Cassandra Voices

Tag: Patrick Healy

  • Make Greenland Great

    In his last great novel The Plot Against America (2004) Philp Roth posited plausible circumstances where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great social democrat, could be dislodged by the proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh.

    Sadly, a failure to understand history bedevils our time. We have sleepwalked into a similar scenario after the last U.S. Presidential election. Now I fear it is too late. A fascist leader appears to have been re-elected President.

    In 1935, as much of Europe was succumbing to fascism, Upton Sinclair penned his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here in which Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform. He promises to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, offering each citizen $5,000 per year. Portraying himself as a champion of ‘the forgotten man’ and ‘traditional’ American values, Windrip defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then goes on to beat his Republican opponent.

    It can happen here and now. Trump is emblematic of how, worldwide, a new form of corporate fascism, or corporate communism, has become dominant. So let us examine the initial pronouncements.

    Inauguration Day

    What did his flurry of executive orders mean, apart from braggadocio and sabre rattling? This is quite apart from the caveat that executive decrees short-circuiting the legislative process are the hallmarks of fascism, as Carl Schmidt the legendary jurist argued. American democracy appears to be in tatters.

    In an inaugural address that was remarkably coherent and lucid in conceptual terms, Trump invoked President McKinley (1897-1901). The implications are clear. McKinley colonised Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba, and was also hostile to global cooperation.

    So, resignations from the admittedly corrupt WHO and the revocation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement are the first two steps. Now, all directly or indirectly funded citadels of world governance are under siege if they oppose or sanction American interests.

    Danish author Peter Høeg penned a famous bestselling book Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1982) about Greenland and more precisely the Danish government’s treatment of the indigenous Inuit community The engine of the plot is the concealment of a state secret: a lethal meteorite and a parasitic worm that serves as an existential threat. The ruling Danes are not portrayed sympathetically with respect to Greenlanders. Indeed, according to a recent poll Greenlanders aspire for autonomy, but not another external coloniser.

    Yet Donal Trump wants Greenland and seems prepared to invade. Thus, he sent his son to a resort in the island’s most populous town Neuk armed with the slogans about making Greenland great. The thought did occur that Inviting homeless people into a 4-star hotel, albeit accidentally, is a policy he could replicate in his domestic policies, though I doubt he will.  The whole staged visit was of course bellicose posturing, and the shape of things to come.

    Why then the sudden interest? Well, it’s not so sudden frankly, but it’s most revealing. The interest stems from what is apparent in the Trump regime’s agenda: a zero-sum game of competition between nation states, leading to a global competition for diminishing resources. Texan and indeed Arabian oil supply may run dry and is certainly being exhausted at current consumption rates.

    Greenland is terra nullius or virgin territory, unspoiled in one crucial respect. It is among the last outposts where the riches of the earth can be extracted – to enrich the few and destroy the planet. More to the point, it will soon be exploitable given that climate change is overwhelmingly likely to cause the glaciers to melt.

    Black Gold

    Oil! (1927) is the title of Upton Sinclair’s epic novel about American greed, which was adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (2007). Today, American capitalist colonialism wants not just Greenland, but the Northern Territories of Canada. Drill Baby Drill.

    The Northern Territories of Canada are also an Arctic landmass of untapped resources. In his speech, he specifically mentioned tariffs – incidentally also a Mckinley policy – and tariffs were only just averted from coming into force against Canada and Mexico. China was also hit with retaliatory measures. Yet, it is the plain people of America who voted for him who will pay the bill, only after he has fired half the federal government.

    Thus, invocation of McKinley in his speech is also the invocation of a solid hard currency President that is for the few, not the many.

    The concept in international law of domestic jurisdiction is to respect national sovereignty, and only where there have been systematic human rights abuses to interfere in the domain reserve of a state. The justification of a breach of an obligation ergo omnes or a Crime Against Humanity is, ideally, filtered and ratified by the U.N.. This has often occurred in a bogus fashion, such as the dodgy dossier that led to the Bush-Blair war on Iraq. Trump also wants oil, but is going about it in a different way.

    So, he will not accept any international sanction or control, and will move with autocratic impunity. Play ball or we will invade, or refuse to recognise the UN, or perhaps force it to decamp from New York. Should the General Assembly object to any of this it may simply be liquidated. The statement above might seem alarmist but there are few checks and balances left.

    That seems to me to be what is happening is with the division of the world into trading blocs or sectors. Trump does not want to spend hard dollars on wasteful wars in the Ukraine or Gaza but that is not to say he gives a rat’s arse about human rights. Instead, he aims to establish a profit-driven North American confederation, to include Canada and Greenland, and, of course, reclaim the revenue of American businesses.

    Hi ally, or puppet master, Elon Musk, also has limited respect for national sovereignty, but a different mechanism of attack. He destabilizes through funding political actors such as the ADF in Germany and agitates online against the Starmer administration.

    America wants pliant co-operative regimes, with Musk acting as a modern-day Kissinger-without-portfolio. Trump has no doubt suspended the ban on Tik Tok to allow his bestie to buy it up and pollute the minds of an entire generation. This is Freedom of Expression if we will tell you what to say.

    ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents detaining a man.

    Ethnic Cleansing

    We will also see de facto ethnic cleansing, as in his proposal that two million Gazans should vacate their land to make way for a new Riviera. Also, the removal of undesirable aliens, even those for whom America is a birthright, and the development of a Mexican Iron Curtain.

    The new form of cleansing is akin to the McCarthyite Red Scare, given the removal of employment rights of those who are opposed to his interests and thus by definition seditious. Most of this action will be upheld by a compliant and docile judiciary. In short federal employees with even a trace of Red will be summarily dismissed.

    And what of Ireland? The extension of American trade will surely lead to the decamping of multinational corporations. American hedge funds already enjoy a dominant interest in our domestic housing market. Nevertheless, I predict tariffs will be employed against Ireland and Europe if regimes are less than favourable towards the United States.

    Further, the entire liberal WOKE agenda, which in my view has been deeply troublesome and counterproductive, is being dismantled. ‘His Christians’, as he calls them, form the Bible Belt will see a return to very traditional female and male roles. This is of course after his Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has very extreme views on homosexuality, so watch this space.

    There were also pardons for far-right protestors after he lost the last election, and a promised investment in more lethal injections and an escalation of the death penalty. The previous few years have seen the US Supreme Court block off appeals for ineffective assistance of Counsel. One senses that his emergency powers remit of executive action will not be confined to the Mexican border, but the legislative remit will be much wider and internal, and will be upheld by SCOTUS.

    It is apparent that the worldwide human rights post-Second World War consensus is over save for a few enclaves. State authoritarianism – with his acolytes in Argentina and Italy present at the inauguration – will now increase at a rapid pace.

    More fundamentally, if American democracy doesn’t survive this then all democracies are threatened. We all contract pneumonia, politically speaking, when they catch a cold.

    Karl Kraus

    The legendary Austrian journalist Karl Kraus died in 1936 after editing Die Fackel for thirty-seven years, shortly after Hitlers ascension to power in Germany. At the height of collapse, and after a self-enforced interregnum of nine months he published one last edition that included the extended essay ‘The Third Walpurgis Night’.

    The essential argument is that with their devotion to palaver and tactics, the Social Democrats facilitated Hitlers rise. He despaired at their belief that ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss as anything other than Hitler was needed. Well, the lunacy of liberal political correctness and their failure to focus on real issues facilitated misguided Populism.

    The opening paragraph of the extended essay is devastating in its implications for today:

    As to Hitler, I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly—but mistakenly—expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor…

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht, as Patrick Healy has suggested, is that satire should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility – use of mockery, insult, indignation etc. – but also to its fusion with the voice of the moralist, employing the skill of a standup comic. The word has also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together. However, just as with Hitler, so with Trump, we are now beyond satire. At one level we must remain silent, or use words sparingly.

    Kraus, in his masterly analysis of Goebbels (a precursor to Musk), accepts that so deeply clever and embedded is the propaganda – and the appearance of culture and progress – that we forget that they intend to do what they are going to do.

    The reaction to the camp fascist Nazi salute by Musk is a clear indication that seriously cultivated people should not take these barbarians seriously, but they ought to be taken seriously, as globally, in a state of collective hysteria, people are voting for them into office. So, is it that we, the civilised, are no longer to be taken seriously?

    Watching this shit show unfold is like being the Isherwood figure in the film Cabaret at the German been garden as he hears a version of the Horst Wessel being sung.

    Trump, unlike nativistic Greenlanders, wants ownership of land and people’s minds, but in a very unstable situation there is an alternative. Remember what happened to President Mckinley.

  • My Mother (at the Time)

    This is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, where host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy.

    In a suburb of Tokyo, sometime in the future, a Japanese scholar of Irish literature is studying an obscure text. He has heard of it through a Joycean friend. The work is Beyond the Pale, an immersion into the mind of a character not unlike its author, Patrick Healy, who was an Irish critic and philosopher who spent much of his life in Amsterdam. The whole heavy volume of Beyond the Pale sits before him. It is a little daunting.

    Who is Patrick Healy?  The Japanese scholar has been finding out, bit by bit. Reliable information is hard to find.

    Some of this is by design. Some of it because of the cruelty (or at least indifference) of the writer’s early fate. Healy was a gifted child, but born to an unmarried mother in postwar Ireland, and thus was sent to foster families and to the care of various “Sisters” of the church.

    The Japanese scholar has been able to locate a separate, early text published by Healy back  in 1985, called Up in the Air and Down. It is a short novella, a stream of consciousness spoken from the point of view of a child living through such a reality. Near the start of this work he reads:

    I didn’t have a mummy or daddy because they died just like one of the cats who was Snowy’s mammy and now I remember I cried because the cat would never come back (p.10).

    The Japanese scholar likes this detail of the cat. However, he already knows this account of the parents may be an untruth told to the boy narrator, if the character can be said to closely match the real Healy. He finds more of this apparent attempt to placate and to steer the boy’s thinking on the next page:

    Sister was my mammy now and so were all the big girls and I was lucky because I had lots of mammies and daddies and Sister said that some little boys and girls have only one and I had lots and I should be very happy and that these two nice people who were going to be my mummy and daddy are waiting for their new boy and I wasn’t to be afraid and they lived far away but we would see them soon, but I wanted to go back and play and why was Sister taking me away and not being my mammy anymore, maybe Sister was going to heaven too, and I was afraid. (ps. 10-11)

    The short book ends with the boy narrator affirming his existence in the celestial terms of his day, showing his need for play and exploration:

    I am not a secret because God knows who I am even when I play with the yo-yo that goes Up in the Air and Down. (p.55)

    All of this is important because the huge, late-life opus the Japanese Joycean will now begin to study is likewise framed around a life in 20th century Ireland. A growing up given form by a dislocation of parenthood, and an attempt to seize upon a renewed existence in young adulthood, through language and music and sensation.

    The Japanese scholar knows that the Irish cultural output of books and films addressing the plight of “fallen” women who were separated from their offspring and often pressed into misery and forced labour in laundries and convents has been substantial. Yet here it is: a little-known testament by someone who emerged from such circumstances and sought to form his own mind, rather than let it be formed negatively by them. Not directly concerned with the young boy’s voice, it instead forms an internal, semi-conscious portrait of the man who emerged, grasping life through an adoration of words and ideas.

    The Japanese scholar begins to read Beyond the Pale, and he can hear the melodies of Healy’s voice, which he already knows from his epic recording of Finnegan’s Wake. It thrills him that this Joyce-evoking book begins with an unexpected burst of Japanese words: as the “story” (if it is a story) meanders out into existence, we encounter a young Irish lad being tutored in Japanese by a “Viscount Taffe”, who seems to be simultaneously preparing a beef consommé; a consommé “devoutly to be wished.”

    Unlike this hypothetical Japanese scholar, in the summer of 2024 I had the opportunity to meet Patrick Healy, in Amsterdam, where he was completing work on Beyond the Pale in a cavernous apartment looking like the workshop of an ancient Egyptian priest. Confined there during Amsterdam’s hard lockdowns, he had begun to submerge more deeply in his memories.  This was something of an intimidating foray into his world for me, at first. I had heard stories, including from my own father, and other intellectually-minded people of their generation, about this brilliant and erudite figure. Perhaps more than a little rogueish, he would sit in Bewley’s in 1980s Dublin and mesmerise them all with his sophistry. The reputation for seduction and for cunning behaviour was reinforced for the Healy of that long ago time by many. Yet his life in the meantime, hard to unwind and with very little detail available, made more sense through the encounter with him and with his work. He had invented a career for himself unlike those of his peers: as a scholar he spent significant time in Germany and German archives, mastering that language, eventually settling in Holland where he taught at the university of Delft. HIs links to Ireland were kept in tenuous health over the years. He was a very close friend of the barrister and historian Frank Callanan, also a personal friend, who had sadly passed away unexpectedly in 2021.

    Healy—who once performed a read through and recording of Finnegan’s Wake in the early 90s, getting through the whole thing in four days—has a famously fine voice.

    Selections from our affable 3-day conversation in Amsterdam follow here. After, you may access the bonus episode to hear more of Patrick reading at length from Beyond the Pale. Don’t worry about the Ariadne’s thread of the story, if there is one. Just try to hear the Irish soul that is alive in his voice. This is, I feel, the best way to savor the hidden currents and magical word play that Healy has worked into his text.

    Here below are two testimonials from writer and journalist Bridget Hourican and human rights lawyer David Langwallner

    Bridget Hourican

    I’ve been haunted by a poem of Patrick Healy’s called ‘Stoic Fire’ since I read it maybe ten years ago. The title, and as I recall it, the poem itself, is a kind of oxymoron because fire is passionate, a conflagration, and stoicism is dispassionate, quietly enduring. I think stoic fire describes Patrick.

    He is poet, visual artist, art critic, translator, philosopher of aesthetics and novelist. Before he was all those, he was – I’m told reliably by everyone who was there then – the best debater in UCD and Trinity (he attended both). His heckles were legendary, his voice astonishing. Reviewing his translation of Karl Kraus’s epic play ‘Last Days of Mankind’, Eileen Battersby shrewdly noted that ‘Healy’s musicality and feel for the rhythms of speech… possibly explains why his Kraus is so vibrant’. Perhaps the greatest use of his voice is his recording of Finnegans Wake, which my late husband, Frank Callanan told me, he listened to right through one night with Margaret O’Callaghan, and it left them shattered, delirious, in tears, ecstatic. I believe this was one of the things that spurred Frank to write his book on Joyce.

    Luke Sheehan introduced me to podcasts, more or less. Before he (or anyone) was making podcasts, he was seeking out unusual and arcane material and people. He would come back and recount his findings in ways that were unanticipated, circuitous, marvellously detailed (by marvellous I mean the detail was not where you would expect it) and funny, always very funny. Luke is also poet, critic and short-story writer but I’ve always thought his great gift was for oral narratives (or as we now call them, podcasts).

    Although I know both of them, I’m not quite sure how Luke tracked Patrick down and got him on the record, but what a fabulous thing that he has done this, and that we have Patrick’s voice telling his story and exploring his ideas, in this immensely subtle and moving curation by Luke. I noticed, very early on when I was with Frank, that every time he mentioned Patrick’s name, someone would whip round and demand with fierce urgency ‘Patrick Healy? where is he?’  It is like Luke to have acted on his own fierce urgency and brought us this.

    David Langwallner

    I am very pleased that Luke Sheehan is doing this podcast on Patrick Healey. From the late 1970’s through the late 1980’s  often in great penury he was one of the most outstanding cultural figures in Dublin. A winner of The Irish Times debating competition as he stresses as an individual where he became the kind of fool to the King Lears of his contemporaries.  Mostly dead.
    He is the greatest conversationalist and cafe side philosopher I have ever encountered and that includes the jurist Ronald Dworkin.
    He is man of Olympian intellect and great personal grace charm and civility which the Dutch through his architecture Professorship have recognized. The loss was Irelands. He was also a great mentor to me and when he played Oscar Wilde to my playing Edwards Carson in a reenactment of the trial of Oscar Wilde strange to say now with David Norris and Alice Glynn as expert witnesses he queues to the graduate memorial building extended the full extent of Westmoreland street. 
    In this trial Oscar won and so has Patrick! 
    Since then an interest we very much share in common and crucial to our times he has become an expert in the Viennese intellectuals of the Weimar Repubic most noticeable Karl Krauss.
    He is the last of great old Dublin Joycean in fact and one hopes his new book gets the attention he richly deserves.
    Otherwise he will be most upset.