Nothing but an unedited stream of semi-consciousness...

It can be difficult, mused a muse, that parody and satire can be lost at times when fact seems to encroach upon fiction. Or indeed simply replaces it. In a world where facts about misconduct are simply denounced as lies and 'fake news' is not so much the problem because it has always been thus. It has commonly been the case that an individual or company or government would simply state that some piece of news reported about them, or even just scurrilously repeated down the local bar, is a lie and then there would be hundred of hours of investigation by people that believe it is true and that this truth should be reported as such and that the perpetrators should be called out about their misdeeds. And so it came to pass that huge organizations were brought low, political careers were ended, marriages destroyed or even wars started. By truth. And things have not changed so much, except now of course, the lies and mistruths are now more greatly accepted as being true. And when more evidence is placed in front of the jury of public opinion, the jury throws rotten tomatoes at the presenter and dismisses the evidence as yet more fakeness! And so it comes to pass that children stop getting vaccinated, and distraught parents grieve at a funeral with a small white box containing a child that could have lived. Or companies move jobs to a more suitable country with better opportunities and jobs disappear while the countries leaders proclaim there is a bright new future just over the horizon. Or new hospitals get built only they are not so new after all and anyway, there is nobody to staff them even when they are built but that's ok because there is no money to both build and staff them after all, not yet, not until the future arrives. And jobs in mines are back in vogue and maybe also jobs in clothes mills and on canals and in steel mills and on shipyards, but it doesn't matter very much because the coal that's produced is too expensive to buy and too dirty to burn and clothes produced are only for the wealthy because only the wealthy can afford them and canals are clogged with weeds or dilapidated Victorian architecture collapses as it has never been maintained or ships produced are simply not really good enough. And education is something that everybody seems to have but more people than ever before have degrees and a debt bill for life to go with it but the degrees don't provide what the country needs because there can only be so many hotel managers and media consultants and film editors but never enough engineers or physicists or surgeons or micro biologists but that's ok because while the border is sealed shut for damned Europeans coming over to serve coffee or make beds but the back door is unlocked and open for the whole world of those educated in something that is of great use in their originating country but a mirage has tempted them to move to a terrace house in the north until the veils are lifted from their eyes and the reality of once great country built on the backs of the poor and the weak and payments in the form of tributes from people that might one day want them back again and the reality bites that the country is actually broken and battered and bruised and might just never see again the good times that have been promised by a million politicians who continue to tell them that anything other than their words is simply another example of lies and fake news and that, if you just close your eyes and really really believe, then everything will be ok and the sun will shine and everything you have ever wanted will be yours for the asking. And just to help you achieve everything you ever wanted there will be moneylenders who will give you as much as you desire and more than you need and can afford and if you cannot afford it that will be ok because you can have some more and more and more and when you find that everything you wanted has actually gone and everything you thought you wanted is being taken away and when you have nothing but a doorway to sleep in and the cheapest secondhand sleeping bag from the cheapest suburban supermarket and that is your life and the moneylenders find that when the people they borrowed from want their money back and they cannot have it because there is more lent than exists and then the government gives the moneylenders more money and takes it from those in sleeping bags in shop doorways because they deserved it for believing they wanted what they did not want and don't have and will never have again. That will not be a truth either, it will simply be fake news and those that are still believing it only fake news and not real will walk past those in the shop doorways and will ignore them because they did not believe and if they had simply believed and did as they were told then they would not be living in a doorway of a shop long since closed because there were more people in the doorway than coming through the door. But no worries, it is just fake news, close your eyes and go back to sleep, it'll all be ok. Just don't surrender.