Leakage.

Covid19 relies on leakage. In one person it either kills and/or is extinguished in less than two weeks, not counting convalescence. In the first four days you don’t know you’ve got it and your not contagious, after that you are but severely hampered by feeling like shit. But it sure as hell knows how to leak from one person to another. Somehow in the face of this one exploit our current government looks like a confused geriatric Dodo. Several million travellers entered the UK un-quarantined after we knew it was leaking world wide. Huge leak. After a further leaking delay we went into lock-down which was also leaky because we could go shopping etc. After three months we’ve got the leaking steady at about one for one which in itself is dangerously close to exponential leaking. And now in a reckless attempt to make this whole governmental mess appear successful we’re being offered more opportunities to leak. And this is probably a month before we have a workable test-trace-whatever thing. Another huge leak forward.

It’s not that politicians are stupid it’s that they have totally the wrong skill set for dealing with a pandemic. They are trained in self-confidence, privilege, rhetoric and parliamentary procedure. They have no understanding of the scientific method, real world problem solving, how the majority of us live and in this case the vital importance of timing. They are far closer to actors living off approval than other professions that live off results. They have converted any expert ‘advice’ unknowingly into a fragmented muddle primarily aimed at making their performance look good to the audience. So what have we learnt? It’s nice having a slower paced life rather than frenetic pressure. Zoom etc makes working from home more viable than we thought. Far less traffic is a godsend and the air feels cleaner. The garden’s looking amazing in the sunshine. We can get so many ‘home’ things done. Fashion’s not that important. We know how courageous and valuable our NHS is. Celebrities at home are no different to us. We’ll know what to do when the next pandemic comes. And possibly most important of all, we know if we sleep walk into a poor, corrupt Parliament people will die and our kids will pay for it for decades.

Yesterday I watched the final race in the 2016 British Superbikes series. It was a titanic struggle between two guys showing ultimate skill, commitment and bravery. The winner was drained and in tears and the loser was the first to congratulate him. They had brought out the best in each other. It’s like that in sport; it’s honest. Our Parliament is corrupt because it’s not like that in our politics. It has become, ‘who can dupe the populous best’, and honesty can’t win at that game.

Get Cummings Done.

One can only imagine the Dom/Boris conversation. ‘She’s coming down with it/ We can’t do without you/ Can I take her to her mothers?/ Of course dear boy.’ One could also imagin a news headline the following day, ‘Advisor’s family rushed to grandparents by official car to safeguard government.’ But true to DC’s way he opted to do it himself. I imagine he sees himself as a Bletchley Park back-room operative making history without being a visible part of it. He’d cracked the code of British political propaganda, the three word phrase, and it’s ‘All gone Pear-shaped.’ (ignore the hyphon) So is there a deeper truth here, that if you live by subterfuge you will die by subterfuge? And the same goes for being too clever by half. The distortions used to win the referendum and elections, the deceptive vacuous assertions that underpin our current government’s political rhetoric are coming face to face with their maker. Dominic Cummings actions on that car journey were best justifiable and at worst immaterial but the public outcry of genuine anger is palpable, if unfathomable by Conservative ministers. It’s a reaction to the rank puss of their own disingenuousness; the oily smell of a dead body. But it’s their time in the sun, their culmination, each one clinging to the lead Lilo of the office they’d so long dreamt of. Yes they’re out of their depth but the British public could forgive that. Being deceived, duped, lied to and treated as stupid we won’t forgive, especially by those ‘who serve us’ in public office. So could the man who handed power to the Conservatives have driven it away in 220 miles? Can we be saved from the UK being the 53^rd US state with Boris as State governor rather than our own PM? Can Keir Starmer hold the dagger of calm truth to the throat of this gang of rogue boys? Series two will be out in the fall, sorry autumn. And now to the commercial break.

The Other Pandemic.

We all know the words; dishonesty, duplicity, deception, spin, misinformation etc, all the million names we have for lying. Honesty is speaking and acting on what you know to be true irrespective of repercussions.

Ever since the human brain expanded to cope with our complex socialisation we have had a dilemma, to act for the common good or for our own personal advantage by means of deception. Deception is our unique invention as a species, at least at the levels we employ it. As such it defines our social order from the rich and powerful to the turf wars of drug gangs and the millions in-between. it’s that part of our brain that asks, “How do I get the better of the rest?” In our many hundreds of years of history this question has been played out like a contagious virus many million times. It’s hardly a coincidence then that we’re experiencing two pandemics at the same time, one the Coronavirus and two a pandemic of untruths where the ‘healthy’ truth is almost dead and buried by an explosion of duplicity. This non-coincidence is because at every stage in its progression Coronavirus has been aided by our growing capacity for falsehood.

One can condemn lying on a moral level as we’ve done for many years, but when the escalating effects of it could well lead us to extinction by virus, global warming and environmental destruction the result becomes far more explicit than a debatable moral judgement. Basically we have thought and still think ‘we can get away with it’, but this humanity changing circumstance is proving we can’t, not any longer. But it’s hard for those who prosper by lieing to throw off that protective cloak: Profits may suffer, I might lose my job or be crucified on social media, my country might be weakened, I might lose popularity, I’m frightened; all things that appear to require multiple layers of dishonesty to continue. In my own lifetime I have seen this pandemic grow as dishonesty becomes the bedrock of success and the avoidance of failure, from the selling of chocolate to the acquisition of wealth and propagation of state power: all based on deception. The problem and the reason for our jeopardy is that that thing out there called reality only works on truth, it is it, it defines it. And when we shout, “No this is the truth” when it isn’t is like a little kid fighting a bear; the poor thing ain’t never going to win the argument, and likely as not will die. And reality has way less sympathy than a bear. So while we’re busy fighting the Coronavirus as if our life depends on it could we also formulate a vaccine to expunge dishonesty?