The Disappointing Truth

They always disappoint, don't they?  The 'big reveals' in scandals and long-running news stories, that is.  The media always builds this stuff up, teasing the prospect of future revelations, while dropping salacious scraps of inconclusive information, giving the impression that this is all leading up to some kind of spectacular denouement.  Like a TV soap opera, or a thriller movie.  And, of course, we lap it all up, just as we do those TV shows and films, buying in to all the drama along the way as a substitute for the excitement that is missing in our own real lives.  But in these long-running news scandals, just like in real life, we never seem to get the big pay off.  Instead, it all seems to fizzle out disappointingly.  Take the Epstein scandal - we've had yet more documents released today, following years of hints and teasing from both Trump and his opponents as to who is going to get burned by the inevitable breaking of the scandal when everything comes out.  Yet, in truth, despite all the stuff released, all the pictures and e-mails, that smoking gun never seems to appear.  The 'Holy Grail' of evidence which will point the finger at Trump, or anyone else for that matter, stubbornly refuses to materialise.  Everything is circumstantial.  The only major casualty so far has been the former Prince Andrew and even there the evidence is pretty much circumstantial.  Certainly nothing sufficiently concrete to warrant criminal investigations - his downfall has purely been the result of the reputational damage his association with Epstein has caused the Royal Family.

But such is the nature of this sort of stuff - it isn't just confined to political scandals like the Epstein business.  The media loves to push those narratives about how the US government has access to alien technology from crashed UFOs, or that the UK government has reams of files devoted to UFO incursions into British airspace, which it  suppressed to prevent public panic.  With each story they hint that astounding revelations are about to break: that dead aliens are about to be revealed, that files are going to be released showing that Harold Wilson held meetings with aliens in 1968 or that the US will roll a complete flying saucer out of the hangers at Area 51.  Yet all we get are the same tired old stories from the same tired old cranks about how they met a man from Rigel while working in a top secret US lab, or how they were taken on a ride around Mars in an alien spaceship - all with absolutely no evidence to back them up.  The big pay off just never comes.  Because, the cynic in me says, if it ever did, then the story would effectively be dead.  Sure, there would be plenty of stuff about how the aliens are getting a State Visit and meeting the King at Buckingham Palace, but that would draw them into the world of the ordinary, making them concrete presences, rather than some tantalising, shadowy mystery which sells papers.  Because that's the draw of these things - the mystery.  All mysteries, when solved, are somewhat disappointing.  In contrast to fiction, for instance, murders are inevitably motivated by greed, jealousy, passion or are heat of the moment incidents, the result of rage, drugs or alcohol.  Or some combination of the three.  Either that, or they are the work of a psychopath who, in contrast to movie psychos, has unfathomable motives and looks more like a mumbling tramp than a sophisticated professional like Hannibal Lecter.  As with everything else, the fantastic fantasy versions are always far more exciting and interesting than the mundane reality.  Which is probably why so many people seem to like conspiracy theories.  But that's a whole other post...