It’s a week now since I closed the front door on the world. Since then I’ve contended with a burgeoning headache and a slowly escalating panic. Every cough brings with it a worry that this is it, I’m going to end my days sat between these four walls wondering where the hell I put the can opener.
Rationalising the headache, it’s probably a combination of my tinnitus, which has been in a particularly vengeful mood, constantly Tweeting and Facebooking on my phone and the stress of having very little to do other than tidy up (again), make meals and act as my own tech support, which carries its own particular stresses.
One of the things about adverse circumstances that has struck me is the propensity for people to seek a blame object. Today, I read of a 5g cell phone tower in Birmingham being set alight. It hasn’t been clearly established the perpetrator was fighting against the global conspiracy to control us all by 5g, or not, but it seems likely in these strained times. Yesterday, in California, a train driver tried to ram a military hospital ship in LA Harbour. Again, we’re not sure about the exact reason for his attack, except he said he wanted to get the truth out.
I’m not sure this is the tip of a nasty iceberg, or just a couple of adjacent, but isolated incidents. A quick look at #conspiracy on Twitter tends to suggest the former. There are thousands of Tweets revealing “the truth” about Corvid, but even then, as numerous as Twitter users are, they aren’t that many in terms of the global population and many of them are at the far end of the shitty stick. Right now, I’m guessing most people are feeling bored by the monotony, but still rather pleased they’re not in work and can get on with building that barbecue in the yard, or a bit of decorating. Five weeks in, or so, that might change and a little bit of anger will start bubbling to the surface. Who that will be direct at is moot. The big failings like austerity driven underinvestment in health services are easily misdirected. We have already seen that with the Brexit vote in Britain and Trump’s election in the US. The establishment blames “The Establishment”, but not them, it’s the other establishment – the metropolitan elites, the EU, the Clintons etc. It worked then and it will work again. They’re clever enough to find a new bogeyman. What or whom that will be is open to conjecture.
The current attacks on the BBC by government supporters suggests it might be in the firing line. Today, Naga Munchetty is getting it in the neck for holding Health Minister Matt Hancock to account on BBC Breakfast, but not a day goes by without some form of misdirection about the Beeb spreading across the internet. The unfortunate aspect of this is the liberal side of the argument is quite lack lustre, mostly because of the supine role the BBC has played in the last decade by NOT holding the government to account and for not being all that balanced in its reporting of the Brexit debate.
The BBC will argue otherwise and claim that it has given time to both sides of the argument throughout this period. They do so knowing full well that if someone with presentational skills comes on one of their programmes claiming rabbits are carnivores, balancing it with an expert in rabbits who has all the presence of a six week old pineapple isn’t really fair. People don’t want facts, they want confirmation of their particular prejudices and if meat eating rabbits are part of their paradigm, or at least the current narrative is it is part of their paradigm, then they’ll back it up to the hilt no matter how irrational it is.
That’s the key thing about politics and football mentality – the supporters will always back their team, right or wrong.
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