The Bitch and Redundant Truth!

Well Darlings,

If I were to ask who the most unpopular and disliked people are today, I doubt it would take anyone long to come up with politicians or bankers, and probably both. We take at face value what these people tell us at our peril. However when you stop to analyze the reason for this, you find they are only a small part of a great culture we live in today.

When cars are advertised not for their performance, safety, miles per gallon, comfort, spaciousness, or even reliability, but deceptively on what the latest computer graphics technology can make them appear to do in a commercial, irrelevant things they can never really do, why should we be surprised when a politician or a banker equally doesn't produce what they pretend? We have developed a culture based on being deceived, almost as a form of self-harm, a kind of penance - but for what?

So much scientific research has been carried out, so many serious articles written, and television documentaries made, to prove there is no magic lotion that can ever make anyone younger or rollback the aging process, and yet knowing this there is a whole army of people who cumulatively spend billions of pounds annually on products that claim to do just that. The manufacturers often produce statistics for satisfied customers, but does anyone question these? They are usually based on a number so small as to be insignificantly meaningless, and when produced in percentage terms, as they so often are to make the product look good, if you were to stop and do the arithmetic you will all too often find they result in a fraction of a person being involved.

I have to ask: just who are all these part-people? They are turning up everywhere! Do they actually exist? Have they limbs missing, or maybe organs? I've heard of bit players, but this is ridiculous! Do you think perhaps they are just the product of numbers thought up on the spur of the moment to impress us? Statistics plucked from the sky?

Then there are the many shampoos, conditioners, hair dyes, and not forgetting those annoying eyelash brushes, where claims are made so outrageous that they are only permissible because of a small and hardly readable disclaimer flashed onto the bottom of the screen, usually at the very moment the viewer needs to view "the end result" of the manufacturer's claims and therefore won't attempt to read it. If using a certain eyelash brush doesn't suddenly produce the actual extensions they employ in the advertisement's end result, or a particular shampoo doesn't automatically implant those hair extensions, then why do they use them? Is it to deceive us? Or is it because the manufacturers believe people like to be deceived?

Could it be that by lying and deceiving, politicians and bankers think they are actually pleasing us, and only doing what we expect of them in this strange culture, or do you think, perhaps like the majority of us, they no longer have a clue as to what the truth means? I fear the truth has become an unnecessary commodity today, an embarrassment, until now I am forced to believe it is almost redundant.

Where is the truth to be found on: Iraq, Afghanistan, and winning or losing those wars, our crime figures, the state of education, the nation's health service, or on anything really today? Sometimes I feel like I'm bobbing around in a murky stew; one that's not to my taste. Pass the pepper, please!

The Bitch! 29/07/10.