger than your dad’ when it comes to how this plays out from a young age, as that is the classic line of one-upmanship used by people to highlight that process in action. You might know someone like that, you know the ones, who regardless of what you say or do, they did it first, or bigger, or better. And this is where society often seems like it has descended into a dick measuring contest, for men and women alike. Literally. Where everyone is so keen to be considered the best, or the top, or have more – but is that because they want it for themselves really? Or is it because they believe people think more of them like that, wanting to please ‘society’ and be what they think is required of them. Continuing the cycle of image and perception, because to be honest by now, I’m not sure we know any different…

(c) K Wicks

Resetting The Board

~ MKW Publishing ~ 1 Comment

There is much talk of resets, old times past and new times coming. But they were always far away from where we were back then, or just called ‘the future’. Well, it appears we have now caught up to the future, and just as we have, the past is catching up with us. Before it can be completely erased or forgotten, or simply put down as ‘misinformation’, just as it may have again and again. Creating a diluted and convoluted data bank and source of information, so there is no right, or correct or definitive yes or truth. There is only chaos, no order. And one might think that would be a terrible state of affairs to have in society, no-one knowing which way was up, or what two plus two was etc. But only because you have been taught that up is above you, and needs to be identified, or that you need to know what quantity is and how to measure it. But why? It’s possible to go through life, quite adequately I might add, now knowing either of those things, unless of course you find yourself underwater, then you indeed may need to know which way is up. But on the whole, you get the point. A person can live quite well and happily without the construct of society. It will be less convenient of course, but society is not required for people, yet people are required for society. It is a dependency, not a symbiotic relationship originally, but they have tried to make it so.

However, society has now stopped being as convenient, and no longer wants to function in the same way. Instead, it appears to have morphed into something more akin to a parasite, needing to control and feed on its host and keep them in a zombie like state of dependency. Unfortunately, we are the host. And like the zombified insects under the function of similar parasites, that have to carry on until such time as they are no longer required, we are slowly being made like them. It seems the time of playing the democracy card is coming to an end, and the totalitarian card comes into play. Even more so I believe the past is a very intricately woven set of lies and stories, fabricated and set in place for purpose of conditioning and ultimately to steal the past and write the future as you would like it to be. Delusion becoming reality, which then causes what was reality to become delusion. Now you realise why we maybe had so many asylums back in the day, a convenient way to get rid of those who wouldn’t play ball, and all sorts of other disruptions, revolutions and ‘civil wars’ wouldn’t have been as they seem. I often now wonder if those things that did leave an imprint and couldn’t be erased, were just rewritten as a victorious entertaining story to distract from the truth of who was really fighting who. Great empires, wars, battles, heroes, villains and neat timelines for them to all fit into, seeming rather like a well-crafted tale to enthral the masses and be carried down as ‘history’. My article There’s Nothing Great About It speculates on some notable events and how they appear as a cover for something else, but as these things are lost to time and betrayal, unfortunately I can only speculate and never know for sure.

But it does appear that the board has been reset many a time, a new game enacted and laid out, new players, pieces and characters put forward for their role in the next instalment. And every time it goes wrong, collapses or they get found out, they have a tantrum, tip the board and storm off, as you would imagine a childish person behaving at losing and not coping with it. Making sure no-one else can carry on playing if they aren’t in front. And that is how it seems now, as though we are in the tense bit just before the board gets flipped, seeing and feeling it build, waiting for them to ruin the game. They know you don’t want to play again, and in fact won’t play again, so will proceed to make sure no-one can play without them. Breaking down society and systems of infrastructure built up over generations, knowing you won’t be able to just regroup, or carry on without them. Disrupting everything until you either play by their rules, or the whole game gets thrown to the floor and ‘reset’ how they would like. But I can’t help thinking there is a different game entirely we should be playing, and it doesn’t involve them…

(c) K Wicks

The News Is The News

~ MKW Publishing ~ 2 Comments

It’s taken a strange turn, the world of information and ‘news’. Reminding me of Casualty, the TV series. Which I used to enjoy as a kid, the drama, the tension, the NHS being presented as heroes. Good bit of programming, in more ways than one. But it was a good watch, for a time. I started to go off it when a change to the set up happened, and it took me a while to notice. It slowly stopped being about the person the accident was going to happen to, or had happened to and shifted away from the ‘victims’, to focus on the staff. The affairs, the dramas, the back-stabbing etc. It became a weird soap opera, rather than a medical drama. And although I spent time watching soap operas too in my youth, the constant, crappy and hectic drama of fictious people eventually made me wonder why I wasted time watching it. So stopped. As you get older, you start to see a lot more of that hectic drama in real life and people, so no need for a fictional version to run alongside that. But by switching the set-up to be about the staff rather than the patients lost me, it was no longer interesting.

Anchorman 2 – the film. I liked both of them, funny and quite ridiculous but the sequel was interesting. Showing how on a basic level, when you can’t get the scoop, or find any real news to report, you either make it up – or you be the news. The news becoming the news. And we were on the brink of it, after we went for multiple 24-hour news channels, more newspapers than you really need, constant drivel and information intermingled and filtered through to the masses. And filtered it is, even the instantaneous internet world is edited and filtered, checked and restricted. So, there is still an overall editor calling the shots and deciding what is fit for public consumption. Or not in some cases, but they go with it anyway. No longer on the brink though, corporations have fully crossed over into being part of it rather than just reporting it. Weirdly though, not because they don’t have real news to report, of that there is plenty, but it doesn’t quite fit the narrative that corporate forces want people to follow.

And as we know, once you become the observed, you are no longer the observer, and you can’t be both. So, the influence that newspapers, TV stations and faces that represent them is dwindling and being redefined with everything else. Those faces no longer command respect, as we know they are just the mouthpieces of the media machine, and are the stupid ones for maybe not seeing it before, thinking they were just there to ‘let us know’ what’s going on. Hardly ever giving thought to the why, just blindly watching news and reading papers, seeing headlines and ‘paying attention’ as they call it. Being aware of the world around you, or something like that. But knowing now, it was an awareness steeped in falsities and of what someone else wanted me to know or be aware of.

For years we have had invasions of privacy though on their part, investigations into people, well known and otherwise, for exposes, scoops and front-page news. However, it seems to have taken a strange turn in the latest round of the news being the news. And when it’s their own, or them being used for news fodder, suddenly it becomes a topic to discuss about rights and privacy. And it is a problem and strange part of society that we have, that people feel the need to tear people down, gossip about others, spread rumours, or just plain old humiliate someone – by way of a publication no less. Why are we like that as a species? Taking delight in others misfortune and wanting to see people fail, hoping instead you make it? And then what? Have everyone wishing you had failed instead of being happy for you? It’s an odd thing, and I get a smile on my face when I see someone else do good, or have a happy moment, so when trying to imagine what it must be like to see the same thing and feel hate or have a mean feeling towards it, is a difference I can’t get on board with.

Yet it’s one that has been cultivated. You’ve Been Framed comes to mind here, and I laughed like many others for the silly misfortune that befell people, slapstick, I guess. The presenter of that show had another that I wasn’t so comfortable with, Beadles About. It was good, but painful, and I really felt for the people being wound up and tricked. And really, I found it hard to reconcile that we would cause people untold stress and worry, just for ‘entertainment’. All laughing at the end when they revealed it was all a joke, but there being a strange tension of ‘but what if they had died? What if they had flipped out and hurt someone?’ I didn’t enjoy watching it in the end, as it was screwing with what I believed were real people, their lives and their emotions. That wasn’t entertainment for me personally, and carried over into other programming. Once you can see it’s a set-up, or people are being used beyond what they think they are there for, it becomes painful to watch. Just like the news. So, no longer there for reporting what is going on, they are there to enact a painful script and are being used for purpose, thinking they are there for something else possibly, or are complicit, either way it’s a struggle to watch and listen anymore. And just like I mentioned in my article Early News, why is it really necessary that we are pummelled with information, updates and stats from chosen countries all over the world on a daily basis anyway? So, again and as with much these days, it comes back to what purpose does it serve and why…

(c) K Wicks