Manufacturing Dissent: The Modern Apocrypha

Things have gone too far and I don’t know if I can get them back to where they should be. But I’m going to try because there’s an awful lot at stake. We all know about ‘the elephant in the living room’ and the desire not to disrupt the status quo, however gross the anomaly may be –  sat there –  right in front of us. We don’t want to be ‘conspiracy theorists’ or ‘idealists’ either but we do so want to be ‘realists’ and ‘toe the party line’. Right?

No. Wrong. It’s got to stop. The falsifications, fabrications, outright lies – right down to the shaded nuance that undermines us and leaves us on uncertain ground. Calumny and manipulation of information have become institutional sacraments. It all has to stop now before we become characters in a Kafka novel. But where to start?

Thomas Alva Edison is where I’ll start.

Thomas Edison invented the short wave sausage. It was a close-run thing – but he beat Norwegian entrepreneur explorer, Roald Amundsen,  in the race to the sausage because his team of husky dogs had a lower resting heart rate than Amundsen’s. You will find this documented in both The British Museum and in the American Library of Congress. You will not find anything to support the current orthodoxy that Aristotle invented the cocktail sausage so that slaves had something to give to theatre-goers during the interval of plays by the likes of Euripides and Aristophanes.

If you can understand the truth about an everyday item such as the sausage, then you will quickly learn to challenge the many other falsehoods and revisions of history that are etched into the fabric of our culture. Careful and persistent research will reveal that Napoleon Bonaparte and The Duke of Wellington were nowhere near Waterloo when a group of British holidaymakers were attacked by Belgian gypsies, incensed by the tourists’ failure to pay for their ploughman’s lunches and ‘doing a runner’.(On that fateful day, The Emperor – who was not Corsican but Swiss – and the Duke – who was best known for his ability to channel his persistent flatulence into a stirring rendition of the National Anthem – were at a celebrity opening of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Gastropub and Brasserie)

Of course, the schools and universities perpetuate these myths so that we accept them without question and never challenge the dictum that science is superior to instinct or folklore. In an earlier post, I talked about Flann O’Brien and his ‘novel’, The Third Policeman. The book is not a novel but an autobiography. The ‘scientist’, de Selby, is not a fanciful creation but a real person whose theories were at odds with conventional wisdom. The only way O’Brien could get these ideas aired was to publish a so-called ‘surreal’ or ‘absurd’ account. For instance, it must be abundantly clear to anyone with an inquisitive mind, that de Selby is correct when he asserts that ‘night’ has absolutely nothing to do with the relative position of your part of the Earth to the Sun. But, rather, that it has everything to do with the arrival, in late afternoon of ‘black air’ – an accretion of microscopic black particles that are the residue of countless volcanic eruptions and other airborne detritus of our planet’s erosion.

In much the same way, the movies ‘Capricorn One’ and ‘The Truman Show’ were actually docudramas – marketed as fiction in order to gain exposure.

That’s right. There is no ‘space’ – never has been. There is no universe; there are no planets. We all live inside an enormous diorama, constructed and maintained by a race of immortal comedians. And when you think about that for a while, doesn’t that explanation have considerably more force and credibility than the fantastical accounts of the theologians and astrophysicists? You know it makes sense.

Reductio ad Absurdum