The riverbank analogy

There's a political analogy which my mate up the road has used ... and which I adapted ... and it's something like ... each river or canal has a left bank, a right bank ... a red bank, a blue bank ... and people are like the riverboat or canalboat navigating down that river or canal ... they can't just steer a path down the deep channels, often marked but also known from experience ... as they used to.

No ... for some crazed reason, they keep lurching, first to the blue bank, crashing into all the boats, all the settled life of the riverbank ... they find their progress impeded so they lurch over to the red bank and crash into that, with the same result ... mayhem.

Sometimes, with the captain seemingly either drunk or asleep at the wheel, the first mate has to leap to the wheel to course correct ... absolutely necessary to lurch out of danger. But the captain sees only a usurpation of his natural authority and he fights for the wheel like a Jeremy Hunt, calling the first mate names, all kinds of -ists. He says to bystanders that the first mate has taken leave of his senses ...

... but he might just be right. Thst first mate could well be a disciple of red bankism and wants the whole river redbankish or he may have been usurped by a bluebanker ... and so on. And what if one of them has been paid big money by a non-river dweller ... blood money ... to ruin the lives of all river dwellers, to steer courses which can only wreck life on the river as this Money wants an unimpeded view for himself, free of river dwellers.

At this point, in seeing what the motivations of the various parties really are, it might be necessary to ask oneself:

... or roughly translated ... who stands to benefit by these moves, who gains? If Gates wants to buy up farmland and install expensive solar panels instead of food ... at the same time paying pilots big money to stream toxic chemicals behind planes in crisscross fashion, in order to protect Earth from the wicked Sun ... how many stop to ask ... hang on ... if there's less and less sun, why all the solar panels?

Gates does not answer but his spokes-myrmidons do ... oh it's all this climate change you know. The interviewer asks who dreamed up this anthropolog-whatever ... a directive arrives from the Gates god that this interviewer is to be killed for being one of these ists, an insurrectionist, no less.

Yes, insanity has taken over but whose insanity?  That of the ordinary to-and-fro, tussling riverbankers?

Or someone or something far more insidious ... which some do call globopsycho?  Someone shouts, "Kill! Kill! Kill!" and thousands of kids go out and glue themselves to roads.

Someone else whose boat plots the same-old, same-old path which had got their forebears through for hundreds of years beforehand ... the same path down the middle of the river, through the channels ... he observes all the mayhem and shudders ... he remembers his grandfather's tales of the bad old days of ancient history, of marauding gangs, of mass slaughter, starvation ... he wonders why on earth all these modernists think that Lurching wildly from red bank to blue bank and then the other way, causing maximum wreckage ... how on earth can that be a solution.

He sees some clown called Jeremy Hunt stood on the blue bank, dressed in blue uniform, haranguing riverbankers on both sides with a defence of Lurching, which he calls slow and steady Centrism, sanity for all.

And then our sane boat captain, the traditionalist, sees another clown called Corbyn dressed in red, standing on a boat haranguing redbankers that they must Lurch one way, then the other, tear it all down, start again, rob anyone with anything to give to him ... he calls it slow and steady Centrism.  

The real Centrist, the sane trad riverboat captain, continues to steer that path down the middle but now its becoming difficult to navigate ... too much wreckage, dead bodies strewn around. At that point, messages reach both Hunt and Corbyn that today's payments have been deposited in their accounts. "Shhhhhh," admonish both, "Quiet, we're not Angela Rayner, we keep our sleaze well hidden, thank you very much."