Hate Mail - Denying An Accusation of Habitual Lying By Lying About What Was Said Proves My Point

I merely noted what what dear old John Mortimer said about the connection with the use of lying, bending the truth and deceit on the part of lawyers and judges in connection with writing for the stage and TV.  Even "documentaries" which have quite an interesting definition as constructed "reality" in the same article.   I wasn't the one making that connection, Mortimer did.  If you had done what I can count on you fans of such media never doing, reading the provided links supporting what I said, he was even more explicit about his dismissal of reality.

Life as a barrister never was terribly real to me and courtrooms were always a place of fantasy to me. They had nothing to do with discovering the truth, really, of course.

Well, maybe in his perusal of such things, he might have realized that unlike in his role in the drama, as a lawyer who didn't have any personal investment in the issues of a trial, once he took off his wig and bands and went back to his chambers or home, the people who were the subjects of the case didn't have that luxury, it was very real for them.

I don't really see much of a difference between his attitude and the attitude of the audience of "reality TV" shows or cabloid hate talk, the on-air talking heads and others who aren't much touched directly by the lies it sells.  John Mortimer was a nice guy, I'm sure, in his private life and even in his professional life, among his colleagues.  His indifference to those people whose lives were the raw material of his reality based legal career and who he used in his creation of fiction isn't any more admirable.  His convenience as a creator of TV and stage fiction is, in the hands of those who are also, so, enabled is far from inconsequential in real lives and in real deaths.

He also said:

Well, they were very nice to me, my parents; they were never nasty. And they did treat me as if I were grown up. I try and treat my children from the age of ten months as if they were totally grown up, which I think is the only way to treat children. But as for that lack of communication you mention, I’m very fond of that, I think. I hate people saying what they think. If you’re an American you must say what you think, whereas if you’re English you should say everything except what you think.

That's a charming thing to hear said by a semi-eccentric Brit, in regard to his upbringing by a real eccentric Brit, it's a recipe for poisoning democracy if taken seriously.  Our legal system, our alleged intelligentsia has adopted it.  Yet the alleged liberals who reserve that alienation from the necessity of thinking realistically for themselves are, then, perplexed to find that other people who, practicing the same level of fantasy in place of reality, come to quite different outcomes and vote for people like Reagan, the Bushes, Sarah Palin and, Lord help us, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or any of the others who our regime of "free press-speech" have resulted in.

While you might laugh now, you won't be laughing when the Republicans win another presidency and cement the present majority on the Supreme Court into place.   Failing to seriously address what they are doing now, of the regime of lies they enable, will not produce a decent, democratic society.  I think they are far more likely to lead to a violent, bloody moral catastrophe.  Moral relativism carries with it the almost certain conditions that will make a true, reality based democratic self-government impossible.   Everything that brought about the conditions that brought that about is what have brought us to the catastrophe where Donald Trump might be president.  Foremost among those, allowing hate-talk radio, cabloid and corporate TV and other media to lie with total abandon in pursuit of the profits of its owners and investors is certainly the foremost of those conditions.

I mean, TRUMP IS A TV CELEBRITY, THE CENTRAL FIGURE IN WHAT IS CALLED REALITY TV FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE SULLIVAN DECISION.  How much more obvious does it have to get for those of the "reality community" to see what's right there in front of their snotty noses before they see it?  George Orwell wouldn't have been surprised, though John Mortimer didn't seem to see it in the decades after his death. 

Update:  And, for those who remember the wake of PBS introducing an unreading American public into the charms of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, note what Mortimer says about the reality created by people consuming his screen play of the fantasy.

MORTIMER

Well, I was in Oxford during the war, during the blitz, and the blackout, and rationing, and a period of austerity. Although there were relics of the old Evelyn Waugh period, my Oxford was very different. I was very pleased to do Brideshead, which I remember reading at the time that it came out. In the forties everyone liked it because it took them away from the austerity, and it talked of a past, vanished age and wonderful golden youth and all that. And so it’s popular now, when there’s another age of austerity in Britain.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think accounts for its huge popularity in the U.S.?

MORTIMER

As to the popularity of it with the American audience, there’s a letter from Evelyn Waugh saying he never thought that more than eight Americans would like Brideshead. And now they have Lord Sebastian look-alike contests in the streets of San Francisco! I’m not sure it hasn’t done a terrible disservice to the world, with all of these young men being frightfully right wing and carrying teddy bears!

INTERVIEWER

I don’t believe you shared many values with Evelyn Waugh. Did this in any way cause difficulties for you in writing the adapation?

MORTIMER

Well, he was a great Catholic reactionary, and I’m a sort of an atheist and an inactive socialist. But on the whole I like the book and I love writing about religion. I mean I love writing about it, but I don’t have any religion.

INTERVIEWER

Did you therefore find it difficult to identify with Charles Ryder’s eventual religious awakening?

MORTIMER

No, I found that very easy. The difficulty I had with the character was his political stance, his behavior during the General Strike, which I could hardly bear to write about. And there’s also a scene in which he takes Rex out to dinner, in which he feels terribly superior because Rex chooses the wrong sort of food and the wrong glass. This I find unbelievably snobbish. I don’t mind his religion, but I do mind his snobbery. And he’s a difficult character because he’s the most boring character in the whole thing—and all the other characters are so good.

You really have to wonder about Mortimer not getting the connection between Waugh's and his aristocrat glorifying fiction and the promotion of aristocratic attitudes in reality in the Reagan years. And he's supposed to have been great and perceptive commentator on society and reality.  He knew it was happening, he commented on it, but he was able to keep a comfortable distance between his creation and the reality it led to.  That makes his comments about the General Strike section of the fantasy ring more than just a bit hollow.

Ryder's religion, the religion of Evelyn Waugh was certainly not based in the Gospel of Jesus, in the economic commandments of the Jewish Law, it is based in 18th and 19th century British economics and the legal system that was created to ensure those.   In the end, they aren't anywhere near as removed from John Mortimer's style of socialism as are The Law of Moses, the Jewish prophetic literature and the most radical of all of those, the Gospel of Jesus.  I don't think the  absence of the understanding of the relationships among those things, of  Mortimer's inability to see the relationships among those things is unrelated to his atheism.

update 2:  Where Do You Guys Think Such Idiocy Comes From If Not The Media Which Is The Source of It?

In checking on some hate mail, I notice, even as what I said was denied by his readers, Duncan Black notes that 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats want to bomb a fictional "Arab" country as seen in a Disney cartoon.

Here is what his typically terse "post" links to.

You can either use this to feel superior to the rather frightening percent of the media-informed American public who maintain such ignorant concepts, CONCEPTS ON WHICH THEY ARE QUITE ABLE TO BASE THEIR VERY REAL AND ENTIRELY EFFICACIOUS VOTES for your own preening edification or you can recognize the very real potential for disaster in that situation and the reasons for it and admit that an informed vote is damaged by allowing the media to fill peoples' minds with bigoted lies designed to make them hate Arabs and as a replacement for reality. That was the basis of the Bush II sale of its invasion of Iraq, which has mostly benefited terrorists and despots who use theocracy in their hold on power.