On Monday I travelled to London on a train. A fellow traveller had a shopping bag with a quote on it. It was in French and by the artist Henri Matisse. As a serial French 'O' level failure, I managed to translate most of it and with the bonus of having a 'smart' phone, I immediately looked it up. I had the subject for today's blog.
Er...not quite. Events have hijacked me. I cannot write a topical blog without reference to the goings on in the British parliament yesterday. Or to be accurate, in a committee room in a contentious modern building across the road from Big Ben and Houses of Parliament.
What a strange day it was yesterday. I was away from home, in my grandparent’s and father's old flat having a de-clutter. Going through 100 years worth of photos and papers provided fascinating moments and could have entertained me all day. But I couldn’t give my full attention to what I was supposed to be doing.
I begun to watch the proceedings in the committee room and became riveted for hours. I tried to do work with the radio in the background, instead of sitting in front of the TV, but found the actual watching of the people involved, hypnotic. One person's boring can be another person's excitement. e.g: the most boring film I have ever seen was '2001 - A Space Odyssey.' Not everyone has thought the same.
As there are readers of this blog from all round the world, I will put the events into context. There was an 80 year old Australian called Rupert Murdoch, a man who has a global newspaper and TV empire. He was with his son, James, who is his deputy. They had been called to answer questions, put to them by Members of
Parliament. Reporters on their papers, had been shown to be getting information by illegal means, such as, phone hacking and paying policemen.
I was multi-tasking. I had my eyes on the TV and my ears on the radio. I was also engaged in reading a Twitter stream, with comments from a variety of political commentators and the general public. As I’ve said before, I like to look at the bigger picture before forming opinions.
Our brain take cues from the senses and looks for a memory match. Exact or similar in some way. Hence on the Twitter stream, the elderly man and smooth, younger man quickly became Burns and Smithers from 'The Simpsons'. Except I don’t watch 'The Sipmsons', so didn’t really know who they were. When an image was posted, I could see what people were alluding too. That was their pattern.
I saw a crumpled old man, who appeared to be like a deflated balloon. His young wife, sat behind him showing concern for him at times. I thought she was a nurse figure. He reminded me a bit of my father, especially when he was being belligerent. Was this man a tyrant? A man who had governments quaking in their boots? It was no surprise that as proceedings carried on, that other observers thought the scene resembled the end of the ' The Wizard of Oz.', when the powerful wizard is revealed as an ordinary old man, hiding behind a curtain, using tricks to appear powerful.
This was about the cynical world of the media. The manipulation of facts is paramount. Was I being manipulated? Were there 'magic tricks' being played? There had been mention that the men might have been coached. Was Murdoch Snr 'acting' and appealing for sympathy? I watched for the dropping of the ‘act’, but it didn’t happen in three hours of questioning, so I am left with believing that the slightly doddery, hard of hearing, past his best, man I saw was mostly ‘for real’. Though I still harbour doubts.
Murdoch Jnr was another matter. A robotic performance with pat phrases wheeled out so often that two thirds of the way through, I wrote a summary of his evidence on Twitter. “ That is a very important question and I wasn’t there at the time.”
Just when the questioning looked to be drawing to a close, a member of the general public tried to push a plate full of shaving foam into Murdoch Snr's face. Fortunately, the foam wasn't a substance or object more dangerous and everyone recovered their composure quickly. Personally I feel that the security guards should have to account for themselves and the quality of their searching. It could have been a whole lot nastier.
Bizarrely, the Twitter stream quickly revealed that the pie thrower had been a 'plinther'. That is one of 2,400 people chosen to stand on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square for one hour in 2009. I was incredibly fortunate to have been one of those 'plinthers' too. A strange day was getting stranger.
I was interested to know how the national newspapers today would interpret all that had happened. I haven’t read them all, but just the front pages told me what I want to know. How did they they see what I saw? How have they interpreted yesterday’s events? Very differently, as would be expected. Read for yourselves.
The Conservative supporting Telegraph:
The Murdoch owned Sun:
The Independent
As the film repeated the 'pie throwing' incident over and over, I became interested in the reactions of the other people in the room. I was drawn to the differing body language of all the people in the room, as they reacted to the incident. I added my own interpretation to what I saw. Thus I made judgements of certain people.
Try it for yourselves:
Our brains will make their own individual own particular ‘memory matches’ from the images triggered and emotions raised. This particularly comes into play in family situations and can cause a great deal of grief and resentment.
All siblings will have different memories. Siblings who have gone into print with a memoir can create a lifetime of estrangement. The siblings may have shared the same experience, but do not feel the same emotions about it or the people involved.
No experience should be denied, people will experience things differently.
Sometimes we need to accept that fact, however difficult it may be.
©RitaLeaman2011
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