Rhetoric reduced to ridicule as reality is rendered in a riddle

All editing is over. Speech, projected on new platforms, has become the newly authoritative medium, writes Gerard Howlin.

Fact is the new fiction. There was nothing new, certainly nothing phenomenal, about Brexit. There is nothing in our ‘debate’ about not charging for water, as an absurd example, or Mick Wallace’s bill to allow for the termination of pregnancies in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities as a tragic one, that isn’t the equal of it.

They are all words unmoored from their meaning. It is meaning not as objective reality, but as a managerial truth. Facts are managed to fit conjectured realities. Where once words, in rhetoric, led to understanding, now rhetoric is the end, not the means. Words are intended to muster feelings. The sway of emotion has become the highest level of understanding.