So it’s 5:20am and I’ve pretty much given up on going to sleep tonight, maybe tomorrow, we’ll see.

Thought I might as well do this instead as I haven’t posted for a while and subsequently have a bit of a backlog of posts getting in the way of other things in my head. Also, the fact that I’ve finally got myself a shit hot little mac laptop, instead of that clunky old PC, means I don’t actually have to get out of bed.

So who enjoyed their Christmas(1)?

I hope you all did, personally I’m just glad it’s over because, and here we reach somewhere approaching a point, I hate Christmas.

Now the vague point currently shimmering ahead is that that statement is kind of a lie.

I generally find myself feeling pretty shitty at this time of year and there are a whole host of reasons for that. This year and last I’ve spent Christmas Eve and Day looking after my Grandma, who has dementia and watching my parents get even more stressed out than usual.

So you see maybe it’s not Christmas’s fault. I do recognise that it’s a great time for a lot of people and I’d even go so far as to recognise that maybe in the future it will be for me.

Down at the bottom of this hole however, the one I’ve been digging all my life, I just can’t seem to shake those three words: I hate Christmas.

They feel true, even though I know they’re technically not so the question is, is that a lie?

I sense some debate regarding the nature of intent looming over the horizon. Unfortunately, as the gut instinct nature of the feeling in question means that I have no clue as to what my intentions are when it comes to that little bit of Scrooge, there’s not a great deal of mileage in that one.

How about a whole other kind of lie?

If we’re talking about lies and liars we may as well turn to the pros.

Do any of us really expect a single word that falls from a politician’s lips to be truthful? Well if you do I afford you the same exasperated and bitter respect I lend to religious types. That relentless insistence, that insanely blind faith in something that patently cannot be true, even at the daily expense of children’s lives.

Anyway, let’s be clear here. The standard, outright, black = white bullshit on which our society is founded is not what I’m getting at here.

Just to clarify consider Blair the other day, explaining via his trademark self righteous arrogance exactly why the Serious Fraud Office was required by our Attorney General to drop their investigation into BAE Systems.

It wasn’t a case of the Saudis clicking their fingers and our government backflipping like a little bitch, no, no. Prosecutions only proceed in this country if they are deemed to be in the public interest, and apparently this one wasn’t.

Everyone knew this was a lie, though how many knew that the international legislation we endorse and insist third world countries observe states very clearly that national interest can never take priority over a corruption investigation.

I’m assuming this is because said corruption will always be against the national interest in the long run and, just perhaps, because said corruption generally kills children one way or another, albeit brown children far away, (which apparently seems to be not quite as bad.)

So now we’re clear on which point isn’t being made here let’s get back to what is.

The fundamental flaw in the democratic system is that a politician’s overriding priority can only ever be getting elected. Regardless of how good or noble they may be, they can’t put any of it into action without power and so the acquisition of power supersedes everything else.

It’s with this caveat in place that we arrive at the second flavour of lie.

When politicians tell you how much money leaves this country to aid needy people elsewhere in the world I think they probably do generally believe it.

Unfortunately it turns out that for every US$ received from the west by a struggling third world nation, four US$ leave that country headed for the west, usually via multinational corporations, thanks to the corruption that is standard working practice across the globe.

Again the issue of intent raises its head hopefully, is it a lie if you honestly don’t know it’s untrue? Considering this specific circumstance in isolation I’d be tempted to suggest that the responsibility they have to ensure they are informed turns the lack of intent into negligence but wait, there’s something else going on here.

So we’ve had don’t know if it’s a lie and we’ve had don’t know it’s a lie, where to go from here? How about knowing it’s a lie but believing it anyway?

Sound crazy? Well it is really, but I bet you’ve done it today.

Telling yourself you don’t have a choice when quite clearly you do, that’s a damn lie.

Intent? It’s entirely intentional, in order to motivate yourself to do something you don’t want to do, you convince yourself that you don’t have a choice. ‘I have to go to work,’ would be a very common example of this.

So there we have three icy flavours of lie, a Neapolitan of deception if you like.

The fact is that, one way or another, pretty much everything you eve here will be some kind of lie and the traditional interpretation of this assessment would be to suggest that the world is simply a terrible place.

Before we all start buying the Daily Mail and blaming asylum seekers for our missing odd socks however there’s another question to ask.

What’s really at fault here; the world, or our perception of how it should be?

It’s really very simple: question and ponder everything, or least the most you can manage, because at the end of the day you are responsible for who you are and what you do.

If I tell you you can fly and you jump off the roof, then sure I’m a liar, but you’re the one with broken legs.

footnote

(1) the Mass of the Christ makes me uncomfortable, not because it carries any spiritual connotations but precisely because it does not, very little of Christmas tradition has anything to do with Christianity, (the date for example happens to be at the same time as the far, far older traditional mid winter festival,) and very little of Christian tradition has anything to do with Christ, (but generally quite a bit to do with the politics of the middle ages,)
for me the whole thing smacks of the long since forgotten but highly successful conquering of our souls by the monotheistic elite, the uprooting of our grassroots faith in our own ability to survive and the laying down of grey, grey concrete power structures and guilt,
I love the idea of celebrating the winter solstice, it really means something to me on several levels, I just hate that it’s still being held hostage by the dream of a brat in a barn,