The state of the world

Following the political developments upon both sides of the Pond in the media over the past week it has occurred to me that the world has progressed well beyond the dismissive clichéd truism “You couldn’t make it up”.

A combination of ‘Fake News’, the hysterical and embarrassing three-hour collective meltdown in the House of Commons, the general Brexit paralysis and now the developing impeachment controversy in the United States over President Trump’s phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart in advance of the forthcoming Presidential election has effectively taken us to a whole new parallel universe.

We hear much both about the ill effects of upon of cyber-bullying, teasing and mocking upon the weak and vulnerable of all ages – not least depression and despair sometimes leading to self-harm and even suicide – and the ability of those (whether perfectly sane or unhinged) to find others on the internet who agree with or reinforce the weirdest and most ridiculous of conspiracy theories, religious beliefs or political standpoints.

The latter, of course, strikes at the heart of any chance of having a constructive dialogue, discussion or even negotiation based around a communality of basic human values and common sense.

To put no finer point upon it, when you can hatch and share a lunatic notion – and then communicate only with those who agree with you – it doesn’t take much for you to reach a situation where you won’t listen to anyone else simply because you don’t need to.

To be fair, the emergence of ‘Fake News’ had at least one benefit to it.

It reminded us (if we had forgotten or fondly imagined different) that true impartiality – like mercury slipping between one’s fingers – is damned difficult state to reach let alone impose because of the twin issues that ‘one man’s meat is another’s poison’ and, at the end of the day, ‘who judges the judges?’

Ultimately, I’d suggest – simply because human beings are involved – even the least controversial, most intellectually-obvious, straightforward, evidence-supported report up on a seemingly innocuous subject must contain some subtle and probably unconscious degree of subjectivity.

That said, we have now reached the point where the first thing we have to consider when confronted by any item of developing news or current affairs, is not “what are the facts?” but “Who is reporting these things, why are they doing it, and from what political or other viewpoint are they presenting them?”

This is, of course, a dangerous place to be.

For, if you cannot rely entirely upon any source to deliver you the hard, honest, impartial truthful facts of any matter, how can anyone – whether he or she is a Prime Minister, President, military commander, university chancellor, prison governor, leading surgeon, expedition leader, commissioner of police, chief of intelligence or even a lollipop lady standing outside a primary school on a busy road at ‘going home’ time – take any decision of consequence?

Yesterday on television I happened by chance to watch two items on the 24-hour BBC News Channel that illustrated my point with bells on.

The first was a confrontation between two females – a black activist in London and a right-on, white, blonde Republican intellectual on the line from the USA – on the subject of the impeachment process now beginning in the US Congress.

The former was right behind the impeachment hearings, simply on the basis that – on the face of it – the contents of the President’s call in question [whether the evidence was an actual transcript or a cobbled-together summary of the call wasn’t clear to me] definitely needed investigating, even if only to establish whether there was a basic case to answer.

In contrast, for the Republican lady, this whole ‘whistleblower’ thing was a ludicrous, stumped-up, clearly politically-motivated, farrago of lies dreamed up by the increasingly desperate Democratic Party in order to try and prevent Donald Trump being re-elected in 2020.

The ‘discussion’, which naturally generated more heat than light, went on for more than ten minutes and created no common ground, no understanding and no conclusion.

It was if the one was speaking an obscure regional Chinese dialect and the other pigeon-English Eskimo.

The other item I refer to was a bog-standard discussion about the current constitutional/political snarl-up in Parliament featuring politicians and pundits on both sides of the current Brexit debate.

The fundamental involved was democracy itself.

The Leavers kept referring to the 17.4 million people who voted to leave in the 2016 Referendum and the dangers to democracy that any scheme devised by ‘the arrogant, we-know-better, Establishment’ to avoid implementing the Referendum result would represent.

The Remainers meanwhile thumped on and on about the ‘facts’ that in 2016 nobody had any idea what they were voting for, that the Leave campaign had told repeated lies, that the House of Commons was ‘standing up for democracy’ and that “now we know what we know about what Leave would actually mean in practice, we cannot allow Brexit [or was it a ‘no deal’ Brexit? – again I wasn’t quite clear on the point] to happen”.

Again, another case of both sides speaking their own language and completely failing to understand (and/or listen to) the other’s.

Where we all go from here, I have absolutely no idea.