Favourite Frases for Flat-earthers

I’ve been struggling with my latest blog. Since Easter weekend! That’s usually a sign I should abandon it and start something new, but on this occasion I was so irritated, I had to get back on an even keel by flushing all the cr-p out of my system, a bit like a textual enema. 

Most discussions I have with those who hold opposing views, either in the pub or by email, are constructive, productive and enlightening. Where I struggle is when, as happened on Good Friday, I'm confronted with statements akin to ‘the Earth is flat’ or ‘1 + 1 = 3’ and the more I - politely - present my iron-clad facts and logic, the more I'm dissed, impolitely. There's only one conclusion:

They can’t handle the truth!

That’s my First Favourite Frase, with apologies to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.

'Flat-earthers' such as that won't countenance the truth, but they'll lap up misleading one-liners and bastardised data as if they were chocolate Easter eggs. It’s not chocolate anything, People, it’s cr-p! Cr-p in, cr-p out, which seems to go hand-in-hand with unkindness. But unkindness and Easter (not just eggs) don’t mix. Easter: Christ is Risen; turn the other cheek; be kind to animals, which includes me. This leads nicely to my second Favourite Frase, one I composed myself for a previous blog:

Having a social conscience means sensitivity and kindness on a personal as well as an abstract level.

Variation on a theme:

Being a bleeding-heart liberal doesn’t mean you can bleed hearts.

Not quite Christ but not far off, guess who helped me kick-start the blog: Good Old Winston Churchill. I was trying to relax by reading a WWII-tome and came across a 1939 gem by Winnie: “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. He was considering what role the Soviet Union might play in the war. I just HAD to use that phrase in my blog, but how? It didn’t work as is, so I derived an alternative that better reflects what I’m currently discussing:

Cheap soundbites wrapped in a straitjacket inside a garbage bag.

The next evening, Hubby and I were watching University Challenge on iPlayer. Paxman asked a series of questions about Shakespeare’s plays. The first one I had a mental block but the second was easy.

“Macbeth and Banquo!” I shouted. Hubby jumped.

Macbeth! I dashed into my study, grabbed my copy of the play and found the soliloquy that had popped into my noddle and perfectly described those Good Friday emails:

A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

MacB (Act V, scene 5) was referring to the meaning (or lack) of life, now that his wife was dead; I’m referring to the lack of meaning in that silly email from another Lady MacB. Meow.

My blog was now up and running, thanks to Winnie and Shakey’s collective genius. But I needed more. A third genius. The icing on the cake. An unfortunate cliché given that it's Dominic Cummings, who contributed to Boris’ downfall over Cake-gate. Regardless of the fact that you wouldn’t want to bring him home to meet your parents, Cummings is (or was) a brilliant political strategist. In particular, I admire to the hilt his two slogans:

Take Back Control

and

Get Brexit Done

Their magic is in their concision, simplicity and resonance with aspects of everyday people’s everyday lives. Subliminally marrying these everydays with an issue that was anything but everyday, i.e. Brexit, was Cummings’ genius. He doesn’t have an everyday mind (I believe he’s ‘on the scale’) but he sure as heck understands everyday people better than any of the political elite, out-of-touch WFH civil servants, ivory-tower media, bleeding-heart liberals and the EU Behemoth.

Examining Get Brexit Done first, how often have we all said Just do it or similar. For example, frequent refrains on social media amongst supporters of the West Cumbria Mine are: Get on with it, Get it built and Get me a spade. By tapping into everyday language and frustrations, as well as harnessing the instinctive inner confidence that we must have to say very forthrightly Do It, is a recipe for success. Who knew? Cummings, that’s who. 

A Get (Whatever) Done mindset can empower us to stop wasting energy by trying to explain and educate, stop waiting for others to get their heads out of their arses, and just Do Whatever to ... oh, I dunno ... Take Back Control.

Control of what? Bear with me. Everyone likes to be in control of their lives (as opposed to being in charge of an office, say). When we’re not in control, we feel lost, rudderless, anxious, bereft even. In due course (hopefully) we regain control, either through the passage of time, kindness of friends, or by doing something for one reason that has the unintended consequence of securing control again. I’m of another school: one that grabs the bull by the horns and consciously decides what I need to do to Take Back Control. Of what? The Narrative!

The Good Friday email exchange was symptomatic of me howling at the moon. I had the facts. I had the reasoning. I had the moral high ground (in more ways than one) but somehow I’d lost control of The Narrative. It was like being confronted with Ursula von der Liar as the Fairy Godmother, and Mick ‘The Grinch’ Lynch as Prince Charming, and there's nothing I can say to save the Fairy Tale.

So I mooched around for a few days, wondering how to Take Back Control when I couldn’t rely on facts and logic to see me through, and anything I did say would probably be used in evidence against me (not that I’ve ever been given the luxury of a fair trial). Then Elon Musk arrived on his white charger. I can’t make up my mind whether I’m a fan of his, indifferent or a critic but, on this occasion, he was Jiminy Cricket to my Pinocchio. He made mincemeat of a BBC journalist who had challenged him to an interview and must have felt sick when Musk accepted. The journo went in as many BBC journos do, with his mind already made up and with no evidence to back up his biases. (Sound familiar?) Musk didn’t come up with my next Favourite Frase, the magazine spiked did, but it wouldn’t have been written without Musk: 

A journalist so accustomed to pushing The Narrative that he apparently has no grasp of the facts.

Hallelujah! All Musk had to do to Take Control of the Narrative was show that the journo had no grasp of the facts. In my case, I’d already shown that the flat-earther was fact-poor; if they choose not to listen or acknowledge, or think, then that’s their problem. I was always in control of The Narrative. I never lost it.

There’s no way to end this blog other than, not one, but two Final Frases, you lucky so-and-sos. This one's from Nineteen Eighty-Four and describes the last email I received on Good Friday:

It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

The very last word has to go to Maggie:

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.