A rant, inspired by a poem, inspired by a politican lying.
If truth is beauty than we are beginning to live in a very ugly world. This poem was inspired by one politician making many false accusations only to be fact checked later. When he was, he claimed he’d misremembered the facts. Call me a cynic but I’d say he was lying to begin with. Politicians lying, nothing new there. But he got away with it by making the claim of misremembered facts. For me it sums up something this particulary dirty and disgracegul election campaign has highlighted more thoroughly than ever.
Whatever party you support , this can’t be a good way to inform the public. Picking, choosing, inventing facts to make whatever you’re saying sound good. There is controversy around the providence of the child on the floor photo but the act of stealing the phone by Boris Johnson and putting it in his pocket shows the people that lead us don’t even want to see a truth which doesn’t agree with their reality. The same is true of the ministers refusing to admit the error in the number of new nurses they promised. Coming back to the original point, a world where people are allowed to invent facts and brand it the ‘truth’ is a very dangerous world indeed. And a world where the news media feel more like propaganda agencies is even scarier. This isn’t a new thing, but it feels more blatant and unrestrained. Is it the Trump effect?
With the distortion that comes from living in social media bubbles, losing a reliable media is a serious thing. I hope it is not too late. This is less a poem about lying politicians and more about the sadness of living in a post truth world. Without some source of attempted feigned objectivity where is the anchor that stops us decending even further into some chaos manipulated by a small few. It must be said some figures in the media challenge these people, but the trend towards deploying ‘alternative truthes’ is deeply worrying.
Seeing the exuse of misremembered facts makes me very sad. If our truth is to be derived from beauty then we may as well be magpies..
As we all take in the events of the week, today’s door is an excerpt from another as yet published poem.