What can you believe these days? Anything you like …
We were having an informal editorial conference the other day over a very pleasant meal in a West End restaurant when out of the blue I aired the proposition that the Rust should declare itself a Trump-free organ, at least for a six-month trial period. Well, at least I received a polite hearing.
My reasoning was that, far from being the godsend of all godsends to the late-night ‘hip-cool-liberal-leftie-lovie-intelligencia’ US satire industry, the forty-fifth President of the USA was de facto currently a great deal closer to putting a swathe of movie scriptwriters completely out of business. His opening performance in power had been so unhinged that even a sympathetic biographical movie version in the style of The Glenn Miller Story (1954, written by Valentine Davies and Oscar Brodney, directed by Anthony Mann, featuring James Stewart as Miller and June Alyson as his wife) would be shown the door inside two minutes of being pitched to any Hollywood producer worth his salt simply because it stretched the bounds of crediblity too far and would only prompt derision in any cinema-going audience.
In such circumstances, I suggested – despite the Rust’s proud reputation for being ‘way out there’ – a period of Trump radio silence would not just be logical (i.e. ignoring the time-honoured adage “If you cannot beat them, join them” and adopting instead Homer Simpson’s classic advice to son Bart about school exams and indeed life in general, “If at first you don’t succeed, give up”) but actually better serve the needs of our vast and growing following [latest statistically-recorded number of Twitter followers 636,093]. After all, they’re getting all the Trump they need from the world’s media, why should we not become an oasis of Trump-free craziness for a period as an experiment, if not permanently?
I thought It was worth a pop, even though I wasn’t expecting a great deal of support. Perhaps inevitably, those with me at the trough were as one in maintaining that this mighty organ should never accept any form of direction, political line of any persuasion or indeed any restraint at all upon subject matter or angle at all. I could see where they were coming from – viz. the theory that the only constraints one should ever accept are those one places upon oneself.
At least the Trump phenomenon has brought to everyone’s attention the wafer-thin lines between truth and falsehood, or should that be ‘between one person’s truth and another’s falsehood’ or even ‘one man’s meat is another’s poison’.
Maybe it is the case that there are few if any fundamental truths in the human world, well bar perhaps beyond the facts that we all sleep and wake up, feed ourselves, go to the bathroom and potter about all day.
Different honourable people of varying political persuasions held with different degrees of conviction or fanaticism might regard either the Socialist Worker as a rabidly-left-wing rag and/or the Daily Mail as a similarly-lunatic right-wing mouthpiece – depending of course upon from which viewpoint they’re coming – whilst happily reading the one or the other believing every line it peddles with the zeal of a Bible-bashing evangelist who takes every word of both the Old and New testaments to be literally true.
We in the West might ridicule and scoff at the Russian regime of President Putin for its relationship with the truth, especially when (we are told) that Russia has annexed the Crimea, violated the sovereignty of the Ukraine, instigated governmental level performance-enhancing drugs programme for its athletes and murdered an ex-KGB operative in London with some plutonium-laced tea, but the government-influenced Russian media is telling its people a completely different version.
From the West’s viewpoint – regarding its media as the ideal (‘free speech’ to the fore, investigative reporting and the task of exposing hypocrisy, deceit and cant within the powerful elite all meat and drink to those who follow such things) – Russia’s media is a joke, just a metaphorical loudspeaker for Mr Putin and his cronies.
However, to Mr Putin the West’s media is also a joke. Or even just as big a cesspit as anything he’s controlling, in fact he’s probably got KGB agents ‘working and exploiting’ the West’s media for all it’s worth, simply because, of course, ‘exploiting the media’ is always possible everywhere.
That seems to be a universal given, whether it’s President Trump doing his thing, or some ‘B’ list female celebrity just happening to be disporting herself in a tiny bikini on a beach in Barbados, or accidentally on purpose having a slight ‘wardrobe malfunction’ on some movie premiere red carpet, when a member of the paparazzi ‘just happened’ be on hand to capture it in a series of high-definition snaps … er … when in fact all of the above was pre-arranged by said lady’s press officer or agent on the basis of gaining money, or some pages’ worth of free publicity, and in fact probably both.
I’ve blogged previously on the theme that – despite the expectation (you might think) that the more intelligent people are, the more likely you’d expect them to get nearer the truth, and therefore also to agree – quite intelligent people full of common sense on both sides of any political argument can draw completely different narratives and conclusion from the same set of facts.
I was reminded of this – with Philip Hammond’s Budget speech coming up tomorrow – when I last saw John McDonnell (Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer) being interviewed on Sunday’s The Andrew Marr Show.
His subjects of the moment were the NHS and social care (especially of the elderly) funding crises in the context of Brexit, taxation policy and governmental priorities. [You’ll have to excuse me because at the time I wasn’t really concentrating enough to take note of the financial facts and projections being bandied about by McDonnell and by Andrew Marr – and indeed I wasn’t too sure that they were fully confident about their numbers either].
McDonnell made what, on the face of it, seemed a restrained and sensible case that the NHS generally and urgently needed an immediate extra £8 to £10 billion-worth of additional funding and that the best way to promote economic growth was to embark upon a series of infrastructure projects. How would these be paid for? Easy – by getting the rich “to pay their fair share” (not lower their taxes, as the Tories were about to do) and simultaneously halting all tax evasion. And that was it – simples.
It was not long after that Philip Hammond took to the airwaves to say something but also nothing about his imminent Budget (because that wasn’t allowed, of course). He assured viewers/listeners that – with Brexit coming down the track – the one thing that he wouldn’t be doing was chucking billions and billions of pounds at pet projects and just borrowing huge sums of money (as Labour traditionally did) to fund them because that would simply leave future generations to pay for our current excesses – which, of course, was a bad and irresponsible thing to do.
Which of them was right? Most likely they both are, or indeed they both aren’t. It depends who has their hand on the levers that control the media at any one time. Or indeed all the time.
Then there’s the BBC. Supposedly the best and most impartial media organisation in the world. Or so the world, out there listening to the BBC’s World Service, thinks. Partly because we tell the world that’s what it is, anyway.
Meanwhile, back home, the Tories regard the BBC as a hotbed of lefty, lovie, politically-correct activists determined to pick away at the Establishment and not to report ‘the facts’ (that is, as the Tory Government sees them).
Simultaneously the Labour Party – and other opposition parties – view the BBC as a compliant servant and mouthpiece of the Tory Establishment. They cannot both be right. Or wrong. (Or can they?). Or, as the BBC would see it “If we’re being criticised by both the left-wing and the right-wing, we must be getting the balance just about on the money …”
Here’s an article on the travails of President Trump by Lawrence Douglas that appears today on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
