When writing, or even reading, history there is always an inclination to interpret the past teleologically--that is to assess the importance of events according to how they contributed to some apparently pre-ordained outcome. This inclination veers into overwhelming impulse when the history in question is that of Germany's. Given that the Third Reich's reign of a dozen years still exerts unflagging fascination, the hundreds, even thousands, of years of Germanic history are sometimes viewed as little more than a seedbed for National Socialism. This can reach absurd lengths--for example, in a recent romp through the history of Rome, floppy-haired Tory, Boris Johnson, implied that the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which halted Roman colonization east of the Rhine, could help explain the exceptional, warlike nature of the Germans!

However, some explanations of Germany's exceptional "character" are more intellectually solid than others. German historians even have a term for their country's unique trajectory--Sonderweg , or special path. The first steps in this path are typically traced back to Prussia, the eastern German state that "unified" the nation under the Machiavellian guidance of Chancellor Bismarck. The argument goes something like this: Prussia, a state that mirrored Sparta in maintaining a military elite (the Junkers) who lived at the expense of a cowed feudal peasantry, hijacked control of a modern nation that was undergoing rapid industrialization (specifically in the regions along the Rhine). Thus, whereas in Britain and France economic development and a widening democratic franchise supposedly went hand-in-hand, in Germany--the most powerful economy in Europe, perhaps the world--an ultra-modern economy was shackled to the most reactionary of governments. This 18th-century state with 20th-century munitions kicked off World War I, which in turn had a profound influence on a certain Austrian private.

But good historians like to challenge stereotypes, and Christopher Clark, in what might be the history book of 2006, does so with fluid erudition and sympathy in Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947. I'll mention some of the shading that Clark adds to the usual chiaroscuro portraits of the land of Kaiser Bill and the Iron Chancellor in the next post. (Plus I'm only on page 380 at the moment!)

Two things in passing, however. Did you know that the name "Junker" derives from "Jung Herr," as it was usually the second sons of aristocratic families who were sent to settle the less-desirable lands east of the Elbe?

Second, Clark's book costs a substantial 44 euros. Instead of postponing reading it until Christmas, I got my hands on a copy from Tallaght Library, which I joined only recently. It's an great resource, so good it almost restores my faith in Irish public services.

At the risk of sounding like one of those warbling thesps who bang on about the "dangers" of the stage and the "high-wire act" of live theatre, I suggest that going for a fancy style in prose can also be a risky undertaking. One textual faux pas can put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. For example, I have started reading Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children around four times. At each false start I am halted by the same odd description. A character is grandly described as having a "Nabokovian brow."

I mutter to myself: what the hell is "Nabokovian" doing here? Does Messud mean that the character has a forehead like Vladimir Nabokov's? But I'm not sure if the Russian's forehead is sufficiently renowned to deserve it being archly applied as an adjective to a fictional face. But what is more dubious about the phrase is that by dropping the term "Nabokovian" like a stone into the narrative, Messud is trying, you feel, to take a shortcut to high-brow cachet by associating her prose with Vladimir Vladimirovich's.

Doubtless, such aesthetic quibbling can seem a bit precious. But there are cases when overripe writing is clearly disastrous.

For example, in Saturday's Irish Times, Olivia O'Leary gave a rave review to Kevin Myers's bonking-and-bombs account of his journalistic stint in Belfast during the early 1970s: Watching the Door. She gives us a whiff of "Colonel" Myers's inimitable style...

Another bomb, near the RTE offices, went off as Myers arrived. He was reminded of biology classes at school and dissecting rabbits. "And it was the smell of rabbit entrails that now filled Donegall Street, in part vanilla, in part raw steak, in part anus-fresh excrement[...]"

Unfortunately the figure one is reminded of is not, say, Michael Herr, Chris Hedges, or Thomas Ricks but--alas--loopy wine pundit Jilly Goolden attempting to describe an Asda-label plonk.

And as for the "anus-fresh excrement"--I'm almost embarrassed to admit that it made me think of a slogan for high-grade garden manure.

Following the rout of the Republicans at the polls, sub-editors across the globe have, perhaps gloatingly, dubbed President Bush and his Secretary for Defence as "casualties of war." Perhaps I'm being too literal-minded, but I didn't see the president being medivaced from the White House lawn or hear of Donald Rumsfeld being injured in the latest Baghdad atrocity. The use of word "casualty" as a metaphor against the backdrop of a conflict that is estimated to have claimed 654,965 lives might seem a little ill-considered.

Because in the political realm, being a "casualty of war" means, in Rumsfeld's case, being given a by-the-numbers eulogy from your boss and being guided gently out the door (was I imagining it or in the footage did Bush's hand on Rummy's back seem to have a certain propulsive force?)

Yet for Rumsfeld, a man who made his fortune by giving the world the dubious benefits of Nutrasweet, a comfortable retirement will doubtless be further padded by lucrative sinecures in the metastasizing military-industrial complex.

But will he be able to sleep at night?
You betcha.

See here for the story behind Muayad Muhsin's painting.

Who is Brian Atene? A month ago, apparently, if you Googled his name, all you would turn up was a school photo from the late 1970s. Now, thanks to the star-making power of You Tube, the Google query "Brian Atene" triggers an avalanche of 49,900 results. The sudden prominence is all down to a YouTube audition tape that took blogger Panopticist's fancy. His posting was picked up by Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs of them all, and the video became a near sensation. It's not hard to see why. The tape feature Atene's hilariously inept and bizarrely over-confident "audition" for a role in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. The sheer awfulness of the tryout reaches a crescendo with Atene's carpet-chewing "reading" of a speech from Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders.


Atene clearly doesn't suffer from self-esteem issues. Because rather than praying that this ephemeral fame will quickly blow over, Atene is (it seems) back after 20 years, and he just loves the attention.


Of course, given the impossibility of gauging the provenance of material on the web, these videos might not be "authentic." They could be cleverly designed artefacts from some acting-school project or viral-marketing campaign. However, if that is the case, they reveal a talent for provoking vicarious embarrassment that puts Ricky Gervais in the ha'penny place.

And if the videos are "for real," be afraid, be very afraid.

One of the first reviews of Thomas Pynchon's 1,085-page novel, Against the Day, has appeared in Time. Richard Layco's tone is that of a green-faced dinner who ordered something "adventurous" in, say, an authentic Cantonese restaurant and is now having trouble lifting up another spoonful of the undifferentiated pottage to his lips:

More than in any of Pynchon's previous books, just what it all means is a problem in Against the Day, where plots and ideas and fantastic developments pile up in exhausting profusion. You've been vouchsafed once again his vision of a bright, beleaguered world, this one with more than its share of resemblances to our realities post--Sept. 11. With another few decades of reading and decoding, you may even get the work's largest intentions to snap into focus. Or maybe not.

The nation's favourite carrot-top pop-sociologist...well, the nation's only carrot-top pop-sociologist, David McWilliams, has scored quite a coup with the telegenic regurgitation of his smash book, The Pope's Children. According to newspaper reports, about 500,000 people have tuned in to watch themselves be lampooned as Decklanders, HiCos (Hibernian Cosmopolitans, natch), and Breakfast Roll Men (I eat a breakfast roll, ergo I am Breakfast Roll Man).

All this might be entertaining for those who see patio heaters as an ominous symbol of deracination (sure, it was far from patio heaters you were reared...), but does this glib pigeonholing really add up to substantial analysis? Doubts about the shallowness of thinking on display were thrown into relief by an intriguing story this week in the International Herald Tribune, which reported on how a new book has triggered a bout of introspection in Sweden, a country not unfamiliar with searching self-examination.

According to historians Lars Tragardh and Henrik Berggren, the authors of the "provocatively titled" Is the Swede a Human Being? (Ar svensken manniska), Sweden, traditionally viewed as a land in which the collective good takes precedence over individual autonomy (those high taxes! those government-owned off licences!), actually allows its citizens more freedom than almost anywhere else, including the USA.

Lazily, I will quote part of the explanation rather than paraphrase:

Politically, this "moral logic," as it is called in the book, has evolved into a bargain between the Swedish individual and the state, where the Swede leaves more in the hands of the state than an American, a German or an Italian would ever dream of. Swedish family policy, especially, is extreme in international terms, with state-subsidized infant care, strictly individual taxation after marriage, and no legal obligations toward parents when they grow old.

You could interpret this as saying that the Swedes have "out-sourced" familial responsibilities to the state, so relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, and links throughout the extended family are based purely on love, mutual respect, and, possibly, liking each other.

A cynic might argue that if relationships with your kindred are liberated from claims of dependency, then the family and clan are facing a bleak future. Indeed, the familiar phrase "you can't choose your family" suggests a certain yearning. Regardless, the Swedish book seems to present a profoundly thought-out critique of a society.

And what is also interesting is that, in comparison, in Ireland, as in the US and the UK, it is particularly evident that the higher up you move the socio-economic ladder, the more you seem to want to disengage from the state. Public transport, public hospitals, public schools are all disdained by the people who pay the most for them (with the exception of those on the very highest rung, who pay zilch in tax).

The ultimate aspirational family model seems to the nuclear family in chain reaction mode: a stay-at-home mother supervising (with help from an East Asian support staff) a multitudinous brood, all reliant on a extremely rich paterfamilias. The Swedish model it is not.

But whether the changes experienced in Ireland over the past decade-and-a-half are so enormous that they can only be captured by an ambitious, overarching theory remains moot.* Sure, footage of Ireland from the mid-1980s makes the place look like Warsaw under marital law, but then again think what upheavals a citizen of Warsaw has experienced in the past 20 years! Nevermind trying to grasp,say, the culture shock experienced by a Chinese peasant, catapulted from feudalism into the 21st century by moving from the farm to Shanghai.

Things have changed, for sure, but, as Breakfast Roll Man might say, where's our f***ing sense of f***ing perspective?

*How about: The collapse in the authority in the Catholic Church in the early 1990s led to a) a spiritual crisis of belated secularism that lead to frenetic displacement activity in the form of unleashed consumerism (a twist of Weber's theory and a reversal of the orthodox argument that consumerism led to a spiritual malaise) and b) the end of the age of deference, culminating in today's situation in which credit card companies are falling over themselves to woo shelf-stackers with 10k credit limits. Superficial thesis? Sure, but no more than McWilliams's.

George Lee, RTE's chief economics correspondent, appears to see himself as the Savonarola of our times, castigating the citizenry for their wicked ways (buying outdoor Jacuzzis, for example) and generally pointing out that we've all lost the run of ourselves. Although Lee is probably right, it's sometimes difficult to avoid reaching for the car radio's "off" button when he starts, with a tone of wearied righteousness, to explain to his Morning Ireland interlocutor that, no, the economy's not chugging along fine--in fact, WE'RE HEADING STRAIGHT FOR A CLIFF!

Given Lee's distaste for the excesses of his contemporaries, it was all the more surprising to see his relatively supine performance when interviewing cardboard-box tycoon, Michael Smurfit, a man whose self-pampering would make even the most hard-necked of Celtic cubs blush. Lee even kept a straight face when Smurfit claimed that money was never really important to him.

Yet this is small potatoes compared to Smurfit's explanation about what drove him to the top of the pile. The good doctor claims that he wanted to establish the good name of the family after his father was blackballed at a number of golf clubs because members mistakenly thought he was Jewish.

Oh, the humanity!

I see that over the weekend the Irish Internet Association's Net Visionary 2006 Awards singled out the awful Twenty Major as Best Blogger. One wonders what it was about that blog that won over the judges: Was it Twenty Major's hilarious "conceit " of building a "colloseum" to watch Travellers fight to the death ("the public could vote to let the combatants go free, or they could vote to release the specially imported starving panthers and crocodiles to finish the job?")

Perhaps they chuckled over an anecdote in a similar vein, in which one of Twenty Major's imaginary friends laughs about killing a Traveller in a hit-and-run. ("Hurrah!" says Pete. "I thought I'd killed a real human being." "You're one jammy clit, Pete" I said, kicking the body back into the ditch, before we went for a rake of pints.)

Maybe the judges just liked the cheerfully foul-mouthed manner in which Romanians are referred to as "c***s", the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign are renamed the Irish Palestine C**ts Convention, and those involved in same-sex marriages are described as ugly "lezzers."

I suppose in the Age of all-conquering Borat, all this can be taken as "satire." Which is just as well, because in the past such scribblings would be dismissed as puerile and bigoted.

What's this? "Troubled" 80s pop icon George Michael involved in another scrape with the forces of law and order?

(Oh... it's only released killer and talented Sunday painter, Michael Stone, after throwing a "suspect device" into the main reception area of Stormont.)

There's no longer any arguments about whether cracks have appeared, it's now a matter of how far they will spread. The once gravity-defying Irish property market is finally showing that it is not immune to Newton's axiom. So, the Irish Independent reports today that "The price of new houses fell last month in the most dramatic evidence to date that rising interest rates are rapidly cooling the market."

Meanwhile those saddled with outsized mortgages wonder whether the drip-drip of interest hikes will have an effect similar to the "humane" preparation of lobsters--where the heat is incrementally raised so the creature doesn't realize it's been boiled alive.

But given that warnings from assorted Cassandras--the ESRI, the Central Bank, and David McWilliams--about the risks of a house price plunge have been circulating for years, the government and its army of advisors must have pondered a strategy to protect the wider economy if the all-too-thinkable occurs. Right? Our flawed-but-noble leader, Bertie Ahern, recently elaborated his administration's contingency plans (also from the Indo):

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern last night told the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference in London: "Interest rates are going to go up a bit, I think that's obvious. We don't want to see that happen too much."

With rougher seas ahead, thank the Lord we've still got Bertie at the helm!

My blogging output in November has been, I acknowledge, slightly erratic. Aside from fulfilling the righteous duties associated with being a modern father, I've been reasonably tied up with work, as the software company that gives me a monthly cheque reaches the end of its release cycle. (Contrary to all the Web 2.0 hype, most purchasers (as opposed to users) of software like to receive old-fashioned CDs, which sort of rules out the handy escape hatch of semi-permanent Beta status).

Occasionally, frustrations with such "knowledge work" can lead to forlorn introspection, with excessive PDF generation leading the cubicle dweller to hum along with those wistful lines from Willy Mason's Oxygen: " I want to live beyond the modern mentality/Where paper is all that you're really taught to create."

Thanks for making me feel better about myself, Willy.

On a less morose note, The Guardian recently provided 20 top tips for surviving life in the workplace. One tip that struck home was injunction number 10, "Steer clear of paper":

There is a saying that a job is not finished until the paperwork is done. It's a saying that is not used much these days because most people's entire job is paperwork. It would be like saying to a shipbuilder: "The job's not over until the ship is built," which is blindingly obvious and might get you a rivet in the forehead.

(I also have to agree that tip number 13, "Never answer a phone," is largely sensible.)

However, perhaps the most galling aspect of being a white-collar serf is that people appear to be making fortunes churning out the kind of crap that actually distracts you from getting on with tackling your own paper mountain. By this stage, many of us are familiar with the insufferably smug faces of Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who became enormously rich when their YouTube site was bought by Google for around $1.65 billion in Google stock. (Actually, both men could have been weeping and blood-soaked in the photographs circulated and the knowledge of their gargantuan wealth would have made them seem smug to this viewer). The "next" gold rush linked to the aforementioned Web 2.0 phenom means that those who should really be counting their lucky stars are now bemoaning the fact that their net worth falls short of Ecuador's GDP.

A recent New York Times article mentioned the plight of James Hong, co-founder of Hotornot.com, a dating site that became a Web fad because it allowed you to rate a person's looks based on photograph they (or, possibly, some creepy stranger) submitted. Despite making a mint from this slightly icky enterprise, Hong is so disillusioned by his relative impecuniousness that he has decided to embrace austerity, Silicon Valley-style:

Mr Hong might think jumping off the money train is an act of supreme sacrifice, but I can't help thinking that even a Prius is ample reward for a site that basically consists of borderline-NSFW pics and a couple of radio buttons.