If you want lies, you'll get liars

It’s a lazy, easy accusation against politicians to say they all lie. In reality, many politicians only lie because it works. They’ve understood that enough voters want to hear their lies and believe them, which makes the right lies, told well, the quickest way to get power and to hang on to it.

The American journalist and writer H L Mencken summed up the process quite neatly, starting with a point I’ve felt for a long time: politicians – perhaps I should say most politicians – have no special aptitude for government, only an aptitude for getting into government.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

I’m not sure about its never being possible to satisfy B without looting A. After all, if US healthcare hadn’t been allowed to keep festering, and the British NHS hadn’t been repeatedly hacked at, for the last ten years, wouldn’t both A and B have benefited from better services in our present pandemic?

Perhaps I’m a little less cynical than Mencken. Or am I just less realistic?

What interests me most, though, is Mencken’s reference to the process of finding people who “pant and pine” for a promise that is unlikely to be kept. Isn’t that the incentive for politicians to lie? Or, put it in other words, if you want politicians to lie to you, isn’t it likely that you’ll end up with lying politicians?

Vote for lies and you'll get liars

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are saddled, for now, with political leaders for whom the lie seems to be as natural as breathing. At the start of the Coronavirus crisis, the UK Prime Minister claimed that the NHS was fully prepared for any eventuality. As well as the impressive rate of growth of deaths generally in the UK, the number of deaths of healthcare workers denied adequate protective equipment, proves how entirely false that statement was. Johnson’s good at thanking front-line staff for their courage and selflessness, less good at protecting them.

Trump’s lies have been more barefaced still, and compounded by irresponsible ignorance. Having suggested that injecting disinfectant might protect against the virus, whereas it’s much more likely to kill you, he attempted on the following day, to pass off the comment as “sarcasm”. That’s even though hundreds of millions have been able to see him on TV making the remark without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

At least a large minority of Americans seem happy to maintain their trust in Trump despite his being caught repeatedly in easily exposed lies. In the UK, the position is worse: a majority of the electorate still believes in Johnson, however often he shows he can’t be trusted. They “pant and pine” to be told what they want to hear, especially in the atmosphere of fear that comes with a crisis,  when it’s comforting to believe government is looking after you,

Most recently, the UK government has made a number of unrealisable promises, just as Mencken warned. One was that the UK would be carrying out Coronavirus tests at a rate of 100,000 a day by the end of April. By the 29th, we had reached some 81,611, though that included people receiving more than one test in a day.

Then suddenly, on the 30th, the day of the deadline, the UK reached 122,347. A brilliant success. The Health Secretary manfully and modestly claimed it as a triumph not for himself, but for the Health Service. A matter for celebration, in any case.

Sadly, a lot of people, anxious to believe whatever they’re told by the government, will take that as gospel. But when we look at the detail, we see that those 122,347 tests actually only affected 73,000 people. Mark Twain once commented that:

Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

Indeed. Most people understood that 100,000 target to mean 100,000 people tested, but if you do enough repeat tests on the same people, you can get there with just 73,000 people. Dexterous sleight of hand.

A still more curious fact is that 39,000 of those tests weren’t actually carried out on the 30th. They were sent to people who had ordered them. Who knows when the tests will be used? Or whether they’ll be used at all?

So people actually tested on the last day of the month may have been under 40,000.

That reminds me of one of the classic lies: “the cheque is in the post”.

How about “the test is in the post”?

Believe it if you want. But if you do, you’ll only be asking to be deceived again. And right now, a lot of people are dying.

Opera: it's all Welsh to me

The promotional material for the Welsh National Opera (WNO) spring programme has turned up.

The WNO in Spring 2017

The company’s staging Madame Butterfly. It seems the “much loved WNO production of Puccini’s tale of love and betrayal returns for limited performances”. I was a little disappointed. After all, they’re charging full price for the tickets, so it strikes me they could fully commit to the production. A limited performance? Count me out.

The WNO is the Welsh equivalent of the English National Opera (ENO), a fine opera company that stages its productions in English. 

Yes, you read that correctly. The statement applies to both companies. You thought the WNO might stage its performances in Welsh? Think again.

There are some 53 million people living in England. Tacked on to the northern end of the country, for now (at least until the next independence referendum), there are nearly 6 million Scots. Pretty much all the Scots speak English, or some dimly recognisable variant of it, and little else. Even within Wales, only about half a million of the 3 million people speak Welsh at all. 

It’s my belief that few even of those really speak it. They can probably pronounce Llanelli correctly, but I doubt they could give you directions in Welsh for how to get there (and why would you want them to, anyway?)

So, the WNO sings in English. And why does that matter? Anyone who answered, “so we can understand the words” can go right to the back of the class. No one understands the words in opera. That’s why they have supertitles, spelling out the words in a great banner above the stage.

And that helps? If you answered “yes”, you really aren’t doing well in this class.

Understanding the words in opera does nothing to improve comprehension. It merely replaces the question, “what are they saying?” by a still more baffling, “why are they bothering to say it?” In opera, it’s best to leave a desire for understanding at the door and just enjoy the music.

That works fine if it isn’t Wagner. Mark Twain, right about so many things, was spot on when he said that, “Wagner's music is better than it sounds.” I once went to a performance of the Ring cycle – the whole thing, four sessions, fourteen hours – and I can confirm Twain’s view.

I say “once” not just because it’s not an experience that I’ve been gasping to repeat in the intervening three or four decades, but because I was surrounded by people for whom it clearly wasn’t a joy to be indulged in only once. At the interval, they were all talking about how that year’s performance compared with last year’s (poorly, apparently) and reminiscing over great productions of the past, in some cases ten or more years previously. 

Wagner, apparently, doesn’t attract appreciation, but worship.

If you’re stuck, as I was, with appreciation, you’re in for a tough time. I spent the first couple of hours hoping for an aria to come along, and then the next twelve trying to adapt to the notion that none was going to, a sense fully confirmed when the final curtain fell.

Still. If they’d been singing in English I don’t imagine the experience would have been any less obscure for me than it was in German.

Why, I could have coped with Welsh and been no less enlightened.

The US and counter-insurgency: not a formula for success

Imagine the following scenario.

The United States comes under attack, losing a number of lives of citizens who were expecting no aggression. The response within the country is one of horror, and a growing desire to hit back against the threat. As a result, American forces begin action around the globe, including regions not apparently in the least connected with the original outrage.

In one country, a long way from home, US troops are initially greeted as liberators from a previous autocratic regime. However, as it becomes clear that the they intend to overstay their welcome, an insurgency develops against the occupation. The US engage in a long and often brutal battle, inflicting heavy losses, including many among the civilian population. In some instances, they commit what it would be hard not to regard as war crimes.

There is no accurate count of the number of local casualties. Estimates range between 34,000 and 200,000. At no point does it become clear that the US action in any way addresses the issue that originally precipitated it.

Does that all sound drearily familiar?

Well, I’m not talking about the 9/11 attack or about the US response in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor, therefore, am I thinking of the possibly 200,000 lives lost during the US battle against the Iraq insurgency.

No. The trigger event, that whipped up the war fever in the States, was the sinking of the US cruiser Maine in Havana harbour. Why in Havana? Because Cuba was then a Spanish possession facing a local uprising for independence; the Maine was there to cow the Spanish and provide tacit support to the independence movement.

A US commission concluded she’d been struck by a mine.

Interestingly, more recent scholarship suggests that the ship blew up because of an internal explosion. It may have been caused by burning gas from the boilers reaching the magazine and the ammunition it contained.

The incident led to the Spanish-American war of 1898. US forces took on the Spanish in a number of theatres around the world, including the Philippines. Which is where the counter-insurgency I mentioned took place.

Like Cuba, the Spanish colony of the Philippines was in a state of turbulence. A struggle for independence had started two years earlier. Many in the movement at first saw the arrival of the American troops as an aid in their struggle, but it soon became clear that they weren’t there to free the islands, only to replace one form of foreign domination by another.

Mark Twain – yes, he of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fame – outlined how few enemy soldiers were generally killed in American battles, even in the Civil War. He then described the deaths that occurred when US forces surrounded insurgents, including women and children, in the Moro crater, an extinct volcano:

...with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded... The enemy numbered six hundred – including women and children – and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

The Moro Crater massacre
Unedifying. And sadly setting a precedent.

Were you upset about the conduct of the Iraq War? About the outrages in Abu Ghraib prison? About the senseless waste of civilian lives?

Sadly, none of these things were new. The war in the Philippines ended, in theory, in 1902. The Moro Crater massacre took place in 1906.

The conclusion? We didn’t learn much in the century that followed. And, by failing to learn from our errors, we committed them all over again – with ISIS as our reward.

A pity Mark Twain’s powerful sarcasm echoed so little with Blair and Bush when it should have.