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This is not easy to get across if you haven’t experienced something similar, but the other day I stumbled across Andrew Marr interviewing a
politician on TV. I think it was one of the Eds or possibly George, Nick or even Dave.
So what?
Well here’s the difficult descriptive bit. For a brief
moment it felt really weird to see a professional liar being interviewed on TV.
Weird? Yes I know - how could it possibly feel weird?
Yet it did – momentarily. For about a second or two – no
more. One of those things you have to catch and store away because the clamour of daily life soon dilutes them to nothing.
So the weirdness was a brief strangeness - like seeing a
peacock majestically strutting down the middle of the road. We once saw exactly
that outside our house and for a second or two we had to make that basic
adjustment we all make to the unexpected - is that thing really a
peacock? It was.
The Andrew Marr thing was much like our double-take on first seeing
that peacock. An appropriate image too - peacock strutting.
A startling flicker of evil on the very edge of
perception. An insight yet not an insight, because we know these evils but don’t really feel them as evil. Too familiar. Perception has its wicked way with us, drops the veil
too soon. Moulds reality, kneads it back into shape, back into what we expect.
We adapt so well and with such phenomenal speed don’t we? No
surprises. So we even tolerate professional liars – see them as part of the
furniture. Unremarkable. Normal. Not evil - not at all.
Nothing to see here – move along now.
But usually we don’t even get that far – we don’t so much
tolerate professional liars as accept them into the backdrop of our lives.
Folk still watch TV in their millions, so they must listen to what is said, to the
lies, without feeling the weirdness. Without switching off in disgust.
We are too good at this, adjusting to what ought not to be. Missing
what could be. Instead we grind out the social and political analysis, treat
professional lies as some kind of argument requiring rebuttal. Even though we
know what the liars are, what their lies are, why they lie.
It’s weird. But only rarely.
6 comments:
We saw a few peacocks today, geese and swans. But no liars. It was quite pleasant.
Geese can be a little economical with the truth though.
More true than perhaps you know: oddly enough, my parents once unexpectedly acquired a pair of peacocks (for reasons too complicated to explain).
The birds would seize every opportunity to wander out of the gate and down the lane to the neighbour's house, where they would process up the garden path to the front door and sit on the doorstep vociferously demanding food with a distinct air of entitlement despite having regular meals at home.
After a while, we swapped one of the cocks for a hen with the idea of giving the other some female companionship; although - more by luck than judgement, I've always suspected - they produced one female chick, the remaining peacock, in keeping with your analogy, spent the vast majority of his time communing with his reflection in an old mirror.
(Just to complete the saga, the young female eventually eloped with a pheasant from the wrong side of the tracks.)
Mac - this one had an air of entitlement too. Maybe a peacock should be the emblem of the House of Commons.
Saw a man carrying a penguin along the road once.
It might have been the substances at the time.
James - that's worth a blog post!
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