Friday, March 23, 2018

Lying in America

23rd March 2018

Right at the beginning when I first came to America, I had never encountered anything like the National Enquirer, and so I would repeat their headlines like Baby to be Born to Human Mother and Ape Father. After all, what would be the point in reporting news that was clearly, well, not news? "Fake news," otherwise known as journalistic bullshit, was a whole new concept for this unsuspecting Scot, and I'm sure for anyone else who had grown up in a developed country of reasonably intelligent citizens. There's a reason Fox News didn't last very long in Britain
But dig a little deeper into American history, and you'll find that describing a little conceptual bubble and climbing into it, is something European settlers have done from the outset. Back up a little and you smash right into the principle on which this country was founded: Manifest Destiny.
If ever there was a dirty lie, this one is the apotheosis: We're Here Because We're Here Because We're Here. Amen. 


These times of "fake news," in which we find ourselves, with a pathological liar in the White House, are just the logical conclusion of this kind of bubble-building. For instance, it is simply part of the American creed that this country is the greatest example of democracy on the planet. You hear this across the spectrum from mindless nationalists to left-wing pundits.  The effect of founding a country on the lies of manifest destiny, and if that weren't enough, on genocide and slavery, is that the collective bullshit detector registers consistently lower and lower.
It has long been recognised how children brought up in this kind of dishonest environment grow up to have a similar recognition deficit.  If you have to spin Daddy's drinking until you believe he is simply a connoisseur of spirits, then your ability to detect that flaw later on in a potential partner, is going to be significantly damaged.
Entire nations do this.  Let's call Daddy in this case Uncle Sam, and he needs you to go along wth the family secret.


Of course, Brits believe a fair amount of political bullshit, too, spooned out to them by politicians in Westminster, but a Donald Trump would get nowhere there. In fact, he has got nowhere there: he has built his golf course, of course, but when he went before the Scottish parliament to try to stop the building of offshore wind farms in his view, he was told to hop it.

Bullshit builds on bullshit, until you have an unholy steaming pile of crap.  That is exactly the stink we are living in now. We have been holding our breath for so long, that nothing really sinks in anymore. Last week, it was reported by the New York Times that the Russians have hacked into the actual controls of America's nuclear reactors. But the news somehow got lost. Everyone just turned the page and thought about Stormy Daniels instead.



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