The New Year & The New Left ~ An étude

It's News Years Eve 2019 and in order to avoid slippers and Cocoa syndrome on a night where revellers are perhaps at their most Dionysian, I take up an invite to a house party as a tag-along near Kings Cross station - London. Everybody seems quite likeable, and in order to offset any seriousness I assume the mental posture of one who is looking for light laughter as opposed to gravity after an arduous and taxing year.

2019 saw the burning of the Amazon, the intensification of US-China trade wars, tensions in the Persian Gulf, mass Protests across Hong Kong, Chile, Bolivia, Algeria, Egypt, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and India (and this list is by no means exhaustive) - the move to impeach President Trump and the US revocation of its support for the Syrian Kurds. To boot, my personal life has once again been beset with suicides, breakdowns, undone family homes, job losses, love losses and all the other thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

So on this night, especially this night, almost as a ritual ablution, I really need a drink, and I really need to exhale. 'Let', I think, 'laughter lighten the load'.

Eventually the alcohol flows, although the conversation somewhat teeters with these new-found strangers, but I am fixed on amusement, humour and irony, and make some nice acquaintances.

On the Kurdish question, our host is both ethnically and ideologically Kurdish, and she and I have a lot to talk about. Our Dialogue is empathetic and reciprocal, and we share many sentiments concerning Socialism and its absolute necessity for, (if indeed nothing else), the self-realisation of the individual. Before Freedom to, what is necessary is Freedom from.

We mark Midnight with shots of Tequila, (We being the entire cadre) but gravity eventually tries to make itself felt. A few of us are in the kitchen making cocktails and talking Sex and Politics when one of the attendees enters, kicks open the foot-peddled rubbish bin and throws something into it, with the force of a righteous declaration and shouts, 'That's bloody Israeli Humous, and I refuse to eat it!' She leaves all-a-huff. This is too good to let sit.

By this point, I must admit I have taken a few drags on a doobie and my sense of irony has peaked, and my sarcasm has started to make itself known and after the kitchen snickering has rippled out its last few waves, I find that I definitely, cannot let this rest.

I take the Israeli Humous out of the bin, (which I might add has recently been cleaned out), walk into the living room and place it on the table next to the new organic substitute and tell the armchair revolutionary in question, that 'I am Jewish' and that they 'are Antisemitic', and that 'I am offended'.

Only one of these propositions is true.

The host, sat couched next to our grand-socialist starts to giggle and tells me through bubbles of laughter that I must put it back in the bin, and so I pick it up, and declare that this move will surely lead to a two-state solution, turn around and walk back into the kitchen and replace it in the trash. An important move. The Tesco effect I assume. Every little helps.

Let me state without ambiguity that my position, as anyone who knows me knows, is that the Palestinian people are undoubtedly the victims of an apartheid regime and that history will not easily forgive, if at all, the ethnic cleansing that is taking place in the region. However. I am also Philosemitic, and as expressed earlier, Socialist in my thinking and my feeling. One need not hold a banal or a homogenous viewpoint. What kind of a mind has to side with Palestinian or Jew, in order to be treated as comprehensible? I hold the world, as you should too, to be more complicated and nuanced than such a trite position.

The Fireworks explode in all their motley hues across the London skylines. And just like that - they fade. I watch this midnight-panaroma from the balcony where I am smoking a cigarette and have stumbled into a conversation about astrology. Now, these are Oxford students. My, my, how things have slipped. An eyebrow raised garners a cynical 'What's your star-sign' to which I reply, 'Proxima Centauri'. The joke goes over heads like a bad toupee. Here's the condensed version of events:

I find myself speaking to these privileged (in the true sense of the word) Oxbridger's about why the social sciences are not actually Sciences, and get given a laughable postmodernist argument that 'just because other cultures believe in magic or prayer' (which are of course essentially one and the same thing) that 'they are no less real than 'Western ideologies'.

Very Interesting. What is lacking of course here is evidence as well as, dare I say it, critical thinking. I watch fly Ad Hominems over Straw Men and in my vision, they seem to synchronise with the fireworks that fade across the city skyline.

We entered 2020 with wonderment as to what awaits on the horizon. It was dawn when we left. London was lightening. A lot of people were, no doubt, already asleep in their beds.

It was overall, a good night. A lot of laughter and interesting conversation. A lot of alcohol. And for the astrologists and the armchair socialists - a lot of narcotics.

They have the habit of Anaesthetising the mind. In Vino Veritas? Perhaps.