Lie to me

We complain that Politicians just tell people what they want to hear, and we’re right, we’re always right.

 Anyway here’s what we want to hear: That we can have loads of stuff without paying for it, that the problems we face are the fault of Immigrants/Bankers and that it’ s all going to be ok if we can just hammer the rich/the poor hard enough. Tell us that and we’ll vote for you, but remember to say it good and loud, cos the other fellow’s saying it too.

  In Britain Blair and his minions figured it out first: they understood that it was nothing to do with being right or wrong. You could be right all day, but if the mail and the sun were telling everyone you were wrong then it didn’t matter. So they focused on the papers and they won and we, the ones who had been reading those papers and putting Major in number 10 long after we should have stuck a fork up his arse and turned him over, because he was obviously done, well we got all indignant about spin. We howled about focus groups and political consultants as though their emergence was not a direct result of our own behavior.

And the media was the cheerleader for this anti spin rage, they devoted acres of newsprint and untold hours of airtime to exploring how the media worked until finally their heads were so far up their own arses that you couldn’t really hear what they were saying anymore. But it was ok, coz they were telling us that none of it was our fault, and we knew that anyway.

  Then, leading by example as ever, our American brethren showed us the next logical step by putting a millionaire president’s son in the white house because he was, like an ordinary guy and stuff. It was a wise move, and obviously designed as a warning to demonstrate to the world what would happen if we all continued along this path of rampant, debt driven consumerism and self righteous egotism. “Look” they said: “This is what happens to uninformed morons, is this what you want?” And the world looked on in awed bewilderment and said: “No.”

  A teachable moment, a cry for help, an astonishing practical joke, whatever it was it was clearly not something any sane nation would care to emulate. Then our Saudi friends changed the punch line and we all went mad. Greed and fear were what drove the stock market they always said, and having reached the point where greed no longer looked like a viable path to stability and contentment, we went with fear. Wars and torture and lies, all of them working under cover of fear. Yay we shouted:  no need to lose the SUV after all and all that scary thinking and reading stuff that was looming up was irrelevant suddenly: everything was black and white again. And it didn’t matter what side of the political fence you were on: Osama or Bush, both were cartoon devils and, how perfect was this, now we could:  “like if we loved freedom” or: “share if we hated Cheney”, ah, the heady winds of people power.

 Meanwhile in Russia and China those inscrutable, unknowable, mysterious men looked on and learned. Democracy = a sham, check, freedom = just a word, check, open global markets = you are thinking we are blind? Money = everything, check. And what did we really want from them? Well oil and Iphones would be a nice start and they could manage that no problem.

 But of course we’d spent all the money by this point and we couldn’t afford stuff anymore, so we looked to the politicians and cried with one pure voice: “tell us what we want to hear” and they, knowing the deal by now, did just that. So we carried on buying houses with no money and wide screen TVs to put in them, we carried on demanding better hospitals and tax cuts and those nice young men in the city juggled stuff so that everyone, including their selves, could keep on buying shit until it all exploded in a great big mess.

And whose fault is it?

Well the bankers’ obviously, I mean the bastards kept giving us money, and the politicians, why the hell didn’t they tell us to stop and in doing so plunge into humiliating electoral defeat, what were they thinking? Not to mention the satanic corporations who made the stuff we wanted, the bastards: hang em all!

Pass me my Ipad, I need to sort this out by posting a pic on Facebook. No it’s over there, under those credit cards, next to my Samsung galaxy, yeah that’s it, ooh look Kanye has a new album coming out…