Liar taming

That a movie star could soon be the governor of California should not surprise us. Politicians are movie stars, or at least the cream of them are. They move in the same rarefied world of luxury – big houses, big cars, fine dining in fancy restaurants, travel, three, four holidays a year in places the ordinary man saves his wages for two years to visit. They stay in hotels, they are paid small fortunes, their lives are comfortable and always will be (once booted out of office to allow another pig to get its snout into the trough, they will take up directorships, speaking engagements and their pensions).
What they are not is people like us. They don't know what it is to struggle to pay the rent, to have no real future, to have to look for a job (they may once have done but those days are gone, long gone, for them now).
Why should we feel they make decisions for us? They don't share our interests.
Like movie stars, their lives are disjointed, the pretences more important than whatever would be real if they could recognise reality any more.
They play a game of gaffes and blunders (that telling the truth could have been so reduced – that speaking your mind can be so scorned), jockeying for position, the pursuit of one another's resignation, debates that are empty substitutes for allowing us to decide our own fates because when the talking is over, the cabal at the top makes the decisions without reference to it, and toadying so sickening you wonder how they can stand to do it, until you see the rewards: seventy grand for half a year's work, seventy more for staff, twenty in subsistence, the ministerial car, first-class travel, the houses, the flats, the flunkies, your own coterie of arsekissers, your face on TV, holidays masquerading as factfinding trips paid for by lobbyists, dinners, gifts for the missus and kids ditto.
Once every four years or so we're asked to play our part in the game. It's a bit like being invited to the circus and picking which clown gets a job and which must spend the next few years heckling. This isn't democracy. It's a means of disempowering us, a means of robbing us of the ability of ever saying, actually, we'd like the circus to leave town and do the juggling, falling down and whatever else for ourselves.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:09 pm