evasiveness, a note

then I turned on the radio and heard nothing but evasiveness, the sort that exists close to lies, as if the national pastime were evasiveness. The Chief Commissioner of Police wanted to lie. You could hear it in his voice. He wanted to charge his accusers with lying, which is just as bad. The Australian media had somewhere compared our police force to the Keystone Cops for not doing the obvious thing and searching the car left behind by a Mr Xue, martial arts expert, where, after, one presumes, bumbling around, they finally discovered the body of his wife. “The liars!” he wanted to say. “The reason I’m lying isn’t anything to do with slapstick, it’s the law!”