Cailean Bochanan

Glasgow, Scotland

5th February, 2009

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.”

The Tempest- William Shakespeare

A flurry of protest has broken out as the depth of the crisis becomes clear for all to see. And it can only get worse as the temple of neo-liberalism, the whole structure of the empire of fraud, begins to crumble returning to the shifting sands on which it was constructed. This is no transient economic crisis, rather it is the collapse of an illusory world of prosperity, a delusional bubble whose expansion is inversely proportional to real wealth creation. The UK , amongst the European powers, is the one which most typifies this parasitic nirvana, a nation which only a short while ago seriously thought it could count its wealth on the basis of the price of its real estate, the exploits of its city financiers and, incredibly, the strength of Sterling. But it is more widely, a ”Western” phenomena, a malaise of the peoples of Europe who have not yet, for all their culture, been able to cast off that assumption of privilege and primacy, consistent with our status as the  world’s great imperialists, and have been lured by the promise of eternal well-being, of  living life as a dream, as of by right.

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