Poll results analysed in the Sunday papers suggest that although Joe Public believes it was wrong for Bertie Ahern to take wodges of cash from well-wishing businessmen, the majority of the electorate thinks the poor man (the victim of a witch hunt!) should stay in his job as Taoiseach. Astonishingly, the Sunday Independent states, "Besides having no desire to see Ahern go, public trust in him is unaltered."

The Irish public's bovine acceptance of such carry-on brings to mind the anecdote associated Adlai Stevenson, the bright hope of the American intelligentsia in the 1950s (who happened to be trounced by Dwight D. Eisenhower on the two occasions he ran as the Democratic candidate for President).

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to him, "You have the vote of every thinking person!" Stevenson called back, "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"*

*(Source: Wikiquote)

I'm aware that I risk becoming a crashing bore by banging on about the latest Irish political crisis, which in the global scheme of things appears irredeemably petty and parochial. It's just that the kerfuffle over Bertie Ahern's financial improprieties represents one of those episodes that forces you to recognize that a substantial proportion of your compatriots, despite the supposed ties of a shared culture and society, actually inhabit an entirely different ethical universe.

Take John Waters, for example. I am, of course, here referring to the bearded sage of Roscommon rather than the American filmmaker. In his column for today's Irish Times, he adopts his customary contrarian stance regarding l'affaire Bertie. With the surly wisdom of a hill farmer come to the big smoke to teach the city slickers a real lesson, he aims to offer "a brief and by no means exhaustive inventory of values which may have been dropped unnoticed off the back of the trailer this week as we overloaded the front with outrage about matters of financial and fiscal compliance."

Note here the canny use of that agricultural metaphor, the overloaded trailer, designed to make SUV-driving suburban types tug at their collars in guilt. It is also interesting that Waters appears to employ the word "outrage" according to the standards of normal Irish usage--not to denote genuine anger, but to suggest a fabricated emotion, grounded in hypocrisy.

Waters then proceeds to list some of the down-to-earth, solid Irish values that have been sacrificed to that false god, probity.

The following is classic Waters: off the leash, bounding away from reality like a greyhound at a coursing meet (how's that for a bit of rustic simile-coining?):

"Friendship: Without a friendship there would be no such thing as society, which is really a macro-society of friends. Is the Minister for Finance not entitled to have friends, and are such individuals not entitled to act in friendship in the same way as the friends of other categories of human being--in support of those they love and admire?"

One feels almost rude to interrupt this surfer-Jesus spiel, but society is not "really" a macro-society of friends. It consists of a lot of people I don't know and probably wouldn't want to know. But that's OK, because our behaviour towards each other is actually governed by society, which is based on cold, heartless abstractions such as laws and impartial institutions. In contrast, people who aim to create societies of like-minded friends--people like us--are sometimes called fascists. Not that I think Waters, perhaps envisioning some kind of shaggy Brehon fraternity, deserves such a damning label. But his is not exactly an inclusive framework for a 21st-century multi-ethnic nation.

Ultimately, after reading Waters (or skimming his text to be honest), one is left mystified by how willing he is to come to the defence of the indefensible. After all, for arrogant politicos like Dermot Ahern or Brian Cowen coming out with guff like "Is the Minister for Finance not entitled to have friends?" is the price that must be paid for staying in government.

But perhaps Waters is willing to play his role as "independent thinker," to the hilt, even at the risk of personally losing one of those values he claims has fallen off the trailer in the past week: Dignity.

A sense of weariness with gombeen politics means I find it burdensome to comment on the farce that unfolded in the Dáil yesterday. Alas, events perhaps reflected Beckett's resigned observation: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

On the radio this morning, presenter Cathal Mac Coille attempted to shame arch-waffler Micheál Martin into admitting that by staying on as Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern had established a new (lower) standard for the ethical behavior expected of the second-highest office in the state. Unfortunately, Mac Coille phrased it by asking whether the standards of De Valera no longer applied. I, jaded and aware of Éamon de Valera's shenanigans with the Irish Press, muttered, "But he was a crook as well!"

(Adapted from Merriam-Webster Online)

Main Entry: ²shoddy
Function: adjective
Inflected Form(s): shod·di·er; -est
1 : made wholly or partly of shoddy
2 a : cheaply imitative : vulgarly pretentious <shoddy merchandise > b : hastily or poorly done : INFERIOR <shoddy healthservice> c : SHABBY , DISREPUTABLE

Just after 9.30 PM, Irish time. The following has just been posted on the RTE site:

RTÉ News has learned that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern may have bought his home from an individual who attended the controversial Manchester dinner at which he received £8,000 while Minister for Finance.

Documents suggest that businessman Micheál Wall may have sold Mr Ahern his house in Drumcondra three years after the dinner.

Fine Gael environment spokesperson Fergus O'Dowd said it was amazing that the Taoiseach did not name Mr Wall as an attendee at the dinner in Manchester.

Mr O'Dowd described the development as 'truly bizarre'.

This is it. There's no way back. No more spluttering, crocodile tears, or half-apologies. Just grab your anorak on the way out, Bertie.

While the government remains paralyzed by crisis, the world, especially the business world, keeps on spinning. Ryanair's announcement that it had already bought 16% of Aer Lingus's shares and was intending to take over the company outright appeared to come from out of the blue, reported as breaking news off the wires this morning. I can envision the Competition Authority probably having a beef with the takeover. But if the deal did go through, it could trigger an interesting, and highly unusual, power struggle. Union power in the Irish economy is largely confined to public services, semi-state bodies, and large, established indigenous firms. The companies associated with Ireland's economic boom, foreign multinationals and start-ups (such as Ryanair), do their utmost to quarantine their organizations from union infiltration. Now, for the first time, these separate domains could come into contact. If the union spokespeople in Aer Lingus--who unsurprisingly and rapidly howled at Ryanair's move--are correct, this collision might be akin to a catastrophic meeting of matter and antimatter.

However, it's unlikely that Michael O'Leary will do a Wapping, tackling the unions head-on. For a start, Aer Lingus is that rara avis among international airlines, a fairly profitable outfit. The motivation for a fight is lacking. In addition, potential political backing is absent: there's nobody remotely along the lines of Thatcher in the Dail ready to take Bertie's place once the Taoiseach (finally) does the honourable thing and jumps.

But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be some scrapes. For the bearded chieftains of SIPTU, Jack O'Connor and Michael Halpenny, Michael O'Leary is about as welcome as a Marine in Fallujah. On the other side, the, er, "flexibility" Ryanair appears to expect from its staff (leading "almost all" of the airline's pilots to claim that they have been victimized) is likely to spark a firestorm if applied to a company that has appeared (in the past) as if run for the benefit of the employees.

On balance, I can't envision the Ryanair acquisition to be a union-busting maneouvre. However, given the above-mentioned objections from regulators--obviously foreseen by O'Leary & Co.--it's tempting to interpret Ryanair's move as just profitable sabre-rattling, showing its power to a government that has hitherto ignored the company's demands on a new terminal for Dublin airport.

Whether a genuine attempt at a buyout or a political feint, either way I can't counterfeit the despair over developments displayed by blogger Sara Carey:

In the 21st century, the lowest form of wit is uploading a jpg that made you smirk:

Generations of quaffing Trinner students might find themselves getting slightly sentimental at the following news:

"STUDENTS' drinking patterns will never be the same again at TCD.

The famous Buttery Bar at the college is closing due to a sustained slump in trade." (More from the Indo)

The report also states that "authorities at Trinity are imposing rules to restrict alcohol at college events before 6pm."

Is nothing sacred?

Yesterday's Observer mimicked a poll undertaken by The New York Times earlier this year and asked "150 literary luminaries to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005". This geographic hodgepodge mirrors the eligibility for the Man Booker Prize. But why be so coy about what makes an author eligible? Wouldn't it be more honest to call it "the best novel from the Metropolitan Motherland and its former colonial territories"?

BTW, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace was voted the best book. A very strong novel, but one that's hard to love...

Also, some lunatic appears to have nominated Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

In a previous post I grandiloquently claimed that "we will have to find Arctic meltwater lapping at our doorsteps before we jettison the freedom [of cheap air travel]". Alas it's not just stag parties jetting off to Prague or the bourgeoisie retreating to their weekend gîtes that are to blame. Even people who are paid to care about the environment seem to be culpable.

The London Times reports:

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, flew to Malaysia, South Africa, and Amsterdam on business and took his family on holiday to Slovakia in the past year. This weekend he is on a business trip to Nigeria. His trips are estimated to have generated at least eight tons of CO2.

“This is the dilemma faced by all international organisations, including green ones,” said Juniper. “We do all we can to cut travel but we need to do some flying to make decisions.”

I'm wondering why I have failed to greet North Korea's recent gatecrashing of the nuclear club with appropriate foreboding. I've come to the conclusion that my blithe response must be rooted in the fact that my image of Kong Jong-il as a terrifying dictator has been irreparably damaged by his singing manikin manifestation in Team America: World Police.

In addition, one can't help thinking that one of the downsides of being an all-powerful tyrant is that nobody has the nerve to offer you a little fashion advice. I mean, if he were just a authoritarian leader along the lines of China's Hu Jintao, surely someone might by now have tactfully suggested that those glasses don't really suit Kim's, er, face shape.

(As part of the global effort to justify Google shelling out $1.65 billion for YouTube, here's a link to the miniature Kim Jong-il crooning the very un-PC number, "I'm so ronry ". (If you can't find it, it might indicate that Google's lawyers have already started cracking down on dodgy copyrighted material.))

This week's New Yorker features a short story from Roddy Doyle, called "The Photograph." It's not bad, clearly the work of a skilled practitioner. But I'm not sure if it deserves its occupation of what are probably the most coveted pages in Anglophone letters.

Doyle's style--which might be dubbed "proletarian stream of consciousness"--is beginning to look a bit threadbare. For a start, this interior monologue approach is supposed to capture the narrator's unique perspective. But in this story, Martin's humdrum observations seem similar in tone to the ones proffered by Paula Spencer, which I read in a recent extract from the eponymous novel. Second, in Doyle's hands, the interior monologue is not the elliptical record of how the senses feed the mind (think of Joyce's famous but initially baffling "Plasto's high-grade ha"). Instead, the voices in Doyle's recent work seem too literal, too tied to the duty of walking the reader through the routines and objects that constitute the character's exterior world. Oddly, this is an inner voice that robs its speaker of an inner life.

On occasion the end result can veer close to the parody of Paula Spencer, which appeared as part of the Digested Reads series of the The Guardian:

"Then, thus I turn me from my country's light/To dwell in solemn shades of endless night."

Thus spake Shakespeare's Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, when faced with exile from the land of his birth. But that was in Ye Olden Dayes. In contrast, the modern Irish exile finds cosseted refuge in countries where endless sun seems to shine. The peripatetic Denis O'Brien has recently moved residence from Portugal to Malta, cardboard-box tycoon "Dr." Michael Smurfit is based in Monaco, and "Sir" A. J. O'Reilly apparently declares the Bahamas as his primary residence. J. P. MacManus, the low-profile gambling centillionaire who nevertheless attracts plenty of coverage for his "charidee" works, has come a long way from Limerick, now operating from that less-than-gritty burb, Geneva.

And after selling his stake in London City Airport for a humongous profit, Dermot Desmond has now rocketed to the top of the list of the richest-Irish people-who-technically-don't-live-in-Ireland. Desmond has chosen the Little Britain of Gibraltar as the bolthole of choice for his estimated 2 billion euro.

Yet sunshine and untaxed loot don't seem to satisfy our home-grown, perma-tanned plutocrats. They still yearn to stay involved in the affairs of the old sod. And in the age of lax residence rules (initially brought in by Smurfit's old pal, former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds) and executive jets on tap, the gullable [sic] Irish public might be forgiven for thinking these figures have never left our shores. Indeed, some of the rich themselves appear to have forgotten that by not personally chipping in to the operation of the state their views on how same state should be run might lack a certain credibility.

How else can one explain Dr. Smurfit lecturing his gilded audience in the K Club (the good doctor's personal fiefdom, although officially owned by the Smurfit company) about the dangers of growing social inequality in Ireland? And then there is the example of Dermot Desmond, lambasting the critics of C.J. Haughey, a man whose own relationship with the taxman was conducted on very understanding terms. And we can't forget Messrs O'Brien and MacManus basking in the reflected glory of their work for sports-oriented charities--these à la carte tax payments might be viewed as making a mockery of the system by those in the PAYE sector who don't receive gushing press coverage for their (obligatory) contributions to keeping the larger show going.

In Richard II, Mowbray bemoans that his exile to foreign lands will stop him from communicating with his fellow man:

"The language I have learn'd these forty years/My native English, now I must forego:/And now my tongue's use is to me no more/Than an unstringed viol or a harp"

Alas for the ears of the Irish public, the tongues of the modern Irish "exile" have not suffered a similar fate.

How would the Sunday newspapers fill their proliferating pages if teams of university researchers did not dutifully supply them with nuggets of trivia? For instance, this weekend the Sunday Times reported that:

Street names are a key indicator of social class and thus personal wealth, according to new research by Professor Richard Webber, of University College London (no street address given). Do you live in a Mews, a Lane or a Way? Then chances are you are richer than someone who lives in a Terrace, a Street or even a Crescent. Set up home in a Street starting with the name Station or Coronation and you are likely to be less well heeled than someone living in a Street beginning with Grosvenor or Oxford.

This may sting MPs, but Professor Webber has found that if you live in a Street named after a politician you are likely to be among the least well-off.

The canniest political elites are able to lull their subjects into experiencing what George Orwell dubbed doublethink: "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." In the contemporary political scene, a passive electorate is expected to swallow a) that the government, being a success, is naturally supported by some of the country's most successful (i.e. richest) people and b) that same government is also the victim of persecution by powerful and envious vested interests.

So, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi--who treated the Italian premiership as though it were another title generated by his business empire--somehow got away with portraying himself as being on the side of the little man. To that end, he made much of his "persecution" at the hands of the over-mighty judiciary and sniping media. (Choosing the latter as a target showed incredible chutzpah).

Similarly, as Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas? has shown, in the United States Republican strategists leveraged contempt of "East Coast liberals" to persuade blue collar voters to put into power pols dedicated to advancing the interests of the very wealthy at the expense of virtually everyone else several hundred rungs down the income ladder.

And in Ireland we have Fianna Fáil. It is the party of the "men in the mohair suits", Charlie Haughey and his Charvet shirts, and the infamous tent at the Galway Races, where property developers, builders, and tax dodgers (frequently one and the same person) schmooze with FF politicians (who are also frequently property developers, builders, and tax dodgers).

Yet despite shackling itself openly to the interests of the top decentile, FF is apparently seen by the Irish public as composed as ordinary daycent "skins," whose success is resented by a sneering clerisy of "D4" (that tired pejorative) meeja types, barristers, middle-class planners, and deracinated cynics.

The success of this doublethink strategy has been powerfully demonstrated by recent polls, which indicate that the revelations about Bertie Ahern accepting loans and gifts from a floating body of friends and well-wishers has not only failed to dent FF support but has actually boosted it.

And yet some journalists not only fail to expose this political paradox--they actively bolster the myth. For the second time in as many weeks, I point to John Waters's Irish Times column more in sorrow than in anger. In Monday's column, with his typically hyperbolic swagger, he claims

"The people have warmed anew to Bertie because there has been something in this story that reveal him as a larger--i.e. more real--man than they believed. Reality comprises more than what journalists call "ethics""

This sort of sophistry--the verbal equivalent of a judo throw that coopts an opponent's lunge--wouldn't go amiss in a cumman gathering of FF diehards. Yet this resort to populism--as if "ethics" were an Anglo-Saxon fixation alien to the plain people of Ireland--often has an ugly underbelly.

And elsewhere, Waters froths that "The sole font of political morality resides in the hearts of the people."

This line, with its sinister echoes of de Toqueville's "tyranny of the majority," smells to high heaven. It is even possible to image it delivered from a floodlit podium, with each word met by cheers from the shadowy masses.

It appeared way back in the September 8 issue of the TLS, but I've only just read the review by Jerry A Coyne of Frederick Crews's Follies of the Wise. Coyne applauds Crews's skewering of contemporary fallacies--"not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb to irrational ideas: recovered-memory therapy, alien abduction, theosophy, Rorschach inkblot analysis, intelligent design creationism, and even poststructuralist literary theory."

But what makes Coyne's review worth retrieving from the recycling bin of old journalism is a paragraph by Crews, which amounts to the one of the pithiest and devastating refutations of the intelligent design "theory":

Square-jawed publisher, John Ryan, the "brains" behind such consciousness-raising mags as VIP, GI (AKA Gay Ireland), and, latterly, The New York Dog, shows he's hip to the new media zeitgeist with his latest venture, Bloggorrah. Proudly claiming to be "unfiltered and updated 10 times daily," Bloggorah appears to be positioning itself as a Hibernian version of Gawker , the sneering Manhattan-based site chronicling the foibles of a clueless overclass.

Unfortunately, given the stagnant fish pond that is the world of Irish celebrity, Bloggarah comes across more like the not-very-lamented The Keane Edge resurrected and hurled over HTTP. However, if the mock epic of Bono's purloined hat (allegedly purloined, m'lud), the sight of Irish models shivering beside boxes of detergent, and Colin Farrell's latest scrapes are your bag, then Bloggorah is a must-visit.

Expect the Irish Times Saturday magazine to list Bloggarah as a "hot" item sometime in closing months of 2007.

From "Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite?" in The New York Times:

At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the [FBI’s] new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Fellow Three Monkeys blog, Our Man in Gda?sk, recently commented on the state of Polish literature, focusing on the genre of "dirty realism" exemplified by the writings of Marek Nowakowski. This literary preoccupation with nostalgie de la boue is also evident in one of the more interesting recent collections of short fiction from an Irish writer, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse, by Waterford-born Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

Unusually, the stories about failures, the depressed, and the just plain alcoholic are largely set (apart from occasional, rather derisive interludes in the United States) in Romania, specifically Bucharest, where Ó Ceallaigh lives. One of the features his characters share with others who populate the genre is that the ones we're supposed to sympathise with read, say, Celine or Plato, as well as drink vodka straight from the bottle. Characters who are not simply losers, but enlightened losers.

Thus they given to misanthropic philosophizing, delivering aperçus such as "If you want to see how a city is doing, he thought, you have to see the edge of it. The centre will tell you everything is fine. The periphery tells the rest."

Needless to say, the periphery as described in the collection's centrepiece, the 60+-page "In the Neighbourhood" reveals everything is far from fine.

The end product is less "dirty realism" than "morose realism." And yet for readers perversely attracted to stories in which characters sit around squalid, moist flats while declaiming with liquored-up elegance on the human condition (I fall into that category--of reader, that is), Ó Ceallaigh's stories provide an ideal venue for slumming it.

The Complete Review reports on the arrival at their offices of the latest, and possibly last, wrist-snapping 1100-page meganovel from that PoMo giant, Thomas Pynchon. They suggest that the book Against The Day "most resembles is, indeed, Gravity's Rainbow. But that's just a very quick first impression: this is definitely a text it's going to take a while to deal with."

What has changed since the release of Gravity's Rainbow over thirty years ago is the Internet, specifically Google and Wikipedia. Will Pychon's taste for esoterica, technical, linguistic or demotic, seem quite so intriguing when prosaic explanations are just a few keystrokes away? Will Against The Day ever require something like this?

*From Pychon's description on Amazon.com

Regular visitors to this site will find it as radically altered as Kenny Rogers. But in this case, I believe the changes are a good thing.

All the improvements can be exclusively attributed to my sister, web designer extraordinaire Catriona, who is scarily au fait with the cryptic realm of CSS files.

Now, as Wilde famously remarked about his blue china, I will struggle to ensure that my scribblings live up to their new home.

Is there something offensive about Borat, "Kazakhstan's sixth most famous man" and the second comedic invention of Sacha Baron Cohen to be give celluloid treatment* ? This would seem not so much a rhetorical question as a flagrantly disingenuous one. Borat, whose persona is composed of a toxic mixture of Asperberger-lite obliviousness and charmless pushiness, regularly indulges in remarks about Jews, blacks, women, and gypsies that not so much insult them as render them as untermenschen. In reports about and trailers for Cohen's film, the pidgin-Englished Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, we have Borat asking a group of feminists what it's like for women to have smaller brains than men, Borat telling Alan Keyes (that rare specimen, a black Republican) that he has a "chocolate face," and, most famously, Borat leading a singalong with rubes in a C&W bar, in which he asks them "throw the Jew down the well/ so my country can be free."

And of course, it's all hilarious, particularly for an audience that would never dream of attending a gig by Bernard Manning, Tarbie, or any of those other sweaty stand-up dinosaurs from the 1970s. Aside from the simple fact that Baron Cohen is intelligent whereas the old-style comedians reached for a golf club when confronted with an original idea, Cohen's act is made acceptable by the belief that it exposes prejudice rather than reinforces it. In a rare out-of-character moment Baron Cohen himself has explained that the new film, like his television work, is a "dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity as much as rabid bigotry."

One wonders if the audience chortling at Borat's goading of women and blacks appreciates the subtle deconstruction going on. It would certainly take an advanced student of media studies to elucidate why telling a black man that he has a "chocolate face" constitutes a dramatic expose of racism. Unless Keyes's dumbfounded reaction exposes that he's actually a racist.

Although it's a truism that film-makers often underestimate the intelligence of their viewers, it is not impossible for them to overestimate their smarts, either. For example, I can recall an interview with the writer of the British sitcom Death Us Do Part, Johnny Speight. The sitcom was basically a platform for the bigoted and impotent rantings of Alf Garnet, played by Warren Mitchell. According to Speight, he eventually wanted to stop writing the show because he grew sick of reading letters from viewers telling him that Alf was bloody right when he ranted about darkies, Micks, commies, etc.

Similarly, those not sufficiently smart to appreciate Baron Cohen's exposure of "dumb conformity" might be misguided enough to think that Borat's schtik is really just a wonderful send up of those backward countries that have failed to live up to the West's standards. Although Borat's putative homeland is one of the more reliable partners in The War Against Terror, Kazakhstan is portrayed as suffering from all the intolerance, bigotry, and misogyny that the forces of enlightenment are trying to defeat with lessons in liberal democracy and heavy ordnance.

And Baron Cohen, aware of just how far to push to envelope, has tapped into the growing disgust, even among the educated classes in Europe and the United States, with the neo-medievalism of the Islamic "arc of extremism" by judiciously shifting the locus a little further to the East and, of course, by having his character be white. If we had Borat transformed into, say, an Afghan or a Pakistani cracking jokes about child brides and honor killings, the cinema auditorium would be shocked into embarrassed silence. And anyway, Peter Sellars (a figure Baron Cohen is oft compared with) already did the funny oriental gentleman routine in a film few television stations now seem willing to transmit, Blake Edwards's The Party.

The New Yorker gives its take on the brainstorming behind devising a catchy slogan to replace "stay the course," a phrase that, apparently, was never really mouthed by President Bush in the first place.