Do you swallow?

How much guff spewing forth from politicians, police, & media are the public going to swallow before they choke to death?

Apparently recent surveys indicate 14% of the folk think politicians tell the truth, 19% think journalists tell the truth and 63% believe the police tell the truth.  How gullible is the general public?

I've just been listening to John Humphrys interviewing Boris Johnson over the resignation of the Chief of Police Paul Stephenson over the phone hacking scandal.  I've never heard Boris Johnson sounding so unsure of himself.  He is normally a blustering, rather naive, straight forward guy.  Well he likes to wear that disguise.  But with the internet around, and so much information not only recorded but readily available to check and correlate, the old school tactic of convenient memory loss is losing its effectiveness.  He was struggling to defend the police chief and indeed himself.  The trouble is that these people have been used to getting away with saying whatever seems plausible at the time to deflect criticism or fudge the issue.  But more and more they are being held to account for their previous contradictory statements.

My irony is that I don't really care much about phone hacking.  I don't think it is half as bad as the 'shock horror' everyone seems so pleased to express.  The irony for me is that the people who are getting caught up in this affair are the ones who need to defend their secret communications because they are up to no good.  I don't get secrecy.  The only secrets I have found acceptable are things like surprise parties.  The trouble with secrecy is it is all part of the mechanism of control.  When you do the philosophical dissection of it all you soon realise that the only reason for keeping secrets is to stop others using information illegitimately but the very act of trying to hide the information becomes a kind of collusion with the illegitimate pursuits.  After all, we are all human and we do what humans do.  What exactly are we pretending to be, such that the 'truth' can be used against us.

This murky business of the phone hacking scandal is getting all the corrupt folk rushing around in a panic.  It is spreading like wild fire through the police, the media and politics.  A contractual arrangement between Neil Wallis and the metropolitan police existed where he was paid £1,000 per day for 'consultation'.  Andy Coulson, who was arrested over the phone hacking affair, was employed by David Cameron.  John Yates, the current assistant commissioner of the metropolitan police, is about to be investigated.  Rebekah Brooks has been arrested too.  Of course she was metaphorically in bed with David Cameron but can you be charged with metaphorical adultery?  And the question David might ask is does she swallow?  She appears to expect everyone else to.  The whole affair is a complete mess.  A bunch of compulsive liars.  But will the culture of arrogance and assumed impunity, control and manipulation, greed and corruption, actually get addressed and sorted?  With the impending financial collapse of the Western World I doubt it.  At the end of the day, as the Joker so aptly put it in The Dark Knight "When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other."