Much has been made of the Green Party leader Natalie Bennett's 'excruciating' interview with LBC last week, where she was dragged underwater by illness and a woeful lack of policy understanding, and in struggling to regain the surface suffered the bends of a 'brain fade'. It was dubbed by gleeful corners of the media and Twittersphere as 'the worst political interview ever', and yet in actual fact it can be seen as the complete opposite. For somewhere within the canyon of breathy silence gaping between stutter and stammer was a very real statement concerning the true nature of modern politics.
We are living, I believe, in a 'post-political age', whereby the scales on which are placed issues of significance are becoming ever more mis-balanced by those in which politics can play little or no effectual part.
This has served to create a vast stageshow across which politicians attempt to 'tread the boards' in a performance of credibility, control and confident poise. Whereas once they could feasibly be said to be mere marionettes, hoisted and dangled by the hidden hands of power - global finance, scientific think tanks, policy institutes or business leaders - now the curtain has fallen over the audience's eyes who have long since found their attention caught and held by alternative stimuli.
Because nothing much appears to make very much sense in this modern political age - stated facts are batted back and forth over the net like a dreary shuttlecock by players who seem diluted of all personality or credentials by the very act itself (rather like a non-sexual pornography) - conventional narratives have been abandoned to exposed as myths, and in their absence all we have is diffracted confusion, piled up steadily like layers of sediment.
Is the deficit rising or falling? Is national debt being cut or added to? Is climate change as severe as is purported and if so why aren't power figures more concerned to action? If our foreign interventions really are successful then why are fundamentalist movements gaining terrible traction? And why, if we have fostered a tolerant and inclusive society with our 'British values', does one such Jihadi turn out to have been a promising London-based student?
Not only this, but we are told that Quantitative Easing will ease austerity when actually, if examined a little closer, it turns out to be a scandalous wealth transfer to the unpunished perpetrators of the economic meltdown. Is there another viable solution to the globalised free market system we are told we must cleave to like a sacred doctrine, or have all alternative structures of ideas been irredeemably punctured by the pin of ideological dogma or short-termist thinking?
Is immigration a credible concern, or just the price to pay for free movement of people through the EU (and anyway, reports show net gains for the UK economy as a result of foreign migrants, and British migrants claiming more from Europe...)? Are Iran and Russia nations of aggressive volatility, led by tyrannical despots who threaten our long-term well-being, or are these mere illusory diversions created by powerful players in intelligence, military and defense institutions to justify their ongoing existence and status?
There is a very real psychological divide now between the governed and those elected to govern. Through the mediarised spectacle of power we enable the artifice to be sustained. As long as the lips are moving and words are spilling forth, however deaf we may now be to them, at least it reassures us that a regular equilibrium is being maintained. Nothing is being said but we can at least hear them saying it.
A meaningless word-sludge of false promises, vague rhetoric and quasi-intellectual theorizing that has been diluted of any tangible ideology or influence on society-at-large. All we can cling to are the slips of tongue, the lapses in nuance, the contradictions exposed; but we cling to them because they permit us to hate them, paint them with the same brush, gives succor to our political ambivalence. It makes us feel better about the fact we do and believe in nothing because they fail to wrest us from our warm shallows of apathy to inspire a semblance of that one thing that could offer a compass through the turbulence of this irrational world - hope.
And so, with the mantle of ambiguity, disillusionment and disaffection continuing to seal itself around the country in this post-political 21st century age, we need to look again at an event like Natalie Bennett's on-air meltdown, where words dissolved in her mouth like candy-floss, and realise that this symbolises the parlous psychological health of our current political neurology, where the only rational, honest or believable response is her failure of articulation.
In a sense, it was perhaps the most profound statement by any political figure in modern times.
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