mon 07 jan 2008 15:36:48 — witte de withstraat
truth wants a volcano
recently in kenya and then in georgia, opposition supporters have become furious when they thought election results were rigged in favor of the incumbent. in kenya the emotions slipped off into opportunism, lotsa looting and killing people from rival tribes.
next up i think is pakistan, where the delayed elections are due in february. results seem likely to be disputed there too. after bhutto's murder they've already had plenty of bloodshed there.
of course i always root for the opposition, for no good reason, just because i don't like incumbency itself. of course it buys an opposition leader no sympathy when we see his supporters hauling new TV sets from shattered shopglass.
to be honest i don't really want the opposition to come to power either. i want all political parties to lose by a landslide. or better yet, a mudslide.
so now, is it just me, or is this happening more often, that people assume elections are rigged? or is it the same as it's always been, only i'm seeing it in the news more? certainly a brilliant example was set in 2000 in the western hemisphere. maybe that was the kickstart of the era of big doubt.
what i do find striking is to see interviewees in the street stating that an election was surely rigged -- as if they already had forensic evidence to prove it. same goes for the incumbents in their offices stating that there was absolutely *no* fraud. how can they actually know?
people get in the news just for having an opinion or a wish. their axe-to-grind *is* the story. not the truth.
help, we can't stop the machine, it's sucking new 'reality' out of nowhere!
we hear more people publicly stating, as fact, things they can't possibly know. so as time goes on, more of us doubt the truth of what we are told. now we distrust democracy itself. meanwhile, our sense of reality is increasingly shaped by what we know (for a fact) is pure fantasy. reality TV is preeminent. reality itself is irrelevant.
so our crisis of truth is intensifying.
what the truth needs is a nice volcanic eruption. there's one in ecuador now. and freak snowstorms and floods in california, not long after a bout of raging wildfires.