A clip on Instagram shows a herd of sheep. Each time the cameraman says anything the herd erupts into a mass bleat. “nice day”- baaaa, “who wants a banana?”- baaaa as regular as clockwork. Funny but worryingly surreal in these days of fake news and call and response politics. Brexit has become as gripping as Peaky Blinders and we’re closing in on the final episodes of season 2. Politics has become entertainment and as such is beholden to the intrigue of plot twists rather than the truth of some far off reality. We’re reading our reality like it’s a book of entertaining fiction, a gripping who-done-it, a game of Cluedo. And only when a rainstorm turns its pages to pulp in our hands might we see it for what it is. Reality has a continuous thread to it, like piecing back together a complex faulty mechanism. Only by following that thread to its conclusion can we successfully make it work. Each conjecture must be resolved, each relationship understood and each part assembled correctly. But fiction can take any form, it being merely the produce of a mind for other minds to unpick. Each time a political actor does something for effect he or she is introducing a source of fiction, casting a hairline crack in the wheel of progress. At some point though not immediately it will fail to some unforeseen calamity. So Fake News is the province of the losing side because ultimately who would bet a fiction against a fact and win? And pity them as follows not seeing the difference.
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