This week we’ll have a double whammy, as the kids never say, two entries both about that elusive of all things, the thing we think we alone know, the thing we demand from others and the one thing we dislike revealing about ourselves, the thing we even conceal from ourselves more frequently than we do to others, of course, I am talking about the truth
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The Truth And PR
‘Truth isn’t truth’ spake the former New York and now President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The quote came in the midst of an interview, most of the interview was nonsense, for sure, but this one quotation which the world seems to have seized upon was one of the few parts of the interview which made sense. Within the context of the interview, Giuliani was saying that if you have two people in a room (Trump and Former FBI Director James Comey (remember him? He seems hell bent on you doing so)) and they have a conversation there is multiple sides to the story as one can only achieve a subjective account and then that subjective account cannot be seen as being objective even to the person who believes it to be 100% true. Why is this? ‘“Because,”’ as Dicken’s wrote ‘said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”’ meaning that the slightest change in the body and mind can affect how one perceives what is happening. Comey may have been uncomfortable and misinterpreted comments and body language and vice versa. Fine, I am not here to defend either of them. Mr Mueller will do his job, his job which, as with juries, is not to find the ‘truth’ per se but to prove beyond reasonable doubt.
This comment of Giuliani had a strange effect. The ‘liberal’ media attacked him, calling him ‘Orwellian’ and the ‘conservative’ media responded by trying to find excuses for him. People believed whatever media outlook agrees with them and thus this throw away comment which is, in my opinion, ultimately true became a media and social media hotbed. The question must be, why has this happened?
A trend that I have noticed recently, maybe it has always been there and I am just very dumb, is that what we take for granted as ‘news’ is actually ‘PR’. Yes, in countries such as Russia, China, The Middle East you expect it but in the West? Since CNN was called ‘Fake News’ (which it isn’t) it has had news anchors talking into the camera to prove that they are not fake news (huh?) and many of its shows seems now to be to prove that it is legitimate. It is not, nor has it ever been, Clinton Network News, but it is something run to make a profit and many of the presenters seem very vain. I have spoken about all of this before so will not repeat myself, but the sad truth is that in this PR war between the left and the right it is the truth, the truth that people need healthcare, need food etc that gets hurt. This PR war just hurts those the media is supposed to represent, not the politicians, not the shareholders, but the people. Let’s be clear here, the media is very powerful and can make and break people. This story alone:
‘Aung San Suu Kyi is set to be stripped of her Freedom of Edinburgh award for her refusal to condemn the violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar. This will be the seventh honour that the former Nobel peace prize winner has been stripped of over the past year, with Edinburgh following the example of Oxford, Glasgow and Newcastle which also revoked Suu Kyi’s Freedom of the City awards.’
is very interesting as Ms Aung San Suu Kyi was built up by the western media who are now tearing her down but don’t forget, Aung San Suu Kyi won the election in Burma and then was put under house arrest by the Military Junta, one supported by China and because of the need in the West for Chinese money she was left to rot, the democratic leader of a country, under house arrest. Only after she was freed after the Velvet Revolution did the West cover her in more things than one and yet it seems more than happy to tear her down now (in government and media) that she does not fit the ideals of those who sat by and did nothing whilst she suffered unimaginable torture which, I’m sure, would change all of us. As the media has shown that it cannot even handle being called ‘Fake’ so maybe the ‘truth’ of Aung San Suu Kyi is something which must be buried as it reveals far more of the truth of us than we want to be seen…which leads us onto…
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The Truth!
Cy Coleman’s Broadway musical Little Me features a song called The Truth which is about writing autobiographies and what people want:
PATRICK
The all-revealing truth!
BELLE
The mass-appealing truth!
PATRICK
The blood-congealing truth!
BELLE
The irregardless truth!
ALL
The truth!
BELLE
As through a haze,
I see a Doubleday’s,
And shining in a window full of Arthur Miller plays:
The truth!
OTHERS
The truth!
BELLE
An odyssey
Entitled “Little Me,”
As told to Patrick Dennis in its whole entirety
By me!
With the areas I’ll expose,
I’ll annihilate Gypsy Rose,
As for practically Proustian prose,
Mary Astor,
Meet your master.
Stack me up with all three Gabors,
I’ll reduce ’em to cut-rate stores,
And Louella, dear, you’ll get yours
With the end-all,
Casey Stendahl
Truth!
OTHERS
Truth! Truth! Truth!
The D.H. Lawrence truth!
BELLE
With an index!
OTHERS
In blood and torrents, truth!
PATRICK
Illustrations!
I recently read In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. The book, as you can guess from the title, is the story of a 13 year old girl (and her mother) escaping from North Korea to eventually be reunited with her sister in South Korea (they are reunited with her father earlier but he soon passes away from cancer- a rarity in North Korea as, Ms Park says, there are so many other things which kill you first) via a terrible journey including escaping into China to be raped and then sold as wives, working in a chat room, starvation, beatings, attempted suicides, crawling across the Gobi desert avoiding search lights, discrimination, bullying, being given up and many more terrible things. Ms Park is (at 23) an internationally known, reluctant (agreeing to go public to try to find her sister), voice for those in North Korea who live in famine and under constant fear of the Government, brainwashed against everything which is not North Korean to think themselves lucky and fear that without the borders (a typical maths problem in school: if I have two big-nosed American bastards and I kill one big-nosed American bastard how many big-nosed American bastards do I have left?) the book is wonderful and you should read it (easily available on Amazon) but my question is, why do we need sensationalism to care about other people? Why do we need the ‘whole bloody truth’ with pictures and indexes to feel engaged by others? Yes, books about ‘normal’ people are dull, Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody is unbearably tedious, but surely we don’t need books to see other people? Other people litter our lives yet we ignore them and give money and attention only to vogue suffering (Africa, popstars being shot at etc.)
We are interesting contradictions, we demand our privacy and yet want everyone to pay attention to us, we sell our anonymity for nothing, and when we can’t sell it we desperately try to give it away. Yet, what we try to give away, what we want to absorb from others is the superficial, the meaningless, the lack of humanity.
My favourite part of Ms Park’s book is when she is woken up by her mother giggling as the fridge (their first electric fridge) has just turned itself on. This is the real people behind the story, these are the people we should care about. The events of the book are tragic and heart breaking but only because underneath it all it happened to people for, under everything, we are all people and that, is the truth.
‘till next time
thegreaterfool2016 