A.L. Kennedy

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Just because information is rich, it doesn’t mean that the truth can’t get lost. Sometimes it gets buried–or perhaps just ignored. From A.L. Kennedy’s BBC News Magazine essay:

“Among other forms of resistance, torture produces whistle-blowers, people who can walk into buildings infected with inhumanity and remain human. They make the truth of torture known, sometimes at great personal risk. It seems, in fact, an epidemic of various concealments and deceptions is giving rise to a wider and wider whistle-blowing response. While the powerful seem increasingly able to simply redefine what truth is – what is, is – the whistle-blowers are treated with increasing severity. In government, in business, in healthcare, education and the security services, the useful truths whistle-blowers bring are ignored, or punished with dismissal, smears, gagging orders, even imprisonment. While journalism can sometimes seem irrevocably corrupted by rented opinions and gossip, serious investigative journalists – professional truth tellers – are in every sense an endangered species, specifically targeted in war zones, curbed and intimidated by both oppressive regimes and democracies.

So we exist, it would appear, in a world where truth is punished and liars may lie at will – about levels of surveillance, expense claims, about statistics and financial transactions, about abuses, failures in care, about the crushing to death of human beings at Hillsborough – and only slowly, slowly will truths emerge and then be denied, before the even slower push for acknowledgement, then justice, then perhaps reconciliation, progress.

Our situation seems bleak. But, equally, we may be at a tipping point when the showbiz dazzle of the narrative is no longer enough to make us pay up, express our gratitude for the skill of the fraud.”

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I trust almost no one for basic competence in day-to-day life, but I don’t worry much about dying a fiery death when I’m on an airplane. I readily put myself in the hands of the crew, even though they’re probably a bunch of horny wiseasses judging us harshly. Let someone else be responsible of my continued breathing for awhile; I’m exhausted from the task. But writer A.L. Kennedy is, like many people, terrified of flying. From her new Aeon essay on the topic:

“I am not superstitious. Magical thinking is an open well of nonsense into which we fall at our peril, it leaves us prey to charlatans and all that is self-defeating about human psychology. I use tapping and listening to music to induce positive states as a kind of self-hypnosis, I don’t believe I’m performing magic… I don’t believe in magic… Yet as soon I get within sight of an airport I know that reality is, in some ghastly way, porous or sensitive at great heights. Some deep, irrational urging, some remnant of young hominids’ anxieties around over-tall trees, tells me that nature itself is able to feel my thoughts at any altitude from which a fall would prove fatal. The higher I get, the more clearly my conscious mind’s emanations will invite attention. It will lean close, like a startled mother bending in over a baby she suddenly realizes is not a baby, but merely a baby-shaped monster swapped for her beloved by evil elves and likely to bite her at night if she doesn’t throw the appalling thing clear out of a window right now. To be precise, the more I fill with fears, the more the universe will attend to and believe my fears, thus making them real. And down will come baby, cradle and all.”

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