FUGGER COMMUNICATIONS

My job is to make you aware of summer blockbusters, international acts of aggression and new family packs of fish fingers. My click farms provide the trends you hashtag on twitter. I don't just promote products and points of view, I alter the fundamental perception of reality itself. You check the facts but my public relations company, Fugger Communications, makes the facts. I email the media and they cut and paste my press releases into all your heads.

When it comes to geopolitical conflicts, Fugger Communications is unique in that it often works propaganda for both sides. Let's imagine that nation A is at war with nation B, well both A and B will hire Fugger Communications to make the other look bad and to make themselves look better. Fugger Communications (Unit F-15E, Nangor Road Business Park) doesn't pick sides. I take both assignments and execute them with the utmost due diligence and standards of excellence going forward.

The main task is to build a wall of nonsense that the truth can't penetrate. I tell a lie, I counter it with another lie and then I tell a third lie to counter the second and then I add a fourth and so on and so on. One brick after another in a Tower of Bable. It's a game of He Said She Said but I'm playing it alone and getting paid by both himself and herself. That's PR for you. It's a lovely earner. No one wants to hear the complex realities anyway. (TLDR.) Folks just want simple stories to reassure them that their side is the good side and the other the bad side. (There are never two bad sides or any shades of grey whatsoever). As for those the conflict does not directly involve, they like a choice of readily understood backstories that allow them to pick a side and enjoy the show, commenting on the plot as it unfolds as if experts. Those who don't buy into my narratives are usually pretty clever but, thankfully, apathetic. If the Holocaust was unfolding today, they're the kind of people who'd groan at the sight of a Nazi death camp and change channel to watch something 'less depressing'. Family Guy probably (warmed by the 'knowingness' of their cold laughter). They're the 'smart cookies'. They matter least. Really, they don't matter at all.

The only other people who don't buy into my spins on events are those caught up in those very events – seeing reality unfold at ground level. These people are of even less concern to me because they're either the ones making the decisions or the ones being killed by the ones who are making the decisions. I need not fret about the latter because the dead testify to nothing and the former are the ones who hired me in the first place.

Helping the opposing leaders of two warring nations achieve their ends by convincing everyone else that all the suffering is worth it leaves me feeling no moral qualms or shake my certainty that I'm performing a service to all parties. You see, to do other than disseminate simplistic propaganda would be severely unkind. The alternative would be to allow people realise the truth - that it is not worth it and that there is nothing they can do about it. Imagine how everyone would feel then, stripped of the compensation of jingoistic righteousness? The truth would kill their hope and leave them in despair. The truth is something to be avoided at all costs because the truth is cruel. The truth is no one's friend. In fact, it is the truth that is the real enemy. The only war truly worth fighting is the war against the truth. I am fighting that war. The fact that I'm handsomely paid to do so is neither here nor there, I am fighting the war against the truth for all of us.

Knowing that I'm making the world seem a less complicated, frightening and futile place than it really is allows me to sleep easy in my bed. As for the rest of you, you can just go back to sleep easily.

There's no need to thank me.

Just stay glued to your TV.