HERE FOR THE TRUTH (And how do you tell when somebody is lying?)

If the truth doesn’t make any sense, does that prove it’s a lie? Torture by any other name may still be good hygiene…

What’s the difference between a lie and a bluff? Have you ever been lied to by a poker-player? Would you risk everything on a bluff? Are you a gambling man? Is that a quintessentially American quirk? The Confidence Man. The snake-oil salesman. The gentlemanly English negotiated. The Arabs haggled. The Jews invested wisely. Australians did everything out back. The French romanticized every move. The Belgians waffled. The Germans had ways to make you tell the truth. The Chinese remained enigmatically pragmatic, agreed with everything to your face, then decided for themselves in their own time. To the Japanese everything was an honorably life and death issue. The Turks would make your head spin, so you wouldn’t know if you were lying or not. The Russians remained stony-faced non-committal, till it was too late to disagree. The Scots kept their hands in their sporran, where they kept their family-jewels. The Welsh kept their welcomes only if you were in their hillsides. Jamaicans were willing to explain anything, but only in ways you couldn’t possibly make any sense of. Africans smiled politely even if they were in the dark. The Spaniards killed bulls for entertainment. How many ethnic stereotypes would it take to change your mind. What’s the difference between a stereotype and an archetype? One holds ships, the other holds water? One keeps you on your toes, the other keeps ‘em tapping? It takes a global population to convince you that you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You either stick, fold or twist. Those are your only options. We all look the same in the dark. Will somebody please turn the light on? What’s the difference between a saint and a philanthropist? One does charitable work, the other creates charitable organizations to do the work for them, with a tax-write-off and public recognition for their kindness. Not that they’d claim to be saints, but neither would a saint lobby for a Nobel sainthood prize. Have you ever considered giving away all your worldly goods, retreating to a monastery, fasting for forty days and conquering all your passions? I’m told it’s the only way you can make miracles happen. What is the difference between a miracle and an ingeniously technological innovation? May as well ask Elon Musk if he truly believes he is a saint…

“HERE FOR THE TRUTH”: a website/ podcast/ subscription membership to share life-enhancing skills. seminars, workshops… To affirm your own “hero’s journey” …Two young (ish) guys seriously but humoredly, clearly-cut personable and relentlessly questioning… But respectful listeners. And why wouldn’t they be, given the context they’d created, they’d just be fooling themselves anyway. They had an instinct for somebody on a roll or when dialogue their best approach. Just no villains allowed? To justify their villainy? Apparently, they get enough air-time on mainstream broadcastings…But NO MORE HEROES??? “You wanna be a hero, well, just follow me!’ (John Lennon). You could be tragically star-talented too! Strangling rats in the shadows? Start idolizing yourself, at best substituting a paper-towel for a washcloth, so you can reuse it again and again to clean up the same mess you keep making…?? You belong to the world now???? We made you, we can break you! You don’t get to the toppermost of the poppermost without a lot of help and not just from your friends…

I resisted their podcast at first as maybe too clearly-cut for its’ own credibility.? No rough-edges. As if low production values best affirmed more likelihood of authenticity. Shows some real commitment, with no corporate funding or aspirations to get some. Though these days crowd-funding may be some cover-up for “controlled opposition”? A little media paranoia inescapable trolling all these “deep dives” down so many rabbit or mole holes…in search of fascinatingly articulated facts or theories that never even crossed your mind before. Then they interviewed a guy I’d already been fascinated by, and their credibility and their backstreet credibility bumped up several notches. I stuck with ‘em and it paid dividends.

All these pre-nominated “heroes” seeking their “truth” of their relationship to a world at least apparently riddled with lies, deceit, hatred, cruelty belligerence, trauma and weaponized obfuscations… You would have to be a hero to even talk about it in polite society, at risk of becoming a social pariah or martyr to some cause you never dreamed might be a civilized deal-breaker! You may be here for the truth, but you didn’t think it would be this painful? Like being circumcised? You’d forgotten what you didn’t consciously remember. Do babies not feel pain? Or was that somatic shock that puts your little nervous-system to sleep? Just out of the womb, not even from the cradle rocking up to get your most sensitively inclined private-parts messed around with! Clinically or ritualistically. If the latter, somebody gets to drink the blood and dine on your foreskin. If the former, more likely sold off to the highest bidder as a primo ingredient for gourmet face-cream!!!??? According to this heroic woman who has painfully researched this procedure still in practice, on behalf of male babies and mothers traumatized everywhere. And is this why I constantly feel there is something missing in my life?

I was quietly walking down the street, when I saw this man who looked like he was about to leap in front of a truck. I gingerly edged away into a side alley. I just didn’t want to watch. I waited for the screeching of brakes, the screams, the sirens…But nothing happened. Or if it did, I didn’t see it coming… The Truth is a lonely hunter. The lie means you may have managed to hit a hard-drive but you’re not in the hole yet. There’s a sand-trap you need to maeuver. Not easy with a bent club and a caddy who has just bet on the other guy to win…

But back to the beginning…When we first realized we didn’t know what the truth is…

I was never much of a sci-fi fan. preferred my dramas naturalistic. Or supernaturalistic, with no technologic or forensic explanation. I’ve always believed in ghosts. You don’t have to see ‘em to know they’re unreally really there. For a good haunting chat about old times, knowing you always have an audience even when it looks like you’re just talking to yourself. How different is it from talking to a screened image?

I wrote this when I was seventeen… “The truth isn’t hard to find / especially if you’re out of your mind / being daft may be more demanding / but it’s filled with infinite understanding / and a proper appreciation of the way things are / confused and silly and selfish and spare / while the sane reserve their judgment and feeling / for lining their wallets and painting the ceiling / ornament quantities fit for a king / the fool is un-foolishly content with nothing/ not that happiness is being barmy / but neither is banking nor joining the army/ and it is infinitely more honest being out of your skull / than pretending you’re wise when you’re just fill of bullshit…” Apparently, I was my own predictive programmer?

If I wanted to know the truth, according to Prince, I should “look to the scriptures”. He told me that on a video. A very personal message. I doubt he received any royalties for it. He stole his own identity. Which seemed reasonable once he realized his previous one had already been stolen. Cheekily proclaiming his “slave” status in a system he’d sold his original identity to. He went down and out in an elevator to heaven or hell…Only another supernatural superstar might proffer a more knowledgeable guess? Maybe he’d thought of himself as a good shepherd, till the crooks took his herding-licence away? “There’s more to life than celebrity, drugs and partying!” If you can’t prove it to yourself, no trillionaire is going to prove it for you. That’s how they became trillionaires.

I heard somebody once suggest that the more deeply you are traumatized the more talented you are likely to become. It’s an over-compensation condition. Targeting you for stardom-grooming… Plus regular re-hab visits to Cedars-Sinai for mind and personality adjustments to ensure you stay on script and convince your fans you’re having the time of your life! As soon as you’re classified unfit for public consumption you may finish up going down and out in an elevator, hanging in a closet or drowned in a bath-tub. You’re worth more dead than alive. Less hassling with contract negotiations. Maybe Michael Jackson was living-now-departed proof of this? Noone gets to become a household name without some serious corporate contract-signing. Have you ever tried to create a trend or some other mass psychosis without military-intelligence creating it for you?

Johnny Rotten insisted he was speaking the truth about Jimmy Saville, but nobody would take him seriously unless he was being musically anarchic at the same time. His own rite of passage through an apparently insane Ozzie Osbourne world of depravity, desecration and predatory Satanic slaughterings of innocence. Ritual guides to the cabalistic symbolistic 666 flauntings and floutings of den-mother Madonna and her sex-doll ass-in-the-air whipped and chained up spawn! Was Johnny Rotten really bad or has he just been circumcised? Is that an explanation for punk-rock. Spitting at your heroes and moshing together like stampeding frogs. Piercing and mutilating your body with all the scars and marks of The Beast. Or is it all just good hygiene?

“Everybody knows that the ship is sinking. Everybody knows that the captain lied”…Wasn’t Leonard Cohen Jewish? He must have been circumcised. Apparently, he was a CIA-Mossad agent? All those times he vanished off the scene to go meditate in a monastery, undoubtedly in Cedars-Sinai getting his halo clipped and his programming up-dated? “You’ve got to serve somebody…” Whoever is paying your wages (of sin?) Because sin sells tickets, especially when it’s so spectacularly packaged and so un-sinfully hyper-promoted. So many rabbit-holes to go down before you reach your dead-end. Hugh Hefner knew that. He learned it from military-intelligence. All that yearning for truth but a rite of passage to India. Which is a euphemism for so many overcrowded corpses all drowning in their very own Ganges…

* I also wrote this when I was seventeen… PARANOIA: “Somebody is taking the piss out of me / I wouldn’t care if I only knew who / is dressing me up just to put me down / making me believe I know what’s going on / for a moment then telling me I’m wrong / I have to start again / somebody is taking the piss out of me / I wouldn’t care if only I knew who it was…????”

But back to my mish-mash blogging. I’m just here for the truth. Nobody told me it had to be a best-seller…Is it any wonder we need an Intelligence Service. They are the only ones, other than Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson who can handle it… I speak from the heart, when it’s not beating too fast to keep up with itself anymore! How many commitments make a compromise?

Postscript: “THE TRUTH AS BLOCKTUBE”. I wrote this when I was eighteen. After an impulsive foray into Northern France. I was still living with my parents. I thought of sharing it with my English teacher. But I decided against it. I just didn’t believe in myself enough. I think I thought he might feel embarrassed on my behalf. I mean, I knew it wasn’t Shakespeare…

PART ONE: Visions of Experience. Blocktube was born and grew up in a little village in Wales. The name of which was so absolutely grotesquely and inexcusably unpronounceable, everybody called it WC for convenience. Anyway, Blocktube left WC one early Monday summery morning by train for Plymouth. Which is pronounced Plimuth by all who know, and Ply-Mouth by all who are unfamiliar. Sometimes the French are unfamiliar. However, Blocktube stumbled through the black docks, breathing heavy because his baggage was getting a little. Soon he wouldn’t be here anymore, he thought, glimpsing the phantom-like ferry for the first time. How subtle life is! But he tried not to be overwhelmed by it. The Customs Man said nothing. “Thankyou”, replied Blocktube curiously.

PART TWO: When is a reclining-seat? A short-haired disobliging man in an off-white coat asked him in pigeon-English if he had “the cabin”. “No”, replied Blocktube, efficiently demonstrating his ticket, “I have the reclining-seat!” The man was visibly unimpressed. “Menno!” He insisted, at the same time disobliging a little old lady. “There are no reclining-seat! They are call reclining-seat, but they are no!” He turned away. Blocktube felt disobliged. He would complain by postcard, he decided. Though, of course, he never did.

PART THREE: When the lights go out on the cross-channel ferry… Blocktube spent about five hours neither asleep nor awake. Slouched with his head tilted. Till the lights returned on to tell him he was in France and he ought to have a wash-up.

PART FOUR: Nos nos les pauvres nos nos / a postcard from Brittany : “Dear mam and dad, having a suitable time but nonetheless not too much. Wrestling with moules and langoustines and dirty cheap wine. Apparently, you can buy specially shaped polythene bags to cover your quoiffs in a Brittanish drizzle. Just off for a quick crepe, then I’ll be on my way home. Lots of Citroens, Chad.” He never did get around to eating snails. He returned with a mild cold and a knowledge of sea-food out of water.

PART FIVE: Never put yourself out for a stranger… Irene took her clogs off. She wasn’t one for standing on ceremony. Blocktube was sleeping with her long before morals came into it. But later she tired more easily and took to reading Womens’ magazines. Blocktube took up his pen and wrote to MEN ONLY: “what on earth does one do about women growing old????” THE END.

Steve Bellwood Here for the Truth photo: Linda Richmond