Out with the old, in with the new. In the same month that Don’t Look Back in Ongar (2024), the final (27th) instalment of the Ross O’Carroll Kelly fictional autobiography was published, the Irish-language musical comedy Kneecap (2024) quickly became the year’s highest-grossing cinema release.
The differences between these two are more than apparent: the ROCK books and newspaper column have given us a satirical history of the south Dublin elite as the country bounces between booms and busts over more than 20 years, while Kneecap is the semi-biographical contemporary story of two working-class Belfast boys who team up with a schoolteacher to form Kneecap, the Irish-language rap group. But it’s also possible to imagine a baton being passed along here, especially when we regard the books and the film in terms of the linguistic shitscape that is modern Ireland.
In the semi-fictional universe of ROCK, the contortions of the English language are the greatest source of comedy, the most pertinent commentary on class and gender difference, and the clearest exposition of Irish culture as being in a state of perpetual colonial aftermath. The bizarre renderings of various accents in ROCK, along with highly convoluted slang, its very narrow field of cultural references, and the characters’ sponge-like acquisition of Americanisms, are a turn-off for many. But they are flattering for readers who, by understanding the linguistic nuances, become themselves the objects of satire.
Kneecap is more patently ‘about’ language. In the film itself and in the band’s music and branding (Kneecap is a band in the real world), language is described in the clearest terms as a political issue. The use of Irish, especially in the northern context, is an anti-colonial act – the campaign for the passing of Irish Language Act of 2022 in the British parliament forms the background to the story. Each word is a bullet fired for freedom, according to the mantra of the die-hard pre-ceasefire philosophy of one protagonist’s father (played by Michael Fassbender, who played Bobby Sands in Hunger some years ago). Alongside the fluently delivered postcolonial critique of language and empire, the film also plays on more subtle conflicts of personal battles fought with language – one protagonist whose parents have raised him in Irish and now refuse to speak it to him, another who refuses to speak English when detained by police, and another who hides his Irish-language musical activity from his language-activist partner.
Cultural Divide
These mutual misunderstandings will put ROCK readers in mind of the language barrier that is raised between Ross and his own son, Ronan, who has been raised in Finglas and speaks with a working-class Dublin accent. Now Ronan works in the highest government circles for his grandfather (Ross’s father), the Trump-adjacent Taoiseach. Father and son both speak English, and Ronan always understands Ross, but Ross often just does not get what his son is saying to him:
‘I shouldn’t be tedding you this, Rosser.’ ‘You might as well tell me? I probably won’t understand it anyway.’ ‘The Gubderminth ren ourra muddy.’ ‘They what?’ ‘Thee ren ourra muddy.’ ‘No, it’s not catching.’ ‘Thee.’ ‘They.’ ‘Ren.’ ‘Ran.’ ‘Ourra.’ ‘Out of.’ ‘Muddy.’ ‘Oh, muddy! Okay, I get you.’
The joke is partly Ross’s low intelligence, which is what he is referring to at the start when he says he probably won’t understand. Ross is completely ignorant, near-illiterate and unable to focus on anything requiring mental exertion. But he is firm in his self-identity and in the cultural values that count (rugby, private schools, luxury consumption, machismo, etc.). The joke is also of course based on class caricatures, and the working-class characters are treated with as much Swiftian mercilessness as anyone else.
More than Swift, however, the contortion of English in the mouth of Ronan resembles the Joycean madness that descends on the language, on all languages, in Finnegans Wake in particular. When Ronan speaks, the Attorney General becomes the ‘Attordeney Generdoddle’ – and the reader finds themselves in the position of Ross, trying to transform this hibernicized monstrosity back into something comprehensible, back into the language of power. The ROCK books are full of these linguistic breakdowns and anomalies, of characters talking past each other, of language acting as a pick with which to dig even deeper into one’s own trench. The world of the ROCK books, like the language that is spoken in them, is chaotic, controlled by the wrong people, and full of injustices in every chapter. This dark portrait of Ireland, like the best satire, is delivered as a prolonged, stupid, sick, and yet funny, joke.
Naoise Ó Cairealláin with Michael Fassbender in Kneecap.
Labour of Resistance
While the do-nothings in the south live free of the British yoke, the Belfast crowd are working hard at the labour of resistance. Education, self-motivation, organising are all positive attributes in Kneecap, which goes some way toward explaining the heavy emphasis on drug-taking hedonism that runs throughout, a careful counter to the characterisation of moralising busybody do-gooder that in other times and contexts has stuck so well to militant gaeilgeoirí. Indeed, when Irish does occasionally appear in earlier ROCK instalments, it tends to reek of worthiness, a tool for virtue-signalling southerners for whom gaelscoileanna are little more than feeder schools for the elite private institutions.
That there is something important and vital at stake is absolutely clear in Kneecap. The achievement of bringing so many people to see an Irish-language film, both within the island and without, is enormous. The band and the film itself combine masterfully punkish attitudinizing and youth-coolness on the one hand, and mainstream institutional endorsement on the other. The Kneecap thing is slickly done and, with money from TG4, Northern Ireland Screen, Coimisiún na Meán and Screen Ireland, plus public endorsements from people such as Elton John and Cillian Murphy, and positive coverage everywhere from the Guardian to the LATimes, they will bring the Irish language and the reasons why it should be spoken to more eyes and ears than perhaps anyone has ever achieved. They also show no sign of toning down their solidarity with Palestine, which will surely hurt their chances when it comes to the Oscars, now that the film has secured the Irish nomination.
Joyce jokes in A Portrait of the Artist that the best English in the world is to be heard in Lower Drumcondra. Ross O’Carroll Kelly would be dismayed to hear this, given that it is on the northside, but he would also have to admit that he is no judge. In fact, he might not even understand the statement, whether joke or not. Being in judgement about language, having an opinion of any kind, is a sophisticated thing in the ROCK universe. In a way, this is a kind of guarantor that the language that does get spoken there has a kind of spontaneous purity, as it flows with so little friction. In Kneecap, the characters can only dream of being so mindlessly expressive. When we look ahead to the process of unification that is surely underway at this stage, the unionist-nationalist divide will occupy much of our attention, but other, vast cultural gaps run through the island, as the difference between this book and this film illustrates.
“Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself – which appears, over the course of the poem, as both an empire in decline and a dysfunctional democracy in crisis. “Trumpian Fever”, Agee writes, “Continually Reminds Me of the Civil War Build-up of the 1850s”. As Agee recognises, and as Mark Twain likewise knew, the past and present have a habit of rhyming through the flux.
A US-born Irish citizen, based in Belfast, Agee is singularly sensitive to the totalitarian impulses and tribal resentments that the title-figure – a “Beacon of Malevolence” – has proven adept at mobilising, both in and out of political office. “Trump Is Ten Times Worse Than Nixon”, he insists, reminding us that the current Republican nominee for president “Openly Supported the Kenosha Shooter”, Kyle Rittenhouse, in 2020. Such precedents alter the civic atmosphere, toxifying public politics, possibly beyond repair.
The Trumpian era, Agee suggests, is defined by ruthlessness, for “Trump” at heart “Is a Political Cutthroat”: a charismatic leader with brash demogogic tendencies, brazenly echoing white nationalist discourses in his bloated ascent to political power. “Trump Is Malcolm X’s “American Nightmare””, we’re informed: a proposition that feels at once historically grounded and chillingly prophetic.
In this respect, the Rant may bear a resemblance to the work of Allen Ginsberg, combining oratorical force with a deep-running sense of cultural urgency. “Trump Is the Real Plot Against America”, Agee declares, “Trump Is a Mouth Who Loves Mouthing”. It should be said that part of the appeal of Trump Rant – what stops it from being merely abrasive and makes it, instead, thought-provoking and often funny – is its fizzing sense of how ludicrous Trump can be. It’s possible, indeed, that when faced with the former president’s one-man circus-show, laughter may be the sanest response. “Trump Is Impossible To Imagine as a Scuba-diver”, Agee quips, and any honest observer would struggle to disagree.
“Trump Speaks No Languages (Not Even English)”, he continues, and we begin to understand the complex blend of fixation and anger that propels Trump Rant along its hurricane-course. Whereas Trump wields language like an ugly weapon, scattering falsehoods and distortions whenever he speaks, Agee, a poet, is using his words to hold up an accusing mirror to power itself. “Trump”, he suggests, “Is The Corrupted Dream”. The Rant, by contrast, might be thought of as a visceral attempt to re-galvanise the original promise – of language as a mode of truthful speech, and of the United States as a vibrant democratic republic (or what Langston Hughes called, with painful justice, the “land that never has been yet”).
With his Democratic rivals staunchly committed to neoliberalism at home and genocide abroad, and his own party plunging ever deeper into a sludge-pit of weaponised nativism, toxic conspiracy culture and personality-worship, as a political figure Trump in 2024 seems as peculiarly emblematic as he has ever been: both homegrown product and representative man, incarnating the feral aggression and strange emptiness of American capitalism. “Trump Is a Tacky Gatsby Bamboozling the National Nick (We’ve Read It All Before!)”, Agee writes, and the tarnished nature of America’s self-mythology seems all the more polluting; the rot too rampant to be reversed.
For all its declarative zest and referential range, Agee’s book is saturated with political dread: we read it in the shadow of things to come.
Feature Image by DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66578850
Recently walking into a garage to pay for diesel, I scanned the news stand, as is my habit, to see if I had missed any of the day’s events. Something did catch my eye, and surprised me. A county Louth paper, the Drogheda Independent, had a headline about the Lourdes Hospital’s, disgraced surgeon Michael Shine.
It seemed a group of his victims had come forward and the Taoiseach was considering a public enquiry. Such abusers leave deep scars that in many cases never truly heal, but he was enabled by the culture of that time. A toxic cowardly omertà still evident in Irish society.
The reason the story caught my eye was that I was once a patient of Michael Shine. At the till, I reflected on that brief experience as a twelve-year-old.
Much to my parent’s dismay, at age twelve, I was six foot tall, and had size twelve feet. My father was a fisherman, skipper and trawlerman in the Irish Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Wherever the fishing was at, he was there. He had a wife and four children who would literally eat him out of house and home. The four children that is, not my mother, who is a saint.
The height issue was not so bad. East German army coats – available from the now long-gone army surplus store in Dundalk, Jocks – tended to grow with you, but getting the size twelve footwear became problematic. Decent footwear in Ireland has always has been difficult to find and expensive. Even now if I want a decent pair of shoes, I have to go to Dublin for the size, range and quality.
Cheap footwear is a false economy, but when you’re size twelve at twelve back in 1989, you have to occasionally hang on until all the other bills are paid, and rightly so. None of us ever starved, but purchasing size twelve shoes, on occasion, had to wait, and this wait unfortunately caused a small issue over time to arise: an ingrown toenail. It went on for a while and caused some pain, which resulted in a referral to the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. I can’t remember whether I was twelve or thirteen by that stage.
Drogheda.
Small Scar
I do remember that it was corrected very effectively through a small surgical procedure. As I type, barefoot, I can still see the small scar Michale Shine cut in, removing the side of the nail and the infected area of my left toenail. But before he did so, I had a consultation with him.
I was brought into a medical examination room, high up in the hospital, from where I could look out over the town. The room had a lot of windows, but was far too high up for anyone to see inside. I walked to the side of the examination table, and I think I heard him say something about my toe, so I took off my runners and socks and went to get up onto the medical examination table.
His response was “no, no, your pants as well.” I was wearing jeans at the time. I did as I was told and found myself on the examination table sitting upright, looking out over the roof tops of Drogheda. Boxershorts had not entered my wardrobe at this stage of my life. I think the under garment I was wearing are referred to as slips – men’s underpants. So, from hip to toe, on both legs, I was bare skin.
Shine placed his right hand on my upper left thigh, for my ingrown toe examination, tapped my thigh twice with his palm, smiled a shark’s smile and told me I was a “fine big boy”. Now DaVinci’s Vitruvian man measures a palm as the width of four fingers and I say it with no shame that Shine’s hand was just the width of another four fingers away from my cock. I should probably say penis, but it’s not a word I would ever use and in fact it’s a bit creepy to be honest.
The memory or indeed the incident has not affected me. It might have added some uninvited flavouring to my psychological or sexual development as a confused teenager that I could have done without. But honestly it has not adversely affected me.
I am lucky, very lucky in comparison to some. That was as far as his hand went. In fact, when he said it, I said nothing but stared over his shoulder at the only other man in the room, a junior doctor. It is the memory of the look on his face, that has stayed with me ever since.
I have learned a lot about people over the years. One thing is about how people perceive fear. Experience has taught me that they feel it in one of two ways: fear for themselves or fear for others. It can be a fleeting moment, which you can correct, or it forms who you are for ever more.
In my time with the Airport Police, I was fortunate enough to have been trained in behavioural detection. What I have learned about people, through many life experiences, allows me to honestly assess my memory of that junior doctor’s fear. It was only fear for himself. The nameless coward was mute, grey with fear and looked at me as if to say: please don’t say anything.
The enablers who reside within and contribute to the toxic culture of an organisation or indeed society are sadly simply cowards. Many are not bad people; in fact, most are not, but their cowardliness contributes to the very problems they grumble about. Some in positions of supervision and management are dangerous cowards, as they misuse their limited power and will push you under the bus in a heartbeat to save themselves.
I wonder how many boys were not as lucky as me, and actually said something? You can imagine the enablers, can’t you? Silencing the innocent to save themselves. I imagine that junior doctor would have seen nothing if I had said something.
Perhaps you’re even one of them yourself, an enabler? It’s a disease in Irish society that needs to be challenged at every level. To target those who speak out, tell the truth and call it as it is, is an attack on your own safety and your own democratic right.
Sadly, enablers cannot see that and the coward in them likes to see the whistleblower get what he deserves, which reinforces their cowardliness. They may even spread a false rumour, like the DAA Airport Duty Manager who held court in the airport control room weeks after my departure, informing those present that I was in trouble for being a wistleblower. It is not the case; it was not the case.
Or the Police Inspector who wanted me to facilitate and provide whatever training I could to a candidate for a position in the Airport Police Dog Unit, even before he had been interviewed. I might never have bothered pointing out how it might look to other officers, or how people would perceive that. I had wasted my time objecting, as the candidate still got the job. People like this all needlessly and carelessly damage our democratic society. We spend so much of our lives in a workplace; of course it is part of society. The values and culture we experience there permeates society.
I can speak about these things as I declined DAA’s unfair dismissal offer of €4,800 in return for a non-disclosure agreement. An agreement that listed forty-two separate pieces of legislation that would have inhibited me from taking any further legal action against them. If they have done nothing wrong, why have forty-two pieces of legislation and a non-disclosure agreement? Evidently, I did not sign.
The main evidence that I wanted was in a redacted report. The enablers’ legal team had the evidence statute barred. I wasn’t prepared to move forward without it.
That legal interpretation, I will argue in the future, in employment law is a scam and one that the Workplace Relations Commission are failing to acknowledge as such. Perhaps because it makes their lives easier. The statute of limitations to take a case for unfair dismissal or penalisation in the workplace, under employment law, is six months. I would argue it is not six months for the admissibility of evidence of penalisation in the workplace. This is a legal scam that a weak Workplace Relations Commission are enabling! But don’t judge them too harshly.
The enablers are alive and well in Irish society, just ask the victims of Michael Shine.
Feature Image: Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda
Few writers can do grief and loss like John MacKenna. He is, without question, the John McGahern of the ‘Ancient East’. Where McGahern has put the villages and drumlins of Leitrim along the inland cusp of the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ at the heart of his writing, the landscape of South Kildare, and its surroundings are integral to MacKenna’s works and that is no different in Father, Son and Brother Ghost where place is the sorrowful score to MacKenna’s libretto.
Unravelling grief is the strange, poignant music of the heart: If ‘grief is the price we pay for love’ MacKenna paid that price. All MacKenna’s fiction revolves around Castledermot, The High and Low Terraces of Abbeylands where the MacKennas lived: The rivers Lerr and Barrow, Mullaghcreelan Woods, Kilkea, Athy, Carlow, the Sliabh Bloom mountains and the midland bogs looming beyond are accomplices in what becomes a landscape of bitter-sweet melancholy. This memoir, mimicking the prayerful intonation ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ is a hymn to MacKenna’s older brother, Jarlath whose untimely death at 62 in 2005 left the writer so bereft that he has been writing and rewriting this memoir for seventeen years between various other pursuits, not least a plunge into psychotherapy as he told a packed audience at its launch recently in the library in Athy.
Jarlath spent the bulk of his working life as a doctor in North Carolina. In this moving memoir, landscape and place become sites of consecration to a lost brother, evoked through fragments of joyful memories, where often, more harrowing family anecdotes and memories interpose – his mother’s tears when the family were leaving the Low Terrace for a larger house on the High Terrace because she was leaving behind three still born babies buried there at the bottom of the garden.
The sometimes distraught attempt to recover this lost fraternal connection reaches back into his parents’ own history, and the increasing friction and disappointment between them, caused, it appears, by Jack MacKenna’s increasing dependence on alcohol. But if Jack MacKenna was an alcoholic, he was a highly functioning one. John, as the youngest child of three, experienced these tensions more intensely, as he was like an only child because his brother and sister were away at boarding school. They were all, to different degrees ‘survivors of their own small carnage’ but he ‘didn’t know it at the time’. Set apart from their neighbours by being the school mistress’s children, the yearning for belonging abides.
Ten years younger than Jarlath, MacKenna is first separated from him when his adored older brother is sent to boarding school in Limerick while the younger brother is still an infant. In the escalating tensions of the home, Jarlath became John’s rock and anchor and his sense of abandonment in the older brother’s many absences is a source of anguish.
It seems the younger brother only realised when Jarlath died that he had never overcome these earlier losses due to their many separations. The severances are amplified, not just by the large age gap, but by the fact that Jarlath spent his summers working in England during his college years when he first studied for an arts degree followed by a H. Dip in Education and then went on to study medicine.
During these periods, Jarlath’s trips to Castledermot were brief but they are jealously recovered here. In choosing to pursue his medical career in America, the miles of the Atlantic Ocean eventually stretched between them, keeping the brothers geographically apart as adult men.
Unsurprisingly, MacKenna conveys a sense of betrayal by all these ‘sunderings’ culminating in his brother’s death from motor neuron disease a few days after he visits him. They are only spared one last night together as Jarlath deteriorated unexpectedly. All this pours forth in torrents of ‘unending loss’. Loss is ‘the tiny, pitched hole in the sky at night or the sun’s hesitation about rising at dawn’. It is ‘a grief that has been given two decades to condense but it remains’.
With incredible skill this ceaseless grief, punctuated by cherished memories is movingly retold – snatched scenes during school and Christmas holidays, pranks played, photos of the three MacKenna children on swings, at picnics, on car bonnets – photos, not provided in the book but described in the minutest detail. In this, intense nurturing of memory, MacKenna manages, not just to keep his absent brother present but to evoke both brother and disappointed father with immense love.
MacKenna’s despair was so all-consuming that he lost his second marriage amid the wilderness of the fallout from his brother’s death and for this, he is not easy on himself. Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkle, Elvis, Mozart and even prayers become accessories in recovered memories – every child of the 60s will identify with them and the same goes for the rosaries and the stations of the cross. The smell of polish, beeswax and lavender evoking back-to-school nostalgia are experiences all those of MacKenna’s generation will easily identify with and they are all tinged with a hint of the sanctified.
Equally, we all knew a Lal McKenna – his single aunt whom, not unlike the heroine of Joyce’s ‘Eveline’, sacrificed her own prospects of love and marriage to care, first for her younger siblings and after that, for her sister’s children in Athy where she lived-in with the family, and also served in the shop. We all know too of the shoe-box coffins where dead and premature babies, excluded from ‘consecrated ground’ for not being baptised were, instead buried in old, abandoned graveyards or other local hallowed spots.
Jarlath’s kindness to the brother, ten years his junior are emotionally recalled as numerous amputations – the ‘tearing apart of what was their brotherhood.’ An image of their father, Jack leaning on a spade at the opening throws a shadow over the pages – a shadow ‘that reached back into the past eight decades’.
The narrative is not chronological but rather moves joltingly from different decades and places – itself evoking loss and dislocation. We are plunged into Jack’s own displacement when, after his mother died soon after he was born, he and his siblings were moved to his grandmother’s house in Celbridge. When his father remarried, Jack McKenna and his siblings were moved back to Bluebell Cottage in Athy where his father, a train driver, was based. Jack McKenna followed his own father into work on the railways and eventually becoming a signalman and foreman in Athy. ‘We are a railway family’ MacKenna informs the reader and his father was an exemplary worker. MacKenna’s earliest dreams was to be a railway worker too.
This beautifully crafted memoir on a grief that brings the writer to the edge of self-annihilation is full of hope too. We are ‘not just the people our parents make us but what we make of ourselves’ and we can ‘all if we are lucky, venture down the road of understanding and mercy’. Like his masterful debut novel The Last Fine Summer (1997) this memoir marks MacKenna out as a dazzling virtuoso of the poetics of love and loss.
Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it. Sigmund Freud from Civilisation and its Discontents (1930)
One sees it traversing through the garrulous troughs on social media, particularly X (formerly known as Twitter), and in the comments section on YouTube. For example, ‘Dads car,’ and, ‘Mums SUV’, rather than ‘Dad’s car,’ or ‘Mum’s SUV.’
It is time-consuming to learn how to punctuate and, thus, write correctly – adhering to the rules. Many find concentrating on this to be a chore. One comprehends, but… it is unadulterated, plaintive laziness.
This is not ‘Grammar-Nazism’ as the meme-led, cultural clichéd term goes. This is about improving one’s writing, working harder, avoiding inertia and Mediocrity. Many prefer verbal communication and visual stimuli to sitting down to write – in a chair ‘old school’, the traditional way.
An instantaneous gratification culture is alive and well. It descends into a podgy finger flicking on a dimly lit screen of an evening, absorbing those dopamine hits. Bobbing and weaving through the electronic morass. Jiving and twisting. The synaptic twerking of consciousness.
We, as human beings, have become slovenly. Infantilised, as we pig out on junk food. Recumbent and ‘comfy’, as we wade through the internet’s offerings. Night after night.
WALL-Es
That scene in the Disney Pixar movie WALL-E with overweight patrons onboard the flying-in-space cruise ship on hover chairs flying around onboard, never walking, watching big screens that tell us when to eat and when to chill. These humans reflect what we have become: our seemingly ambiguous comfort in this obesity has been normalised.
This is where the capitalist market has led us. There is profit in wanton laziness for those who make the products of greed readily available and easy to consume. They do not want to give up that income stream, and into the troughs come the snouts that munch, munch, and munch amidst the squeals.
Shucking up gallons of fizzy drinks. Snuffling down handfuls of sweets and munching upon oil-laden fries. Scoffing on crisps, cakes, and biscuits to fill that sugar, fat, and salt desire, with little or no real nutritional value to help our brains and bodies function.
This writer has been guilty of the above, overeating junk food. It leads to diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, and long-term health complications. It is a work in progress to avoid being bowled out at fifty, succumbing to gout, fat-infused valves, and diabetes.
The idea of spending, as one young person informed me of late, ‘the evening/night scrolling through TikTok,’ is a sad indictment of where many have arrived. We delight in the displayed lives of others on the smartphone’s small screen. But is there anything to be learned from this narcissistic intrigue and fascination?
This writer believes there is a correlation between poor diets and sedentary lifestyles. It is about accepting banality as the status quo and not desiring to work harder.
Mediocrity, as a movement, is parasitical. It moves onto a host, infects it with its form of banal idealism, and then moves on to the next victim, where it implements the same process. Replication. A bacillus of sorts.
Mediocrity feeds into apathetic mindsets that have been taken over by the synaptic-feed outlay. It encompasses newspapers, mainstream media, and much of what is posted on the internet. It promotes and projects an idealistic self-image. Differences are highlighted and ultimately vilified – leading to racism – day in and day out.
Terms such as ‘Shock’ and ‘Fury’ in online news articles feed into that visceral, tribe-on-alert, emotive response that keeps people in that Sartrean fear of ‘the Other’, compounding accepted, interjected biases.
We are also constantly exposed to false standards of measurement. There is a multitude of inane, beige, loquacious, naive, idealistic, and elegiac minds all desiring the same thing – to be rich and famous.
As Freud states in the opening paragraph of Civilisation and its Discontents: ‘It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success, and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.’
Having a million social media followers does not generally bring financial success – it is illusory. These individuals, who are generally beneficiaries of marketing campaigns, have become false prophets. Mediocrity is a virus, burning through media outlets, claiming there is only one way.
Because of its extensive reach and influence, Mediocrity is not readily noticed and thus rectified. It has become entrenched. The indomitable rise of Mediocrity coincides with a fall in proper adherence to punctuation and grammar rules.
Titivillus, a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes, besets a scribe at his desk (14th century illustration),
Punctuation in History
As far back as 260 BCE (Before the Christian Era) in China symbols were being used as full stops on bamboo texts to indicate the end of a chapter. Around this time, Western scholars used scriptio continua, text with no separation between the words. The Greeks were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots from the 5th century BC as an aid to oral delivery. After 200 BC, the Greeks used Aristophanes of Byzantium’s system (called théseis) of a single dot (punctus) to mark up speeches.
In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections.
To take two forms of punctuation, the comma and the semicolon. The comma is widely attributed to Aldus Manutius, a 15th-century Italian printer who used a mark now recognized as a comma to separate words. The word is derived from the Greek koptein (literally ‘to cut off’).
Meanwhile, the semicolon is first attested to in Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna (1496). In English it is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression.
Among great exponents of punctuation, essayist Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 paper ‘Signs of the Times’ employs commas, semicolons, and dashes to break up his sentences and usher in and connect content. Similarly, Herman Melville’s divine usage of the semicolon in his seminal 1851 is evident throughout his almost biblical, classic Moby Dick.
A semicolon can waver back and forth like the tail of a young fry salmon, or a whole raft of them can glitter and flip like sardines caught in a net. A semicolon can work like a wooden gate, allowing the woolly sheep of greater meaning to enter greener pastures, enhancing the experience of reading.
I notice online that some scholars believe that semicolons are pretentious and overactive. So, is this writer just cribbing the numbskulls of opacity? Are we in a fugue state? A place of unlimited bohemianism. Or am I mixing aphorisms?
There are rustling hedgerows of commentators who draft in writers such as James Joyce, saying he ‘kept punctuation usage to a minimum.’ Maybe for Ulysses, but please do not allow yourself to be locked up in the one house of another writer’s style for justification and throw away the key. This is how a particular style becomes overgrown, with mossy banks, thorny thickets, and crabgrass obscuring the view.
I recall a history lecture where the American lecturer said that commas in an academic essay amounted to a crime. This may be true of an academic paper which is dedicated towards a particular arguments that employs texts to make it, but not in a more literary style.
Gertrude Stein seemed to take umbrage at ‘unwarranted’ punctuation with her grandstanding as a grammarian. She was the one who did the heavy lifting in terms of criticism – employing an academic register in her prose to disenfranchise good punctuation usage further. Stating: ‘I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.’
If we embark upon this model, this mentality, we enter a Stygian process – one that slips off the banks and bobs on down to the underworld – into a void of immutable darkness and further self-perpetuating ignorance.
You see punctuation can give writing its function. That is a litany of small symbols denoting how that particular nuanced form acts or functions. A sentence can be a sentence, but punctuation can jolt it into life. Some may say it is a question of style. I say it is a question of slovenliness in an age of electronic meandering.
Some viewers have noticed the numberplate on the Ford Cortina in That They May Face the Rising Sun, the recent film based on John McGahern’s 2002 novel of the same name. The plate reads ‘OZU 155’. Surely this is a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu? In interview, the director, Pat Collins, has said that the coincidence of the number plate was unplanned, but deliberately retained.
Ozu is not well known in the West now, but he is certainly a canonical name among people, like Collins, who know their cinema history. Ozu is celebrated for an observational, restrained style of storytelling, with minimal music or camera movement and, indeed, minimal plot. Collins’s admirable adaptation of McGahern’s final novel bears more than passing resemblances to key Ozu films, such as Late Spring from 1949, Early Summer from 1951, Tokyo Story from 1953 and An Autumn Afternoon from 1962. Like Collins, these all share a concern with the gentle unfolding of inter-generational time, with subtle domestic interactions, and with the challenge (sometimes welcome, sometimes not) posed by the visitor from outside.
What is most pertinent about this playful reference, however, is the common take on Ozu that he addressed ‘universal’ themes, and that his appeal is ‘universal’. Similar observations litter the reception of That They May Face the Rising Sun, and of another recent Irish breakthrough hit that I consider a companion piece to this, 2022’s An Cailín Ciúin, directed by Colm Bairéad. Both of these films are set in isolated, unnamed rural locales, with ordinary folk as lead characters, and have plots that are not besmirched by the concerns of urban existence (crime and punishment, politics, violence, money, addiction, social isolation, class conflict), which tend to dominate the stories we watch on screen. As with Ozu, paring away as many specific plot details as possible makes these films feel, to reach for vocabulary favoured by reviewers, ‘timeless’, ‘classic’, ‘profound’, ‘dreamlike’, ‘beautiful’, ‘delicate’.
It has been a long-running complaint that Irish cinema was dominated too long by questions of national and/or sectarian identity, that its narratives were tediously populated by priests and hysterical IRA men running around in ill-fitting leather jackets. Why couldn’t we just have a ‘normal’ cinema that would tell non-political stories that would have a universal appeal? The embarrassment of a liberal commentariat, and academy, at our political backwardness means that any Irish film that is not about the British question in some form or other is greeted with praise for having achieved some kind of postnationalist maturity. The two recent Irish films that we are concerned with here are therefore feted, as evidence that we have grown up.
It is true of any film set in the past that it is as much about the time it is made as the time it depicts. That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in the early 1980s, but the couple at the heart of the story, self-exiled from the city, are recognisably from our times. The period details are minimal, and the sense of being in the past is achieved mostly by the omission of digital devices, screens and disposable homeware. The fashion and hairstyles, so often an important guide to period, are neutral enough to belong either to the 1980s or to the present, especially if we regard Joe and Kate as ageing hipsters. (All the other characters are timelessly old-fashioned in their appearance.) As for what they do, they are engaged in what we now call remote working and the back-to-basics simplicity of their existence, with its mix of intellectual life, light agricultural activity and overpopulation-conscious childlessness, has a whiff of prepperism.
A very memorable sequence dwells on the wake, hours after the unexpected death of the lonely Johnny, who has been marooned in a life of drudgery in London for decades. In the crowded kitchen of Johnny’s brother’s family, a woman leads the group of country people in reciting a decade of the rosary, keeping track with a set of beads on her lap. Everybody participates in the ritual, responding to her as she cycles through the prayers. We linger on the faces and voices for longer than a more distractable film would allow. In the midst of all this, our protagonists Joe and Kate remain silent. For all of their integration into the community and the vital welcome that they offer to all comers, they are nevertheless not fully part of it.
The tone of this separateness is carefully judged; the silence of Joe and Kate is not hostile, nor is it received badly, as the story is one of tolerance. But, whereas in the novel, it is the community that kindly tolerates the blow-ins who have landed in their midst, in the film the flow of tolerance has switched, and now it is the liberal couple who tolerate the traditional, conservative values of the community. The contemporary characteristics of Joe and Kate align them with our 2024 values. The vast changes that have taken place between the early 1980s and now are palpable in this difference.
Nobody knew better than McGahern the tightness of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church held over the life of the country, especially in rural areas and in the schools. (He lost his job as a teacher because of the content of earlier novels). It is apparent to us now that the church was in fact at an unsustainable peak of dominance, triumphant in the abortion referendum of 1983 and in the defeated divorce referendum of 1986. But events such as the outcries at the death of Ann Lovett and the persecution of Joanne Hayes would set in motion the church’s reputational freefall in the intervening decades (rapist priests, slave laundries, death camps for children of the unmarried, the list goes on) and the blanket implementation in recent times of what was in the past quaintly known as ‘the liberal agenda’.
That They May Face the Rising Sun is a document of the final years of the previous dispensation, before the enormous transformation that has brought us to the liberal consensus that now prevails. When did this change take place, and how? Certainly the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 is a milestone, and in and around that date we could also include the Maastricht Treaty, Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope (both 1992), the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism (Clinton, Blair, the World Trade Organisation), the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce (by a margin of 0.28%), and the world wide web.
One other, admittedly cosmetic, landmark event was the switch in 1987 to the standard European style of car numberplates, where the numbers and letters actually mean something. ‘OZU 155’ stands for the Japanese filmmaker, whose work is celebrated for the vacuous virtue of being about everything and therefore about nothing — in other words, for being politically inoffensive. Any edge of critique present in Ozu is blunted on contact with a commentariat in search of liberal universalisms, hungry to understand ‘story’ as a virtue and ‘context’ as an embarrassment.
McGahern similarly needs to be pruned of embarrassing excrescences. The problem is that in all his books he is a border writer, constantly conscious of the Troubles, the aftermath of the Civil War, the problem of political-institutional legitimacy and the family dysfunctions that flow as a result. He presents the awkward vista of rural communities that to this day persist in voting for political gombeens, seemingly unable to adapt to the fact that people in Dublin and Brussels know what is best. The film adaptation of his final novel forgives these errors by the device of celebrating the tolerant humanism of the educated outsider, stand-ins for viewers who crave forgiveness for despising the backwardness of pre-liberal Ireland and its uncomfortable, unresolved politics and its quaintly non-rational numberplates.
These are extraordinary times. Last month serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, had his 23-year sentence squashed; a Channel 4 documentary aired new sexual misconduct claims against Kevin Spacey, and Woody Allen and Roman Polanski are feted at the Venice Film Festival. ‘Hiding in plain sight’ – and having ruthless lawyers – still seem to work as a treat in the misogynist’s playbook.
Let’s take Woody Allen. These days Woody Allen looks like someone’s favourite teddy that’s been savaged by a pitbull, but don’t be fooled – he’s as unrepentedly misogynistic as ever. And just as keen to claim his innocence: No Court Ever Convicted Me.
Some days it feels as if #MeToo had never happened.
So Woody is the guy who, since the very beginning of his career, made films about older guys glomming onto young women. Very young women. Mariel Hemmingway, in everyone’s favourite Woody movie, ‘Manhattan’, was sixteen-years-old. Sixteen! Being drooled on by a 40-something Woody Allen.
When shooting wrapped on ‘Manhattan’ Woody drove her to her parents mansion and suggested she run away to Paris with him, where he would make her a star. Would there be separate bedrooms? Asked the kid. Eh, no.
Praise the Lord (and pass the ammunition), that was the end of that.
But Woody went on to make more, and more, movies featuring older men – very often himself – and younger, much younger women.
Emma Stone, Allen, and Parker Posey at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015
Cultural Icon
Part of the blindness to this carry on arose of course from Woody being a ‘cultural icon’ for millions of Boomers. The softly-spoken, wonky-specked hero of their fav films, could do no wrong. Woody was their very own ‘Lovable, Neurotic Nebbish’.
As Steven Kurutz of the New York Times wrote that Woody was the litmus test for all things groovy: ‘E. E. Cummings, Paris, 1930s jazz and the sophisticated, cultured world his films came to represent.’
Apart from a few sharp eyed critics like Joan Didion who said Mariel Hemingway in ‘Manhattan’ was ‘another kind of adolescent fantasy, a high-school senior with perfect skin, perfect wisdom, perfect sex, and no visible family’, or film critic Pauline Kaelwho asked, ‘What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?’
Most people played along. It was just Woody, playing out his ‘predilections’. Hahaha. Then came real life.
It turned out it was the same Woody Allen who groomed, seduced, and had a secret affair with his and Mia Farrow’s sixteen-year old high school daughter, Soon-Yi. A young woman whom he had been de facto father to for thirteen years. A young girl, chauffeured to him in his apartment still in her school uniform.
When confronted by a horrified Mia – she’d found the pornographic photos he had taken of Soon-Yi on his desk – Woody went full DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender. Who cared if he destroyed his family and his partner Mia in the process? Certainly not Woody.
He denied Soon-yi was his daughter, that he had been in loco parentis for over thirteen years. Denied grooming her. Denied that Soon-yi, a Korean street child, surviving on trash until adopted by Mia and then husband Andre Previn, was peculiarly vulnerable, having never even had a boyfriend until Mr Specs moved on her.
No no no, wrote Woody. ‘Here was a sharp, classy, fabulous young woman: highly intelligent, full of latent potential, ready to ripen superbly’.
“Ready to ripen superbly.”
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn in Venice in 1996
Worse to come
During custody proceedings it turned out, as Dylan would testify years later in her open letter to the New York Times that Allen had groomed her, and abused her, ‘doing things to her that she didn’t like’ for ‘as long as she could remember’?
Immediately, the vast army of lawyers, PR wonks, ‘experts’ employed by him to destroy Mia Farrow and allow him ‘have’ Soon-Yi, switched their attention to destroying the evidence of his then seven-year-old daughter, Dylan.
In a classic Toxic Dad move, Woody lodged a legal appeal to gain custody of his and Mia’s three younger children: Moses, Dylan and Ronan, saying Mia was an unfit mother. A harridan. A bully. A crazy person. Whom her children hated. That these ‘false allegations’ of abusing Dylan were manifestations of Mia Farrow’s ‘festering anger’ against him. Part of a ‘bitter custody battle’.
Woody was the first to bring up the toxic ‘Parental Alienation’ defence now poisoning thousands of custody cases in both America, the U.K., even here in Ireland, whereby abusive fathers can get full custody of children when their lawyers assert the Mums have ‘alienated’ them against the same abusive Dad.
According to one top US lawyer, it’s ‘easier for the Courts to grant custody to an abusive father than to believe the mother’. Thousands of women, and children, have suffered terribly. Little comfort to them that the guy who dreamed up this latest patriarchal wheeze hacked himself to pieces in his kitchen with a carving knife as local deputies moved in with child abuse charges.
As Woody’s attacks on Mia as ‘harridan’ were amplified by an adoring press, lapped up by fans, interview after sympathetic interview was conducted with our man, ‘as New York as the Statue of Liberty’. It was box office. Who doesn’t love to see a super-rich, beautiful blonde with a large, multicultural family, taken down?
Luckily, Woody overplayed his hand. The seven week-long custody case didn’t go his way. The judge, to Woody’s and his expensive lawyers evident astonishment, denied him custody. In case anyone was in doubt as to why the Judge spelled it out: ‘Mr. Allen’s resort to the stereotypical ‘woman scorned’ defence is an injudicious attempt to divert attention from his failure as a responsible parent and adult.’ Hurray!
Mia Farrow at the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes awards ceremony.
No Criminal Conviction
Sadly, attempts at securing a criminal conviction against him for the sexual abuse of Dylan foundered.
First, the New York hospital who conducted ‘interviews’ at Woody’s behest with seven-year-old Dylan, destroyed all their evidence, then claimed she had either been ‘coached’ or was ‘deluded’. Before any judicial process could take place they allowed Woody Allen to hold a press conference on the hospital steps to ‘proclaim his innocence’.
The New York Prosecutor was apoplectic. But hey, Woody was Woody. He brought millions of dollars into New York, right? What was a seven-year-old’s ‘discomfort’ compared to that?
A young NYC welfare officer who interviewed Dylan separately, believed her. He was ‘instructed’ to find her allegations ‘unfounded’. When he refused, he was fired. His superior said: ‘The elite do whatever they want to do. There are no consequences’. She resigned.
Meanwhile in separate proceedings in Connecticut where Mia and the children lived, another prosecutor believed there was ‘probable cause for a criminal case’. But it was this prosecutor and Mia Farrow who reluctantly decided to call a halt to further legal proceedings as putting a traumatised seven-year-old through any more of this brutality would be too much.
Woody held another press conference: he was clean! More parties! More cheering!
And he continued to make films, play jazz, and yes, actually get married to Soon-Yi. He was sixty-two, she twenty-seven.
Most importantly, he got to keep his precious status as an ‘auteur’ and ‘proven genius’. One of the ‘greats’ of Western cinema.
Ronan Farrow.
Post Traumatic Stress
He almost got away with it.
His victims, daughter Dylan and partner Mia Farrow – though all the children in the family were affected – were left with the pain, post-traumatic-stress, years of self-loathing, anxiety and depression, while he partied on.
As Dylan wrote, ‘Sexual abuse is a life long sentence. It never goes away’.
Woody said it was all ‘stupid’, ‘silly’. There was nothing he could do. And, magic trick!, no court had convicted him. He was clean.
Luckily, just when you think you’ve killed it off for good, the truth has a nasty habit of reappearing.
It was the lionisation of her father at the Golden Globes in 2014 that drove Dylan, now a beautiful young woman in her twenties, into offering that open letter to the New York Times:
For as long as I could remember my father had been doing things to me that I didn’t like…
I didn’t like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn’t like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn’t like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn’t like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me.
Woody’s obsessive grooming culminated in taking the little girl to a ‘crawl space’ in the attic in the family home in Connecticut, making her lie on her tummy and watch her brother’s train set go round, while he touched her private parts, then penetrated her with his finger.
He told her it was ‘their secret’. That one day he would take her to Paris and make her a movie star.
Horribly, the exact same line he’d used on Mariel Hemingway.
Dylan’s letter to the New York Times was a bombshell. Twenty-two years after her mother’s initial disclosure of abuse, cultural indulgence towards male abusers had chilled. Significantly.
Dylan’s younger brother, Ronan Farrow, who Allen had offered a ‘comfortable life’ to in return for speaking out against his sister and his mother, was developing a successful investigative journalism career. His eyes were on that other elephant in the room of abuse, Harvey Weinstein.
Crucially for Dylan, and for their mother Mia, Ronan became an ally.
At first, he admits he was horrified at his sister’s public re-announcement of their father’s sexual abuse. He begged her not to. ‘It was the last association I wanted’. A bonfire in which friendships, powerful allies and those all-important connections would get burnt. Where Woody Allen’s ferocious spin machine would go into overdrive once more.
Thankfully the #MeToo Movement was sweeping through the ‘entertainment world’.
Woody’s ‘this is all too silly’ schtick began to look threadbare.
Ronan’s book on the Harvey Weinstein scandal,Catch and Kill became a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller. Hachette, poised to publish Woody’s memoir under the same imprint, pulped Woody, and championed Ronan. Amazon cancelled a four film-deal.
The Tables Turn
The coup de grace was a four-part HBO documentary aired in 2021, ‘Allen v Farrow’ made by Jane Doe Films. The details, painstakingly put together, paint an utterly damning portrait of an decidedly not nice little guy.
Woody began to sound less sanguine, dismissing the actors who dared refuse to work with him, with: ‘That’s how actors and actresses are, denouncing me became the fashionable thing to do, like everybody suddenly eating kale.’
As if kale had anything to do with justice. With little ones being abused.
Rather prophetically justice has come for Woody and his ilk, Harvey Weinstein etc., via the media. The same media these men manipulated, for years.
Far from being a ‘Trial by Media’ as these scions of the patriarchy like to characterise it, for abused women, going to the media, taking the fight to Twitter, or TikTok, or the New York Times, is a ‘form of rebellion’. It is a way, said Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. with regard to yet another alleged sexual abuser, Russell Brand, for abused women to ‘throw a brick through the windows of the Criminal Justice System. A way of saying: You Have Let Us Down’.
Throwing bricks through windows has a venerable feminist history. Smashing the windows of shops in London was an effective tool in the Suffragettes armoury. Not listening to us? How about this: Crash! Bang! Wallop! And down came the huge plate glass windows in cascading showers of splinters.
The sexual exploitation and abuse of women by powerful men is still endemic in our culture. However it is called out – through film, documentaries, social media, by incredibly brave young women like Dylan Farrow, by throwing bricks through windows – it is our way of saying ENOUGH.
Rationalism is a psychosis; a dissociation of intellect and feeling; the suppression of our intuitive, emotional, and sensual being (the heart’s domain). Enlightenment thinkers wished to replace the credulity of religious compliance with reason. They put their faith in human progress and an expansive intellect – and some, it should be said, in a deeper and more natural spirituality.
They thought they could reform society, but radical social reform has rarely, if ever, been generated by external pressure. It arises when an established worldview reaches the limit of its credibility and its possibilities.
For all the fine words and egalitarian instincts, what emerged was a restricted and abstracted rationality, blinkered by the narrow focus of scientific empiricism: a civilization devoid of core significance that was to become a kind of megalomania. Mathematical abstraction, reductionist precision and the crushing urgency of capital accumulation could never have generated a benign culture.
Without consent to meaning and an imaginative response to the innate feelings that evoke a deeper sense of being, Western civilization will continue its fragmentation and decline until it succumbs to incompetence, overreach, and inner contradiction.
At this point, Goya’s Capricho 43 comes to mind once more. There he sits, Goya himself, slumped over a table, looking like he has the whole world on his shoulders and wishing it would all go away.
However, the words on the panel are stark: “The sleep of reason produces monsters”. And the owls, bats and lynx are generally presumed to symbolize a resurgent irrationality always watching for reason to lower its guard – a clear expression of Enlightenment values. It is balanced somewhat by the caption for the print: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders”.
This is fine so far as it goes, but it ultimately amounts to the same thing. It implies that you can’t trust imagination without reason to almost police it. But in art – so in life generally – the imaginative impulse is primary. It is not going to lead you down the road to ruin as in some Victorian morality tale.
Imagination is the indispensable quality, a benign compulsion in an unfolding life. A creative leap, the capacity to conceive the new, is essential if life is to evolve rather than merely repeat.
Even mathematics, the very rock on which the rational world is built, is itself a brilliant act of imagination; an original, symbolic system, independent of life as lived, and that may in turn be applied to our practical engagement with its process.
Reason elaborates the idea in a kind of inner dialectic that bridges the gap between inspiration and cultural expression, between the imaginative realm and the everyday. In practice, this is an indivisible, spontaneous process – not linear and mechanical – and its accomplishment is a sensitive art.
However, we can’t really be sure what Goya meant. He was unhealthy, overworked and disillusioned. But the sleep of reason is not loss of control; the sleep of reason is rationalism, reason without heart.
"The peremptory watchword "believe in God" has been superseded by “trust the science”. Its dogmatic purpose is no different and it was used to effect during the pandemic as a marketing slogan for social compliance and pharmaceutical profit."https://t.co/QtqRvZn2Co
Looking at Capricho 43 with the Covid pandemic at its height, the bats were insistent. Their association with the new disease was a topic of speculation. A global panic was underway; the threat index was rising, and we were at war with a virus. The response to this “existential” threat (yet another) was employing the standard rhetoric of the war machine. Civil liberties were suspended; a crusade was launched; “trust the science” was on the banners; and facts and figures were deployed like heavy artillery.
If your attitude to the world is purely rational, your actions – both the action itself and the manner of its effect – will reflect the sense of separability and isolation that characterizes it.
Notwithstanding the fact that we humans have co-evolved with viruses, that their presence is vital, even if some are potentially harmful, a program of total suppression was begun. At least until a vaccine (a “magic bullet” that would stop Covid dead in its tracks) could be developed, we were told.
Since the time of Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century it has been known that a small piece of a virus or bacterium can stimulate an immune response. The technique has been used to prevent many common diseases ever since.
A corona virus tends to generate variants liberally and is not so susceptible to a traditional vaccine. For the biotech industry, which had struggled after the financial expectations of The Human Genome Project were not realized, and the difficulty of meeting regulatory requirements, its moment had come. They were now cast as world saviours and the whole force of a global pandemic was behind them.
To put it very simply, gene-based vaccines cause your own cells to produce a spike protein – essentially a piece of the virus – which, like a traditional vaccine should then provoke an immune response. All very well if you “trust the science”.
In this case it meant trusting a pharmaceutical industry with a long record of disregard, deception and harm and allowing them to manipulate, or ‘program,’ your own cells.
But no scientist can assure the outcome of speculative interference in the elusive and dynamic process at the heart of, and common to, every living system. A cell is a cell: nucleus, cytoplasm, membrane, and the tiny world within continuously generating growth. All cells share the same structure; all life is cellular; and all life is interconnected. What could possibly go wrong?
Just to add that claims for efficacy went all the way from “magic bullet” to balm and Covid is still with us, vaccinated or not. And, I almost forgot, a few more billionaires now grace the earth.
In our latest podcast Sunetra Gupta recalls her role as the "anti-lockdown Professor" & explains her work on developing a universal influenza vaccine. She's still awaiting an apology from her opponents such as George Monbiot. Listen to the Full Pod on https://t.co/56pM7rEj94pic.twitter.com/DJp1JuaUaH
The publication of Los Caprichos marks the opening of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the war with France and years of political upheaval would follow. Goya reflects the disorder in his strikingly expressive work of those years until his death in exile in 1828.
By this time Europe and North America were on the verge of a world that would seem very familiar to us now. Both electrification and the internal combustion engine arrived in the 1880’s, and the subsequent years are known as La Belle Epoque in Europe and The Gilded Age in America.
The conspicuous affluence these terms betray rested on a period of intense industrialization and exploitation, during which the British Empire was the great world power. By the year of Goya’s death economic liberalism was about to reveal its most brutal aspect.
In Britain the new poor laws were enacted to starve masses of the underclass into wage slavery. Without support millions more were plunged into sea of destitution. Included in this purgatory of despair were tens of thousands of women and girls forced into prostitution and an early grave. This was the social catastrophe confronted by Charles Dickens and Karl Marx.
Across the seas, India and China (and countries in between), two ancient and distinct civilizations – their history, social structures and trading patterns rent – were forcibly conscripted into a global trading and financial system to their utter detriment, and to the enrichment of an elite group of financiers, industrialists and Western powers who controlled it.
Further south, the scramble for Africa would soon open the gates to yet another prolonged exhibition of colonial barbarity.
One appalling outcome: the instability and structural disintegration wrought by this interference in traditional systems of land use, production and trade left them unable to deal with the consequences of a prolonged drought in the 1880’s. (A phenomenon not unknown and provided for by tradition). As in Ireland a few decades earlier, famine ensued. It is estimated that between Asia and Africa perhaps as many as fifty million may have died.
The unspeakable horror of all this is chronicled in detail in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis, in so far as words or even pictures can convey the terrible suffering of fellow human beings on such an immense scale. Its full effect requires an imaginative capacity typically repressed in the cultivated mind by the assumption of superiority.
In the words of Mike Davis, ‘What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.’[i]
Listen to our podcast with Toby Green as he discusses the effect of Covid lockdowns on Africa, which was largely unaffected by the disease, and the intellectual failure of many on the left. https://t.co/EsbBdkq4xr@toby00green@battleforeurope @SunetraGupta @KevinBardosh
For all the achievements of Western civilization in science and the arts the dark side of our history is actual. Moreover, it still resonates around the world in conflict, poverty, migration, and debt.
It is critical that we should acknowledge our defects now that, so we are told, we are once again standing at the edge of fundamental change. The transition to a post-carbon future will not forestall dire predictions without a radical shift in perspective and it remains ‘business as usual’.
Unrestrained capital accumulation, open-ended economic growth, finance capitalism and the rigged marketplace are entrenched. Bacon’s slogan “knowledge is power” still drives and validates the scientific ideology that underlies it all. Together they perpetuate a toxic system to which the question of how it is fuelled is almost incidental.
In addition, the corporate sector now has the ‘sustainable’ technology supposed to save us firmly in its grip; ‘saving the planet’ is a heaven-sent marketing strategy; and the promise of a ‘just transition’ has becomea sickly green joke.
A cursory analysis of the crisis we are facing would reveal the dynamic driving it. That it has done so for almost half a millennium is why the crisis is so acute and why its cause should be so obvious.
That there are limits to growth is axiomatic. And it should also be apparent that renewable technologies could never equal the energy potential of fossil fuels. The dispersed energy of wind and solar and the second-hand energy of biofuels, even without the problem of intermittence, could only possibly match the concentrated energy of fossil fuels – discounting the growth imperative – by an expansion of its technologies on such a scale that this factor alone would be problematic.
In any case, highly complex renewable systems present their own difficulties. Every method of energy production requires energy to support it: for mining coal, pumping oil, or the massive resource extraction demand by renewables and the ‘smart’ technology that enables it. This requirement has initiated yet another round of colonial exploitation and despoilation.
Also, known reserves of many essential minerals are deficient. And resource scarcity is insurmountable; what doesn’t occur cannot be conjured into existence. A finite world has bio-physical limits: as its resources are subject to exhaustion, so our ambitions are subject to restraint. Our centuries long escapade is being constricted and the problems of over-development and over-complexity cannot be solved by more of the same – more regulations, more laws, plans, targets, goals, reproof, and penalties.
Image: Aleksandar Pasaric
What use is a carbon-free future if our rapacious civilization continues as is? Biodiversity loss, degradation of soils, deforestation, plunder of the oceans, toxic pollution of every kind: all these are just as malignant, if not more so. Degradation and degeneracy cannot be ameliorated by new technologies. And it is delusional to hope that ‘sustainability’ can somehow allow us to defy some of the most fundamental realities of being.
All this prowess we’ve engineered over time seems to have convinced too many of us that men are gods. And challenging the Gods never ends well. Hubris is followed by nemesis – inexorably if we can’t break through the bounds of scientific rationalism. And the stimulus for such a profound shift in consciousness cannot be prescribed; it can only arise organically. Whether from disillusionment, decline, crisis, chaos, or common sense remains to be seen.
The ground of this dilemma was prepared during that long period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: when the dominance of capital was extended, scientific inquiry established the mechanical worldview, and the hegemony of humanity over nature began its destructive course in earnest. If only Galileo could have seen the future through his telescope.
It was at that time of change, about the year 1605 – just five years after Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake and the breadth of his perception went up in flames with him – that Don Quixote first set forth. Caught between these worlds, his adventure in a sense exemplifies dilemma. The changing conditions were presenting a choice: between faith and belief – and the new belief; between metaphor and fact; between self-realization and passivity; between the individual subject and the social object; and for Don Quixote himself perhaps – depending how you read it – between the way of a (wise?) fool and the way of conviction.
Adventure is a disorder, a disruption of the everyday. The quest is, in part, a dissatisfaction in the everyday, a compulsion to discover its deeper reality. In the mediaeval epic the hero and the epic plane are coincident, so to speak. “The men of Homer belong to the same world as their desires”, to quote Jose Ortega y Gasset.[ii]
But Don Quixote is at odds with his world. In this he is probably the first hero of the modern age – an anti-hero, if you will – not borne by the established manner of a chivalric tale, but impelled by his own will, along “the trackless way”, in Joseph Campbell’s words,[iii] of his unfolding life; and creating in his wake his own ‘mythology’, by his own heroic self-realization in a world at variance with his inner being and feeling – as individual integrity will be in an abstract world of facts and figures.
Capital and the new science were breaking the world apart. The organism was torn from its environment, but the soul craves reconciliation and unity. The pathology of progress – distraction, addiction, obsession, emotional disorder, and mental distress to the point of psychosis – all those cries of pain and anguish resound because the world is no longer whole.
And when the prevailing culture is a secular, socio-economic state and no more, to which art and philosophy are peripheral (and largely commodified), it cannot set the terms for a necessary transformation.
To be convinced – whether by religious or scientific dogma makes no difference – is to set yourself at naught and passive in a world always active and renewed. Self-realization, the search for meaning within a prison of abstraction and global assent is, in consequence, only possible in the individual psyche and through the daily heroism of each one of us.
The reign of Gods, Goddesses and our own Christian God was over, or coming to an end. If, on the other hand, the cosmic mystery is implicit in every individual existence – plant, animal, or human – then the poetic imagination, art in its broadest sense, out of which the mythic realm was born and which gave form to its cultural expression, could turn its gaze to the metaphysics – indeed the miracle – of being in every one of us.
And would it be too much to hope that it could then transform everyday life through the reconciliation of the spheres of night and day, of the timeless, or momentous, process of creation and its manifestation in time – and so of reason and authority, the heart, and the head.
But now the giants are on the march again; thousands of them ranged across land and sea. Transformed into windmills, not now by the necromancer, Freston, as Don Quixote once suspected, but by vicissitude and the main chance. Aloof, pristine, impertinent, enormous, their alien presence and baleful monotony is an affront to the vibrant landscape – each one a great counter calculating a return. For every turn another dollar.
The old gods would be in turmoil: the wind harnessed to the strategic avarice of a corporate machine. For what? To ‘save’ a world that the Megamachine (to borrow Fabian Scheidler’s term) has itself constructed and put at risk?
And so also the sun: once raised variously to the status of God or Goddess, powerful mythological symbol, the vivid nucleus of a living cycle that would every dawn dispel the dark. It, too, is to be committed to the same end. That their potential falls short I have already discussed; that even the most critical demands of our current over-consumption can be met is doubtful. But it must now also power the banal syllabus of cyber mania.
Socially destructive global monopolies are eager for every megawatt to propel their program of corporate dominance. The digitalization of the world is an imperial project of unprecedented ambition. A counterfeit world is being prepared. Uniformity of thought, action, experience, and expectation is promoted – autonomy would disturb the shallow manner of digital exchange.
The pioneers of science would be amazed. After all their hard work the earth is becoming flat again. The individual is fading away. Apparently, our lives are to be run by corporate favour and AI. Wow! Our common heritage, from the production of food to our very biology, is to be appropriated by an affected concern and handed over to ‘experts’.
Thankfully, an authentic humanity will not easily be overcome by technocratic pedantry, and we should all have enough experience of bureaucratic and executive stupidity to expect the project is delusional and self-defeating. After all, if they kill the goose, what then?
Unfortunately, it has the potential to further the cause of technocratic governance by a coterie of corporate behemoths who have made no secret of their anti-democratic and anti-social resolve, even as they cloak it in the sweet-sounding words of beneficial intent. And there appears to be no limit to their field of operation, or the level of enforcement through sophisticated systems of surveillance and control.
The intemperate pushing of AI omnipotence has some of the characteristics of mania about it. With any luck it may be destined for the same fate as other notable examples of this recurrent phenomenon. In the meantime, let’s be clear: artificial intelligence is what it says on the tin. It is fake in the same way that artificial flowers are fake. In other words, it is no more than an imitation of intelligence; or rather it purports to be since its proponents have a much- reduced understanding of intelligence in the first place.
The only way a digital system could seem analogous to intelligence is if human beings have been persuaded that they themselves are analogous to machines.
For all the accomplishments of computer science, computers still lack resolve. No computer can make an autonomous decision and no idea can arise unbidden in its electronic circuitry. The data it contains has been handed to it and its operative rules are pre-programmed in algorithms and codes. So-called ‘generative’ AI, so far as I understand it, is simply an intensification of the basic on-off electronics and the yes-no, if not this-that, and, or, both, neither, binary mathematics of existing systems.
To assert that the voluntary and boundless nature of mind and intelligence can be fully represented by a symbolic mathematical system of 1’s and 0’s is absurd – to any thoughtful person. But, of course, if in the first instance you define ‘intelligence’ by what can be contained in its restrictive code then you have AI.
The computer is an ingenious machine, without doubt, a remarkable tool as it stands, but for some reason its potential has been dressed in vainglorious exaggeration from the outset. The haughty claims for AI are no different today than fifty years ago, although confident prophecies of omnipotence still await fulfilment.
That more and more aspects of living and our thought processes can be formulated digitally, and that the programs (the preset rules of the game) are run at breakneck speed is what makes it so impressive. But whereas endless variation and repetition are possible, and answers (largely based on past conclusions) can appear as if by magic, without a non-material imagination, new ideas cannot emerge from old data.
There has been much excitement over the ‘existential’ threat of AI. Indeed, in the hands of the corporate sector, it is busy constructing its own reality with the callous logic of the machine. But there is nothing new here either: apocalyptic alarms have always been associated with the disruption of custom and loss of confidence. If it comes to it, wild forecasts of digital conquest can be countered by simply pulling the plug. The real worry is what on earth has humanity come to that it can so easily imagine subordination to its own technology, to the extent of its own obsolescence – that some would even welcome its approach.
That it is already secondary, to some extent, has nothing to do with the superiority of AI, but is entirely due to our significant distance from the profound coherence of being.
But with so much money at play, the industry is oblivious to either temporal limits or harm. And the next step in the construction of an omniscient computer system – always a goal – follows sensibly enough in the reasoning of scientific materialism.
If the mind has been reduced to the brain, and the brain itself is analogous to a data-processing, memory storage device, then why not build a ‘cognitive’ system that exceeds the intellectual capacity of any human; that would, in turn, design a new improved machine and so on. An “intelligence explosion”, until hey presto! the Singularity is reached – ultra intelligence, omniscience, omnipotence, virtual Godhood!
As fantastical as all this might seem to anyone with their feet still on the ground, there’s more. The geeks among us don’t rest easy. If you’re interested in fantasy, it’s all gathered under the acronym Tescreal. Just be aware that the principal actors here are over-exalted, self-regarding white males in the main, and a forceful eugenicist agenda (a ‘more enlightened eugenics’ apparently) runs through it.
If partisans of AI infallibility were left to stew in the juice of these absurdities within the techno-utopian compound of Silicon Valley, and certain university departments, they needn’t trouble the lives of ordinary decent people. But unfortunately, they command limitless capital and the insatiable dreams of monopolists. Ah, but their intent is to save the world. It’s more likely that an unholy pairing with messianic pretensions will pave the road to hell.
And not only do they appear to be living on another planet, they actually think we can. In this respect, it is a point worth making that no man ever set foot on the moon, and no man or woman ever will, unless they want to bring their life to a painful conclusion. Man reached the moon by bringing his earth environment with him in a spacecraft. An ingenious accomplishment, undoubtedly, but a miss is as good as a mile. And because what is contained in the spacesuit, spacecraft, or space colony for that matter, is clearly partial rather than whole, prolonged existence in it is simply impossible, either physically or psychologically – unless, of course, you’re a machine, or a posthuman!
Given the wonder of existence in the first place, the greatest marvels of being are mind and consciousness, memory and ideas. Any degree of self-awareness should open us to the profound mystery from which they arise. That anyone could make of this ineffable experience nothing more than a mechanical process to be downloaded into a plastic ‘chrysalis’ full of semi-conductors, switches, and silicon chips; and to then emerge as a kind of super-intelligent, posthuman immortal shows just how far from any real sense of our creative presence some of us have drifted.
Every day now, it seems, we are subject to reproof. Signs of crisis are insistent and portents of doom pressure us in a seemingly chaotic world. This essay has attempted to set a wider context; to highlight the critical issues; and to point to the obvious fact that if the corporate/political/ideological covenant responsible for our present state is being relied upon to provide solutions we are going nowhere.
For all its achievements to date, it is now becoming clear that scientific materialism and the single-minded logic of its methodology is reaching the limits of its efficacy; even as materialist anticipation is reaching for its apotheosis in the extravagant representations of AI – the ultimate expression of its reductionist worldview.
And it is possible to see on the wildest shores of this ‘promised land’ a kind of hysteria in the face of diminishing returns, and the desperate resuscitation of a fading ideology.
But the piling on of the past will not work. With increasing complexity every solution begets more problems. It’s a vicious circle, such that at this point many of us might be beginning to feel Sancho Panza’s reproach – windmills in the head is right! How to step off the treadmill is the crux of the problem, although it is also all too clearly the solution. And in the absence of another world to step on to we are hooked by a kind of compulsion neurosis.
A more benign world will require a new morality in its broadest sense; it will not arrive ‘off the peg’, so to speak. ‘Smart’, ‘sustainable’, ‘clean’, ‘green’, the defining terms of our post-carbon future, are a cruel deception if their only purpose is to keep the machine in gear.
Strangely, the very ideology that defines the world will not recognize its material constraint. It still relies on the illusion of superabundance and the invocation of technological superiority in a world struggling for breath.
And where – is it ever asked – is our humanity in this brave new world? The whole drama of a single life, a sort of flourish upon the oceanic well of time and creation; and the billions of us marooned in an abstract world of facts and figures. How do we dignify our lives in a world in which fire has been quenched?
Corbusier’s ‘machine to live in’ is realized in the technological dependence and the spick and span aspect of the all-electric house. But there was a time when the hearth was symbolic of the Navel of the Earth; when fire, the Goddess of the hearth, symbolized the presence of the divine. The hearth and its home were explicit symbols of implicit unity: the invisible or immaterial realm made visible in the material culture.
Such sensibilities are long gone, of course, and unity and meaning must be sought in the human heart – as they should be at this stage of our cultural evolution. But what if the heart itself is cold? What if the material culture is destructive or merely bland?
We now live in a manner without discernment or reserve, informed by opinion and the ubiquity of the market. Jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple; a second coming would be welcome in the face of an ill-considered, commercial culture of unprecedented shallowness. Its dominance and its demands, and its impression upon all is turning hearts to stone and our world into a wasteland.
It is true that most people’s lives are enriched and gain meaning in the ordinary communion of family, friends and community; and perhaps in the practicalities of daily life. But there is a wider world, and in the minds of capitalists the end always justifies the means. In their calculations you don’t count – the phenomenon of your being, that is, not your efficiency in the economy of capital accumulation.
In the everyday language of economics. the economy appears to be an almost perfect mathematical system independent of human history – an abstraction isolated from reality as a whole. In the extremism of neo-liberalism its jurisdiction has neither moral, social, or cultural bounds and it now regulates the global like a detached and senseless Victorian viceroy. To the extent that our lives are decided by it, the social context will be inhumane, and inadequate to our potential and imaginative capacity.
Life in the shallows of economic determinism soon exhausts itself. There is an emptiness at the heart of contemporary culture that will not be filled by the ‘green agenda’. The post-carbon future, as currently outlined, exemplifies the metaphor of the machine no less than its antecedent. Technological solutions will only perpetuate our insulation from the vibrant process of creation. And ‘smart’ technology, let us be clear, does not run on fresh air. On the contrary the magnitude of its energy demand may be unprecedented in industrial history.
The real world arises organically as a self-organizing system, whole and complete at every step of its evolution. That is to say, it is incomparable – it’s what it is and what we are – and may be benign or destructive as we might inhabit it. A bio-physical system is ‘limited’ by the very interdependence of its diverse elements, such that individual behaviour is always governed by a superior context.
Scientific materialism and the pathology of dissociation have led us astray. “For there is in the universe neither centre nor circumference”, wrote Giordano Bruno, “but if you will, the whole is central, and every point may also be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point”.
Each one of us, then, is centre; each one of us manifests the whole, to put it another way. It follows that every identity is ‘I’; and in this sense there is no ‘you’, no other.
In the face of this reality, capitalism rewards one at the expense of another, the few at the expense of the many. In the interest of accumulation, it externalizes costs – to the individual, society, and the environment. It is dehumanizing, anti-social, toxic, ultimately self-destructive, and now global.
We are preoccupied with solutions; but the critical choice is not between fossil fuels and renewables, but between a narrow rationalism and an expanded consciousness, between the sleep of reason and integrity. The crisis we are facing is not, in the first instance, a problem to be solved, but a failure to clearly perceive its cause.
In the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset, “we do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us – the fact of not knowing what is happening to us”.[iv]
[i] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, London, 2001, p 8
[ii] Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Don Quixote, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin, London, 1976
Toby Green also wrote, along with Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality(2023). This latter work engages with the impact of lockdowns on African countries which were, for the most part, unaffected by the disease itself.
In this podcast, Green discusses the application, more widely, of a form of authoritarian capitalism that lingers to this day, with the onset of perma-crises, continued restrictions on civil rights, and the ascendancy of techno-billionaires.
He also points to an intellectual failure on the part of many on the left, who failed to recognise there were two versions of accumulation in conflict, one representing traditional forms of small businesses reliant on in-person contact, the other the monopolies which digital capitalism has favoured and whose power is now far, far greater.
Frank Armstrong previously reviewed The Covid Consensus for Cassandra Voices.
The track which features in this episode is Kurfewture (2021) by Shakalak:
We are sad to report that a Lee Enfield rifle, used in the 1916, Rising, belonging to the late great Shane MacGowan, has gone missing.
The Lee Enfield 303 rifle was used by volunteers during Easter Week, and was given as a present to Shane MacGowan for his 60th birthday by fellow singer Glen Hansard. It has disappeared, thought to have been taken, possibly as a joke, from his home.
The rifle has major emotional significance to Shane’s widow, Victoria, as it was used during the occupation of the GPO in 1916. It brought the singer some joy after being given as a present.
“Shane was not a materialistic person,” Victoria says, explaining that mementos given to him by friends were valued by him much more than “flashy stuff.”
Notably, the gun was already decommissioned, so “it’s not as if it can even be used for it’s original purpose,” Victoria added.
Typically stolen art and antiques may fetch 10 – 25% of full market value, as the object can never be sold on the open market again when it is known that it does not legally belong to the vendor.
In this instance, as the unusable gun was bought for €2,000, this suggests that resale value may only be worth €200 – €500, in the event that the object is identifiable as having been acquired through misappropriation.
Crucially, the value of art and antiques is all about the provenance – the story behind it, and where it came from.
In this instance, as the gun has “H Munn” inscribed on the wooden butt, the artifact is particularly identifiable – and thus possibly of even less resale value than otherwise.
Ultimately, the person who took it may want to look into their conscience and consider whether holding onto it at the cost of distressing his widow is worth the hassle.
Alternatively, should the taker fail to find their conscience, it may be in their interest to evaluate whether the prospect of being prosecuted for criminal larceny is worth the while for something of relatively little monetary value – as well as facing potential ire from his army of fans on later dates.
Speaking to Victoria, she says that “whoever took it probably didn’t mean any harm” and it “was possibly a joke” but that she “would love to get it back, no questions asked.”
If it can be found, Cassandra Voices is happy to accept the artifact with no questions asked, and return it to Victoria. Just drop us a line: admin@cassandravoices.com.
