Cassandra Voices

Tag: society

  • Vanishing Ireland: Taking the Waters

    Today bottled spring water is an everyday drink, and sales run into the billions every year throughout the world. In polluted cities many inhabitants don’t trust the public water supply and use it only for washing. For relaxation and thirst quenching they are willing to pay for bottled spring water from their own country or imported from distant lands.

    Indeed, there is a widespread belief in the value of spring water, even if in many localities tap water is just as rich in mineral content as the bottled water described with impressive statistics, on colourful labels.

    Throughout continental Europe, as far back as Roman times, people have made secular pilgrimages to springs and wells with folkloric reputations. During the so-called Celtic era around Britain and Ireland people flocked to holy wells which they believed contained magical healing powers. Christian evangelists like St. Declan and St. Patrick acknowledged the ancient beliefs and urged their flock to say prayers and perform penitential rituals at these water sources – hence the designation of thousands of Holy Wells throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, many of which have vanished into oblivion as a result of changes to the underground water table and urbanisation.

    19th century photochrom of the Great Bath at the Roman Baths.

    Bath

    The springs at the base of hills near Bath in Somerset, a town founded by the Romans about 60 AD, were cherished from Celtic times for their purity and health effects, but the Roman emphasis on hygiene gave an added boost to the reputation of the place and over the centuries Bath developed into a major health resort.

    Hydrotherapy i.e. the medicinal use of water, became fashionable from the late 16th century. People bathed in cold waters, rubbed painful parts of their bodies with water, or bathed in thermal springs to relieve arthritis, rheumatic pain and other ailments related to skin, stomach and bodily organs.

    In continental Europe from the end of the 18th century onwards members of the landed aristocracy began holidaying in rural idyls, often in the mountains, where chalybeate waters were found.

    In this period, Hotels were founded to cater to the card-playing, horse riding and other costly inclinations of this leisure class of visitors. The urban haute bourgeoise followed the fashionable aristocratic trends.

    In the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian empire Kurorte (places with reputations for curative waters) thrived. It could be a mixture of complacent decadence and health seeking. Many places in today’s Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria and south-eastern Germany still incorporate the word Bad (baths) in their names. The languid decadence has departed and serious health therapy regimes now prevail. Trades unions in Germany and elsewhere organize health holidays for workers and their families.

    A geyser in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic.

    Irish Health Waters

    In the 18th and 19th centuries several places around Ireland were major attractions for both rich and poor seeking comfort and cure from health-giving waters. Local economies thrived as hotels, shops, taverns and local transport catered seasonally to thousands of visitors coming from England and closer to home.

    Only Lisdoonvarna in Clare remains to remind us of a tourist boom from former days. Below are a few details about places that once featured on the health map for urban sophisticates.

    Thomas Davis Street (Main Street), Mallow in August 1903.

    Mallow Springs in Cork

    With the advent of Christianity one of the Mallow springs was dedicated to St. Patrick. The largest of the group is known as Lady’s Well. The belief that the spring had medicinal properties stems from the work of Dr. Rogers of Cork, who in 1727 treated a sick woman in Mallow and observed that the only liquid she could retain was water from the spring.

    After her recovery Dr. Rogers invited Mr. J. Rutty from Bristol Spa to visit Mallow. Rutty wrote a book called Mineral Waters of Ireland, published in 1757, and highlighted the medicinal aspects. He quoted Dr. Rogers as reporting a wide range of cures including for: disorders of the stomach and skin; respiratory problems such as catarrh, coughs, and asthma; urinary disorders; and diabetes. Mallow became a popular health resort for about thirty years, especially in spring and autumn, but by 1850 it had ceased to function due to the social effects of famine and a switch of focus on English spa towns and glamorous resorts on the continent.

    Mallow seems to be the only place in Ireland where thermal springs were known to exist. Many modern 5-star hotels offer so-called spas, which are really designer ‘hot tubs’ and Jacuzzis in luxury wellness centres created for moneyed holiday makers.

    Struell Wells, near Downpatrick, County Down (pictured in feature image).

    Located about three kilometers from the historic town of Downpatrick in Down, Struell (derived from the Gaelic word tSruthail or stream) comprises two wells, two bathhouses and the ruins of a church. It is a remarkable archaeological site. The evidence from Struell strongly suggests that it was an important sacred site in pre-Christian times. It is not far from Saul where St. Patrick is said to have met Dichu in the fifth century and made his first convert.

    There are two roofed wells believed to have curative effects, the Drinking well and the Eye well. From the 17th century until the 1840s Struell was a popular place of pilgrimage. Today it still attracts people in search of cures and spiritual inspiration, and is an important stop on the St. Patrick Trail laid out by the Ulster tourism board.

    Swanlinbar, County Cavan

    In the 18th century people from England flocked to the three spa wells near the village of Swanlinbar, near the border with Fermanagh. Three wells had water rich in mineral trace elements and had a “rotten egg” taste and smell.

    A hotel located at the well in Gortoral hosted the health pilgrims, who were told that drinking the water would allay scurvy, depression and bad appetite. The rotten egg flavour comes from the sulphur content.

    Drumod well just south of Swanlinbar is still accessible and attracts visitors to this day. In his book about the mineral waters of Ireland above mentioned J. Rutty devoted many pages to the area of Swanlinbar and spread its fame around Britain and continental Europe.

    Ballyspellan Spa in County Kilkenny

    Ballyspellan Spa, about 20 kilometers from Kilkenny city, no longer exists, but the spring water that flows through the limestone-rich Clonmantagh hills is still available to visitors who know about the medicinal properties.

    There is a well near Johnstown village where people go to fill bottles with the water. In the early 18th century the gentry of Dublin and other towns made holiday visits. Rochfords’ Hotel nearby offered hospitality. Some of these well-heeled visitors enjoyed hunting foxes and hares, horse racing and dancing. Hurling was another attraction for whoever enjoyed the clash of the ash.

    The poet Thomas Sheridan wrote about the spa. The area was the birthplace of Dr. Ronan Tynan, a noted singer, bone setter and limb amputee. Long after the fashionable gentry ceased to spend their holidays in the area the well remained a summer focal point where locals congregated to drink the water and divert themselves with sports and pleasant conversation.

    St. Munn’s Well at Brownscastle in County Wexford

    Near Taghmon in County Wexford ‘patterns’ were held during the 18th century on the saint’s feast day 21st October. The waters at nearby St. Munn’s Bed were sought by pilgrims in search of cures for back ailments.

    Unfortunately, however, a lot of drunkness and fighting ensued from the partaking of strong poteen distilled in the hills and sold to pilgrims, and by the early 19th century the annual custom was banned by the clergy, but some locals continued visiting the place discreetly.

    In the mid-twentieth century two local men, Jack Sinnott and Christy Murphy drained and piped the vicinity and Seamus Seery with others built a footpath access so that the general public could visit without difficulty.

    Lisdoonvarna in County Clare

    The medicinal waters of Lisdoonvarna were first written about around 1740 and the gentry from far and wide began flocking to an area not far from Ennistymon in County Clare, where no village existed at the time.

    In the second half of the 19th century hotels were built and the precious waters, rich in sulphur and iron, were under the control of private owners. The Guthrie family built a pump house for dispensing the water, one prominent woman in the family being known as Biddy the Sulphur. A certain Dr. Westropp purchased the site and introduced baths. The main visiting season was in September when harvesting was complete. Several hotels and boarding houses competed for customers.

    Lisdoonvarna became associated with matchmaking as parents brought marriageable daughters on holidays there. Matchmaking festivals still take place, and many young people independently take trips to Lisdoonvarna in search of fun and friendship.

    Although I have never tasted the sulphur waters, Lisdoonvarna is important has a personal significance as it is the place where my parents met in the autumn of 1942: my mother visiting from Limerick and my father from more distant Kildare.

    Lisdoonvarna has attracted German and other young continentals seeking out pubs in Clare where traditional Irish music is to be heard. The popular song Lisdoonvarna was first sung by Christy Moore in the 1980s, and helped publicise the folk music festival. It is fair to say that drinking pints in ‘singing pubs’ is now more popular than ‘taking the waters’ among this age profile.

    Glencar Waterfall at Glencar Lough.

    Lesser Known Spa Waters in County Leitrim

    Several localities which are not well known nationally have water springs and wells that have been sought out by health connoisseurs.

    County Leitrim has sulphur and chalybeate (iron-rich) water sources. Around Sliabh and Iarainn (the iron mountain) overlooking Lough Allen in mid-Leitrim old ordinance maps indicate the presence of twenty spa wells, but hardly anybody visits the spots nowadays, although hillwalkers find the whole area overlooking Lough Allen attractive, and remains of old sweat houses can be found. In the Mohill district the neglected remains of a spa well rest obscurely on a private farm

    Drumsna in South Leitrim is reputed to have a number of sulphur streams, not universally prized by locals on account of the ‘rotten egg’ flavour and smell.

    One well in MacManus Cross, between Jamestown and Carrick-on-Shannon is still visited by individuals seeking water to cure worms in children and horses.

    Not far from Dromahair in North Leitrim is a little-known locality on the side of a wooded hill known as Derrybrisk (Doirebriosc in Gaelic, which suggests woodland with oak trees).

    Older inhabitants of Dromahair, Killenummery and Ballintogher remember sweet summer Sunday afternoons until the 1960s when people from the adjoining townlands and visitors from Sligo town, arriving on bicycles, congregated at Derrybrisk spa, as it was then known. Card playing and chatting was the point, not tasting the sulphur water. Farmers came to fill bottles of the sulphur-rich water and use as medicine for sick animals. The water, diluted in ordinary water, was also said to cure worms in young children.

    The advent of motorised transport and mass media such as radio and television seems to have brought these social afternoons to a halt. The spot is difficult to access today. Several farms in the Ballintogher area have streams tasting of sulphur, indicating that there is a lengthy vein of sulphrous limestone in the hills around.

    Modern medicine and improved diets have lessened the traditional appeal of medicinal waters, but folklorists and natural health enthusiasts hanker after the old ways.

    Leitrim largely missed out on the 19th century enthusiasm for taking the waters, but today the ‘forgotten county’ as it is sometimes termed, is ripe for a reimagined rural outdoor tourist industry.

    Hill walkers can be brought on guided trips to view the remains of archaeological sites and curiosities. Old abandoned sweat houses, spa wells, holy wells, dilapidated monastic sites, dolmens and abandoned mining projects – all these and some important War of Independence memorials invite domestic and foreign tourists.

    Craft whiskey and gin are among other spirit waters which have made an appearance. In Drumshanbo in mid-Leitrim Gunpowder Gin has proved to be a dynamite product for domestic and export consumption. Now if only a daring chemistry graduate would invent a novel sulphur water-based alcohol elixir, preferably with the rotten egg smell removed.

  • Walking at Night

    Night Walking Deserves a Quiet Night

    I’ve always walked alone in the city after dark. Recently, it’s with my dog, along the banks of the Royal Canal. Of a winter evening, the path is quieter than during the day, when bikes and scooters fly by, and the dog’s senses are lit up by the city wildlife revealed in the still of night.

    Last week, as we strolled along a quiet stretch, a man entered the canal path from the road and began walking towards us. Something wasn’t right about him.

    For so many women, there is an understanding, so quietly absorbed that we don’t even give it much thought, that there are risks attached to walking alone at night: of physical violence, of sexual violence, of harassment. It’s the water in which women swim. It’s the reason why our male loved ones show concern for us over their male counterparts when out walking alone – because we all know there are greater risks to it by virtue of being a woman.

    I saw a post on social media, in the aftermath of the recent shocking murder of Ashling Murphy. It was by a male journalist who decried the blaming by women of men ‘en masse’ for individual atrocities by men against women.

    The ‘not all men’ mantra seems to me as dull-minded as it is deflective, for whoever made the claim that it was?

    The perpetrator is the person to blame. What is being called to account in women decrying male violence against women is a culture that means all women, including female children, swim in the waters of often unconscious fear when facing the public world of men, from a young age.

    In this world, we know what it is to go from feeling safe to on edge in the blink of an eye, from puberty on, if not before – when we flinch in the face of that first catcall, or unsolicited approach on the street. Ani DiFranco sings of it in her resonant song ‘The Story’:

    I would’ve returned your greeting

    if it weren’t for the way you were looking at me.

    Only men can change that.

    It doesn’t make all men to blame; but it does make them potential agents of change for the better.

    The man who began walking towards me last week was young and, as I said, something wasn’t right about him. His behaviour was heightened, edgy. Maybe he was high. He shouted greetings at the dog, but it didn’t sound friendly. My adrenaline kicked in. I furtively glanced behind to see if I was alone. I was.

    I braced myself for his approach. It wasn’t that I thought the worst, it was that I knew that whatever came to pass on this canal path with nowhere to escape to, I was to a fair degree at his mercy. I gripped my key between my fingers – that reflexive move women make even if only to feel safer.

    The whole thing probably unfolded in less than thirty seconds but it felt longer. He knew that I was the vulnerable one and I sensed his knowledge as he approached. He came closer than he needed to. ‘How are you, love?’ Spoken loudly, into my face. We both knew it wasn’t a genuine question.

    I answered as friendly-casual as I could. Not too nice, not too nonchalant. Definitely no hint of aggression. In my voice I was trying to impart lots of things. I’m relaxed. I don’t see you as a threat. I’m friendly (whatever the nature of your problem is, I don’t judge you). That wasn’t true. I did judge him – for getting his kicks from being able to be scary towards a lone woman just by virtue of being a man. Any soothing note my tone might have imparted was tactical.

    After he passed, I slow-counted to twenty. I was afraid to turn around too soon in case it gave him cause to return. I glanced over my shoulder, then exhaled slowly, relieved to see he had continued on this path – and I was nearing the road.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that I don’t think I’d even have committed the incident to memory, let alone mentioned it to anyone, if I hadn’t returned home to the devastating news that a young woman had been murdered while out jogging on a Tullamore canal path. Ashling Murphy was a beautiful, talented, generous spirit, with her life in front of her. But this is the water in which women swim, the air in which we walk, or run – where risks, conscious and unconscious, sometimes, brutally, come to pass.

    The particular attributes of her murder – that it took place in broad daylight, that it looks to have been an attack by a stranger– make it ripe for description as a tipping-point event, and the outpouring of grief and anger in its wake suggest this may be so. Time will tell.

    For while the cold threat of such an attack may strike the greatest fear into most women, the reality remains that for victims of male violence, the perpetrator is rarely a stranger.

    Per the Women’s Aid Annual Impact Report 2020, since 1996, 236 women have died violently in the Republic of Ireland. 61% were killed in their own homes; 55% were killed by a partner or ex (of the resolved cases) and almost nine in ten knew their killer.

    And while domestic and gender-based violence prevails across social class, often its victims face higher rates of social inequity, including homelessness – in a European study some 92% of homeless women had experienced violence or abuse throughout their lives.

    For society at large, the issue of gender-based violence is one that remains behind closed doors, dealt with within the confines of the private rather than public domain. Charities that support victims of gender-based violence consistently struggle from underfunding, and consecutive governments have treated the issue as one of low priority.

    Lockdowns have been shown to create the most serious impacts for the socially disadvantaged, so it is no surprise that the 2020 Women’s Aid report reveals a startling 43% increase in contacts with their services, compared to 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic and its measures have had an ‘unprecedented and exhausting impact’ on victims of abuse. Surely this and other social inequities of lockdowns must be given consideration as Covid-19 policy shapes itself towards the future.

    As the government quickens pace to steer through its new strategy on domestic and gender-based violence, due to be published in March – its stated goal being a zero-tolerance approach – time will tell what it delivers on a structural level, and we can only hope that it signals meaningful change.

    Whatever comes to pass, it remains the case that on a societal level, all men do have a role in changing the waters within which women swim, along with the air within which we walk, run, and carry out our lives – private and public. And owning that fact may be what separates the men from the boys.

  • A Fairy Tale of Dún Laoghaire 2

    I knew the game was up when my mother told me that Santy had given her a list. I had heard about his many imitators and knew they were just benign North Pole ambassadors who lacked his Arctic magic.

    I met one of them once in Lee’s on the main street of Dun Laoghaire, in a family sized camper tent with a strip of silver tinsel stretched around the entrance. His cotton wool beard dangling on an ear-itching elastic band as his nicotine coloured fingers rummaged in a plastic laundry basket that was loaded with presents. There were two baskets, one dark blue for boys and one pale blue for girls.

    He sounded just like the driver of the 7A bus who brought me home from school every day. “Ah, son have ye been a good lad?” It was like First Confession all over again except with different costumes and just like my first time in the confession box armed with a few well-rehearsed sins, I told him that apart from puncturing my neighbour’s bike I had been a good boy. He coughed and scratched the stubble under his beard. “Ah, you’re a decent lad, a fine fella….” He was a little unsteady in the deck chair where he was sitting and I was afraid he might fall over and injure himself. That wouldn’t do, not with it so close to Christmas; there was lot of work to be done yet. That’s how Santy was in Lee’s. Or was he one of the ambassadors? I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, he seemed very anxious to leave George’s St as soon as he could and get back to The North Pole. This was the busiest time of year and every hour spent here in Lee’s was time lost from directing operations in his snow drifted toy factory, far from Dun Laoghaire. All of that cold and blizzard white frightened me, I imagined the North Pole as a television screen of swirling frozen static, with no button anywhere that could ever switch it off.

    Why had he ended out living in such a desolate place? Something eerie hovered around Santy. Who was he really? Had he done some terrible thing? He spent his life making toys in the world’s most inhospitable place. Was he trying to say sorry for something? And who were the elves? The only dwarf I’d ever seen for real was the one who sold newspapers outside Glasthule church on Sundays. He frightened me; I’d take my mother’s hand and cling to it like a gold ringed shield as we walked inside. My mind chalked up questions. How had a team of news-paper-men ended out working with Santy? How had they met?

    Then one night, a few days before Christmas, a dream came to me that put me right about so many things. There were seven other dwarfs I’d heard of before; the ones who lived with Snow White. I always liked that story but felt it ended very unfairly for them, with all their joy taken away from them by a tall Prince on horse. Each time I read it, I hoped that she would stay with them, that she would explain to the Prince that he’d have to find another story but she always rode off with him, leaving them behind, unhappily ever after.

    In the warm cinemascope of my pillow, I saw the seven of them trekking towards the world’s darkest corners and everywhere they went they wept for losing her and cursed themselves for being short.  Their tears froze when they fell to the ground. Everywhere they went to forget their sadness; they’d leave behind acres of ice and snow, a dark white continent of loss that spread out behind them like a cape that would never be big enough to conceal their seven tiny broken hearts.  And that was how I learnt that The North Pole had come to be.

    Trailing far behind them I saw a man, who looked like a drawing from a story book, swaying in the cold and losing his balance on huge grey mirrors of ice. He was weeping too and cursing what he had done years before. He had let go of a rope that dangled deep down into a well. Children used to speed up and down the well, like a thrill ride, collecting pebbles down below but one day he, the village well man, had let go of the rope, his trembling hands not sure of themselves and two children were drowned. I learnt at age eight that the saddest people wander the furthest.

    And so the world’s saddest tall person and the shortest tearful seven met each other and started on this strange enterprise together. Santy was forever lamenting what he’d done and the dwarves learned to forget just a little, the young woman who’d once danced through their days, as they helped him build his toys in the cold.

    I was always relieved when a dream put me at ease and whispered some new part of an old truth to me. I’d add it to the old truth and for a moment my mind would ring clear as bell with fresh understanding. It was as if I saw further and more clearly how things really were. I kept these truths, the old and the new, like nuggets, deep in my story pockets, to help me along my way.

    When I was leaving the tent in Lee’s he handed me a package from one of the baskets. I pointed at him and asked him, “Santy, did you really once work at a well? I know how The North Pole was born.”

    “Am I well? Sure, Santy is always well, off with ye now”

    My mother pulled impatiently at the hood of my duffel coat.

    “Ah, what are you saying to the man, Billy…?”

    She had said it, “The Man.”

    So he was not Santy, he was “a man”

    I knew that Santy wept most days for what he had done.

    I tore my package open and saw that he had mistaken me for a girl; a string of plastic pearls, a tiny mirror and a comb.

    I went home, put on my necklace and waited for the real Father Sadness to come.

    Feature Image: O’Connell Street, Dublin, Christmas Tree, Lord Mayor Ben Briscoe, Santa Claus, Dublin Photographic Archive, 1988.

  • Hooray for Jolly January!

    It is coming up to one of the best times of the year; those early days of January following the sixth – a period I cheerfully refer to as ‘The Anti-Christmas’!

    Alas December has first to be endured. It is a month dominated by two types of people: those who project that the time is fun for commercial purpose; and those who do so for social advantage. Although each was a monstrous individual, nonetheless Joe Stalin and Ollie Cromwell may have each separately been onto something – in so far as they both banned aspects of Christmas.

    As if an orgy of collective consumerism can offset the unrelenting bleakness of the year’s dullest days? On a more serious note, it is sad that the ‘festive season’ correlates with an annual spike in altercations, hospital admissions, relationship break-ups, etc.

    There is no other way to put it: December fills me with dread. Daylight dropping by a few minutes each day, and worse if cloudy when even the shadows refuse to come out to play amid grim gloom. The rain that fell yesterday does not seem dry on these grey days, as thermometers shiver with the temperatures in single digits. For certain, these must count as the bleakest weeks of the calendar.

    All too often, people behave in a manner unacceptable at any other time of the year. One only has to cross a street during these weeks to witness the manic impatience – and occasional dangerous behaviour – by countless drivers.

    Yet just a few weeks later, the streets are quieter, calmer, and indeed sometimes serene. The same individual who was driving crazily is often a character transformed, taking far more care on the road.

    Maybe it is the guilt-trips associated with December that are most objectionable. These generally take two forms. There is the necessary attendance of social occasions – so as it is less likely to be perceived as an antisocial malcontent – and then there are those innumerable good causes seeking charitable donations. It can be a hard challenge to simply battle on, but it’s vital all the same.

    The usual routes for psychological escape, however, tend to be stymied. Anything outdoors involves cold or damp. Try turning on a radio or TV and you are bombarded with advertising, promising either unbelievable joys after a purchase, or else soliciting charity for desperate heart-breaking catastrophes; a choice between strychnine smiles and poor unfortunates suffering dreadful distress. Possibly not a great recipe for people’s mental health, I suspect.

    Fortunately, the crescendo of craziness usually peaks in the days leading up to Christmas Eve. By then, the sloppiness associated with the Christmas office party mobs has mostly dissipated. Nitwits likely to attempt to attend twelve pubs are also typically in retreat, having succeeded or failed in their valiant missions.

    New Years’ Eve can pose a threat, but usually it just amounts to an Amateurs’ Night, where chaos is confined to those determined to participate. And unless one is unfortunate to live where Orthodox Christmas occurs, the future gets brighter – literally!

    From around January seventh our world starts becoming more pleasant and civilised. It is by then nearly four weeks since earliest nightfall! Contrary to common perception, daylight in evening time begins to extend around the thirteenth of December – although mornings continue getting darker until the thirty-first, hence the twenty-first being the day with least daylight overall. Thus, a week into January, it is bright for nearly an hour longer than the depressing days of mid-December.

    All the nonsense and excess of previous weeks is thankfully finished with for another year. Coca-cola put away their crappy red cloaked Santa Clauses until its annual marketing requirement ten months later –likewise the other big brands that have rendered bland any sense of occasion the time of year ever contained. With January’s arrival, the phrase ‘Sure, it’s Christmas’ becomes invalid, and can no longer be cited in defence of unsatisfactory actions, or lack thereof.

    There is a defence made about Christmas having a ‘real’ meaning before it was commercially hijacked. Yet there again, it is worth noting it was an annual pagan festival before it was pilfered or ‘culturally appropriated’ by Christians. It used to help sell Rome; now it sells Coca-cola.

    All too often, securing a restaurant table in December is a competitive heat, where the victors’ spoils consist of queues and confined spaces, served-up with a dollop of top-dollar prices by overworked staff at the end of their tether. Yet walk into the same establishment in January – at least in ‘normal times’ – and savour the personal attention you are likely to receive from staff glad of the custom. The January lunch or supper liberates the individual; company is by choice rather than obligation.

    It is not that January is the winter tunnel’s end – but an unmistakable brightness is beginning to hove into view. There will be further dark days ahead, but none darker than those past; the dreariness is finally passing. Media continues to push commercial adverts, but those flogging insurance and holidays tend to use far less shrill ditties than those carried at Christmas time. In January, the hard sells are off, enforced engagement is over; and we can escape – we can get away from the maddening crowd.

    It is understandable then why the period around January the sixth has long  been known in Ireland as ‘Little Christmas’ or ‘Nollaig na mBan’, meaning ‘Women’s Christmas’.

    I may call it ‘The Anti-Christmas’ – but perhaps the older title is better, luring buy-in from erstwhile festive fanatics. This is the moment when reasonable people breath a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge they are as far as possible on the calendar from the annual madness of the ‘holiday season’.

    A light is there on the horizon, beckoning us forth, promising a beginning of better and brighter days: Hooray for Jolly January!

    Feature Image: Daniele Idinin

  • “We have Sick Journalism in Ireland”

    Joe MacAnthony might be considered the greatest investigative reporter to have ever operated in the history of the Irish State. His career in Ireland, however, was cut short by vested interests that still appear to insulate those with money in power from accountability and criminal sanction.

    Having exposed the staggering corruption lying behind the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes, he eventually ran out of Irish publishers, and was forced to take a job with the Canadian Broadcasting Authority. After receiving threats to his life, he moved to Canada with his wife and four children, where he lived for thirty-five years.

    0:00 Introduction
    1:13     The Irish Sweepstakes
    14:42     Story on Ray Burke
    19:30 Closed down in RTE
    24:00     Move to Canada
    29:00     Death Threats
    31:00 Unable to Work in Ireland
    32:58     Views on the Irish Times
    34:10     ‘We have sick journalism in Ireland’
    38:00     Possibility of Solution

    As testament to MacAnthony’s stature in Irish journalism, on November 15 2020 Liam Collins wrote for the Sunday Independent:

    The first Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes draw took place 90 years ago this month and it quickly became a global phenomenon. Behind the razzmatazz and the instant riches, however, was a hidden tale of greed. More than four decades later, investigative journalist Joe MacAnthony broke the biggest story in the history of the Sunday Independent and revealed where the Sweep millions went.

    The state-sponsored lottery was set up under the first Cumann na nGaedhal (later Fine Gael) government of the State in 1930, and would bring unheard of riches to former Minister for Industry and Commerce Josephy McGrath, and his heirs, who became firm fixtures in the commercial life of the country, with many influential friends. MacAnthony estimates their fortune amounted to up to four hundred million dollars by 1972.

    Last week filmmaker and Cassandra Voices contributor Bob Quinn sent us a recording of a film he made in 2006 entitled ‘They’ll Never Show That.’

    MacAnthony reflects on his career, and the sorry state of Irish media as he saw it; the structure of which remains substantially unaltered today; in an era increasingly hostile to investigative reporting.

    Having blazed a trail with his work on the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes, MacAnthony explains how his revelations into the corrupt affairs of former Fianna Fáil Minister Ray Burke as far back as the 1970s, hastened the end of his career in both the Sunday Independent and RTE, who withdrew his security card for a period of six months, while he continued to draw a salary.

    MacAnthony provides a chilling assessment of Irish media:

    the Irish Times, when you look at the manner in which this whole thing seems to be fitted to whoever can make the most money in the upper circles of that paper … that is a total disgrace, an unconscionable disgrace in terms of Irish press freedom … the result is we have sick journalists in Ireland and it is sick journalism, and it’s not due to the people who want to be good journalists. It’s the people who control what the good or bad journalists say and who encourage triviality … I mean, the level of triviality that you read. It’s unbelievable.

    He argues that corruption has come about through what he calls ‘facilitators’ – accountants and lawyers – who ensure that few, if any, politicians are ever held to account.

    Ray Burke would serve just four and-a-half months of a six month sentence behind bars, while Liam Lawlor served a few weeks for contempt.

    MacAnthony traces the lenient treatment of politicians to a class distinction, between those who get ‘six years and who gets probation,’ while ‘basically no lawyer in this country and no accountant ever imagines he’s going to go to jail for playing ducks and drakes.’

    He asserts

    it’s just embedded. A culture is embedded … that you can get away with murder.

    MacAnthony proposed the solution of a ‘counter power,’ similar to the FBI, which could set up ‘stings on politicians.’

    He concludes:

    Nobody goes to jail … I mean, these exile millionaires like Denis O’Brien, I mean, that’s disgusting … here is a guy who makes … money out of Irish assets and then goes off and lives somewhere else and only comes in here … when he has the prospect of taking more money out of the system.

    He warns:

    You know, every time you take money out of the system somebody pays and they’re paying [with their] health or they pay in other areas, but they always pay. So these people, I mean, there is conscience involved here. You know that when you make a lot of money, somebody’s suffering at the other end of the scale.

  • One Irish Son’s Journey

    It was one of those frequent blustery evenings, Wednesday May 18th, 2011. I was driving back to Rosses Point from Sligo town. In five minutes one could get soaked, as I had earlier and would after. The wind would blow like hell and clouds give the sky over to shades of light blue and grey as dusk approached. That morning, the water in the tidal channel connecting Sligo Bay to the town was choppy, wind- churned, a kind of deep green. By evening’s light it was calmer, a fuller cerulean than the sky itself.

    I had been having a bout of sinus headaches. A great man for the self-diagnosis, here’s how I assessed the possible causes: 1) indoor dampness from the more or less daily Irish rain; 2) drinking too much, not stout or John Power whiskey, rather strong black tea by the gallon; 3) consuming lashings of white flour in the form of croissants and sausage rolls from the bakery run by the French family off Rockwood Parade; 4) a non-fatal overdose of the scones dished up warm with butter by Jill Barber and her crew at the Drumcliffe Tea Shop by the Churchyard where W.B. Yeats is buried. I felt like I was coming down with something.

    My friend Martin had waxed lyrical about a Leitrim-born homeopath in Sligo town, Maura. He characterized her as a good listener, a healer. He said she might have something for what ailed me. My batch of Euros was dwindling. That year everything in Ireland was twenty-five percent more expensive when compared to American prices, yet I was curious enough to see could she help the sinus ache or maybe persuade a high-pitched constant companion – screeching in my ears – to abate. More than that, I thought I’d get an appointment because frequently my default mode could be characterized as uptight, on alert – shoulders up, jaw clenched, muscles clamped down, my head mimicking a fist. The resultant drag on my energy wore me down.

    I had a 6 p.m. appointment with Maura. Inevitably, I got caught again in a blast of horizontal Northwest rain during the short walk from the Tesco’s parking lot in the centre of town around the corner to the faded elegance of the office buildings at the West end of Wine Street. A British legacy, eight three-story grey Georgian houses were built in a terrace in the 1830’s with large square windows, decorative semi- circular glass above thick wooden front doors and terra cotta pots atop concrete chimneys. They still look decent despite pipes running down the front of several to drain rainwater off the slate roofs.

    Imbibing Sligo Life

    Born a stones-throw away in Garden Hill Nursing Home, I had imbibed life in Sligo as a toddler. Gripping my father’s trouser leg, I observed the goings on around him. I would scamper after him into Blackwood’s General Store on Grattan Street, a place of creaky wooden floorboards sprinkled with sawdust, populated by white-coated shop assistants. After forking out for a pound of rashers, my father would point to the cylinders flying about the ceiling on wires. The shop assistant wrote up a slip and put it along with cash into a cylinder, pulling a handle to send it flying up to a mezzanine office that appeared to be suspended from the ceiling. From that vantage point a bespectacled old dear made up the change and zipped the cylinder back down. Once or twice every summer, my father bundled me into the front seat of his black Ford Consul and drove me down Cartron Hill into Wine Street to the Café Cairo, its floor tiled in black and white squares, for a whipped ice cream cone.

    The world of my early boyhood was circumscribed by the wider landscapes of Sligo – limestone encrusted Ben Bulben, the fresh waters of Lough Gill and the Garravogue river running through town past Foley’s Brewery to the weir at Hyde bridge where we tossed lumps of sliced pan to the swans. Along the coastline, I ran after my father to keep up on his walks in the salted air off the Atlantic coast: Raghley, Strandhill, Rosses Point, Mullaghmore. Running in place against the wind, knees reddened by the chill, brown long socks pulled up tight in wellie-boots I watched my father, his shoulders thrown back, stride away from me into the ghostly distance of the mist enshrouded second strand at Rosses Point.

    I stepped through the glass front door of number two Wine Street through the vestibule into an office to the right. In the old days, doctors had offices along this part of Wine Street. Maura’s place was a new twist – a gang of alternative practitioners sharing space, naming it the Wine Street Wellness Center. Maura arrived in and walked me up the U-shaped staircase to the first landing. To the left, her high-ceilinged office looked shared – no visible personal items or files – and the furniture was second-hand. I sat in a low uncomfortable chair with my back to the door while my soaking raincoat dripped across the only spare chair. I viewed Maura in profile at her bare desk facing the wall.

    She asked me all kinds of questions, about my aching back, ringing ears and all of the things happening in my body certainly but also in my emotional world. She had a series of gently probing questions. As I blabbed replies, she seemed to let my story wash over her, writing the odd clue she extracted down on a notepad. She asked how did I feel about this or that time in my life, all with a view to “restoring the body’s natural balance,” said she.

    Balance, as far as I was concerned, was something others might attain not me. I had been keeping my eye out for balance of some sort for years – balance between my tired body and racing mind; between work and play; between pushing myself to forge forward and sitting back to rest. I wasn’t sure what balance felt like.

    Massive Turning

    Prompted by her expansive questions, my mind’s eye drifted to a massive turning in my life – February 1989. My mother, Mella, took ill suddenly, fatally. I talked to her on the phone the day of the hastily scheduled surgery – open heart – and she said, “Don’t come now; bring the kids in a couple of months, it will be just the tonic I need.” She called my toddler sons her little darlings. Barely twelve hours later, a loud phone bolted me awake in the early hours – the call every emigrant dreads. My elder brother Vivian killed me softly, “She’s in a bad way; come home as quick as you can.”

    Sitting there in the thrift store low chair, I told Maura I was remembering the agonizing wintertime plane trek home to Ireland. Every minute of the journey from Pittsburgh to JFK in New York to London Gatwick and on to Dublin was drawn out, excruciating. “Six hundred miles an hour, bollox,” I remember thinking somewhere over the Atlantic as the steward poured another weak tea into my flimsy plastic cup. At Gatwick, extra security checks delayed me further. With the IRA active, all Irish travelers were suspect.

    Years before, just passed my twenty-sixth birthday, when my eldest brother Ian phoned to tell me my father had died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-two, I knew by the tone of his, “Hello,” what was coming. When he said, “I’m afraid I have bad news,” that sealed it. His news was not entirely unexpected. My father had drifted downhill after retiring at the age of sixty-seven. This call, though, this one struck like the once in a lifetime tornado that had ripped up parts of Pittsburgh, my adopted hometown, in 1980. Out of the blue, Mella, ten days before her 70th birthday, was lying in a hospital bed in Dublin close to death; nothing I could do would speed me to her side. Stuck in mid-air over mid Atlantic, I resorted to talking silently to her.

    “I’m coming. Hold on, dear one, hold on.”

    Vivian awaited at Dublin airport. He shepherded me to his green Mercedes with the tan leather seats. In silence, my brother the motor racing champion sped me through the early morning fog like a VIP, across the semicircle of Dublin Bay anchored by the chimneys of the Bull Wall, past the strand at Sandymount where people braved the early morning wind and drizzle to walk dogs. Ignoring speed limits, he revved the purring engine as we waited at the railway crossing for a DART commuter train to rumble and clatter past. The back end of the Merc fish- tailed as he turned left with a screech onto busy Merrion Road – bobbing and weaving in and out of clogged traffic lanes – straight to the Blackrock Clinic.

    A Preternatural Tristesse

    “What are you feeling now?” Maura asked. “Sad,” I told her.

    Sad wasn’t the half of it. A preternatural tristesse had descended on me, as if I was touching an opening, a small portal atop an immense reservoir of sadness, a deep subterranean lake of tears like an underground aquifer. I was surprised, nonplussed, to discover it. The grey twilight threw shadows scything at an angle across the top of the wall and along the corner of the high-ceilinged room.

    “Right,” she replied with an inflection that combined, “I hear you,” with “I accept your story.”

    Slumped slightly in the non-ergonomic chair, I felt my shoulders relax a little, involuntarily let go of a layer of tightness clamping them down. There’s not enough time in one lifespan, I thought, to cry all of those tears. I sat there wondering if I had somehow not dealt with buried grief around the loss of my mother, whether words unspoken – words of love and affection, respect and gratitude – were still stuck in my gullet after all these years, or whether part of that lake of tears might even belong to her and my father or ancestors, not be mine at all.

    As Maura consulted a large reference book, I remembered that my father and the gregarious Denis Boland regularly sipped John Powers in the second floor living room of the Boland’s Wine Street house a couple of doors along, the one with the plaque outside that stated simply Surgeon Boland.

    They drank pints in the Yeats Country Hotel in Rosses Point with the town’s elite, Tommy Mulligan of Western Wholesale Company, Jimmy Doherty the Accountant, Toher the Chemist who drove a Volkswagen Beetle, Armstrong the Solicitor, the businessman Soden and cigar smoking wit Doctor Charles McCarthy.

    My mother too enjoyed friendships in these houses along Wine Street with May Quinn, the dentist’s wife, and big-hearted Moya Boland who held court from her kitchen, always at the ready to entertain visitors who wandered in off the street. May Quinn’s early death from cancer rattled my mother. They were like sisters the two of them – good looking, blond and wispy with tan makeup. Golf buddies at the links in Rosses Point, after playing a round they giggled together over gins and tonics in the member’s lounge.

    “What we are looking for,” Maura said, “is a constitutional remedy; one that gets underneath surface symptoms to draw out the body’s own capacity to heal – physically and emotionally.”

    First Train Trip

    Memories were overtaking me. I didn’t tell her that earlier that day a walk to the train station at the West end of town had caused me to re-live my first trip in a train – from Sligo to Dublin with my father and younger sister Adrienne. I was six or seven. Oblivious to what packing up must have been going on, I thought we were on some sort of adventure to see Dublin, a dream-place I could not conceive of.

    I quizzed my father at each stop. “Where are we now?” Longford, Edgworthstown, Mullingar, Kinegad. The train stopped along the way while in the hushed carriage people shuffled on and off puncturing the quiet by banging the thick green doors shut then dragging bags along the light brown linoleum floor before heaving them onto overhead racks.

    On the outskirts of Dublin approaching the city centre the train slid by small brick-walled back gardens. The train tracks were high. I could see over the back walls into tiny yards where between light rain showers daily washing blew on lines. In some places there were narrow laneways between the back walls and the railway. Elsewhere, smashed up bicycles, beat up chairs and prams, Walkers brand with metal springs sticking out, lay rusting beside the tracks. Approaching Westland Row station, small windows with white lace curtains hid tiny darkened bedrooms from the train.

    Somehow, we landed up in 72 Cowper Road, a tall elegant Victorian with stained glass on the front door, a half block down from busy Rathmines Road. Welcomed in by my maternal grandparents, I followed the adults like a duckling to the kitchen at the back of the house, down a couple of narrow steps behind a door with curtained glass. My mother and two elder brothers had arrived by car; suitcases had been unpacked. How did these ancient, quiet people – gentle souls – Joseph and Margaret Hynes, cope with six of us landing in on top of them, sharing beds, sleepily whizzing into piss-pots in the middle of the night? Even then I wondered.

    We Weren’t Going Home

    As one day rolled into another it dawned on me gradually, we weren’t going home to Sligo. We were enrolled in schools. We had moved to Dublin for good. I walked to Miss Carr’s elementary prep school on Highfield Road, my brothers to the bottom of Cowper Road and over the railway footbridge to the Jesuits at Gonzaga College in Ranelagh.

    After a couple of months of this routine, we moved to a new house nearby in the quiet leafy confines of Merton Road, number 42. I recall no explanation at the time, or at least none that I could comprehend. As an adult I inferred there was sacrifice involved for my parents. They moved us from Sligo, where years on my mother would confide they had enjoyed their happiest times, for a fresh start – to be closer to aging parents, enroll us in top schools and expand the family to five children with the Dublin birth of my brother Colman.

    I was an hour in the chair answering questions, pausing for Maura to make notes or look something up, when she declared she had an idea for a remedy for me but wished to think about it further – I could stop by for it in a couple of days. A gust of wind shook the windows just as she opened the office door to graciously escort me downstairs to the front door.

    Steering left out of the Tesco’s lot, I drove West along Wine Street, then turned right on the Inner Relief Road, the new bypass that cuts off the West End of Sligo from its center. Past Hughes bridge where the Garravogue joins the tide, I veered left off Markievicz Road up Cartron Hill past my boyhood home, called Inniscara this longtime, down the other side, across the causeway and out the Rosses Point Road.

    I found myself teary-eyed approaching the village at the neo-Gothic limestone Protestant Church on the left marking the widening onto the “new” promenade road built in the 1970’s, the one that “desthroyed” the village, according to two locals, semi-permanent fixtures on the bar stools of Austie’s Pub. Uachterán na hÉireann, President of Ireland Mary McAleese was coming over the car radio on RTÉ addressing a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth 2nd – Head of State, Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, top mega-wealthy Royal personage reigning over millions of subjects – Eílis a Dó as they were calling her on the News in Irish.

    The last British monarch to visit Ireland had been Elizabeth’s grandfather George the Fifth, who landed in 1911 in Kingstown Harbor, we know today as Dún Laoghaire, to receive the muted admiration of his Irish subjects. At that time Ireland was a colony agitating for home rule, a modest form of self-governance within the Union with Britain.

    “What do you think of Eílis a Dó?” a woman juggling a quart of milk, car keys and an Irish Independent newspaper in the village shop in Rosses Point had asked me that morning, pointing to a front page picture of her nibs dripping with royal jewels? “Isn’t she great all the same, for a woman of 85, and yer man is gone 90?”- yer man being His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, longtime sidekick to Eilís a Dó.

    Mary McAleese acknowledged centuries of conflict between Britain and Ireland while asserting those days were well behind us. The whole island, besotted with English football, Downton Abbey and royal weddings, had achieved normal relations with England untainted by mutual threats of violence.

    “The past,” said she, “No longer threatens to overwhelm our present or our future.”

    A few drops of tears were making thin tracks along my face. Eílis a Dó got up and brought the house down with her opening words in Irish: “A Uachtaráin,” she intoned inserting a barely perceptible pause for dramatic effect, “Agas a cháirde,” President and friends.

    “Fair play to her,” our friend Myra Curley, a genial elder in Rosses Point village would declare the following day. Myra followed the royal goings on closely.

    Oyster Island

    The better to listen, I pulled the car over on the promenade road a stone’s throw from where Oyster Island lies across a narrow tidal channel. Evening wind blew low hanging grey-stained clouds across the sky. Gazing over the undulating tidal waters, it occurred to me it was my lot to be removed at an early age, exposed the way maybe gannets or terns off the coastal headland at Mullaghmore, twenty-eight kilometers North of where I was parked, are battered by the elements.

    Migrating birds return again and again to their origins, over and back, over and back, tracing and retracing infinite invisible patterns on the air. For four decades, I have mimicked their returns.

    Since leaving Ireland at the age of twenty-three I came back every chance I got, always returning to Sligo, never feeling fully American yet I was cut off from the day-to-day routines and interactions that would render me an Irish local once again. Toward the end of every trip before returning to Pennsylvania I pined, the way a long-distance lover’s heart cracks a little at the prospect of further separation from a beloved.

    Here I was again, rummaging around the landscapes and buildings of my early boyhood, a familiar desiderium setting in. My mind drifted like a cloud to the year of my father’s death, 1979. In quiet Mullaghmore on the morning of August 27th, the IRA blew Earl Mountbatten of Burma to bits in his small fishing boat, Shadow V. Three others were killed too when the creaky boat exploded beyond the long sandy beach where the harbor opens to Donegal Bay. Among the dead were Mountbatten’s fourteen-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, whose twin brother Timothy survived, and Paul Maxwell a fifteen-year- old summer helper from Northern Ireland. Prince Philip, Mountbatten’s nephew, stood silently and stoically with the Prince of Wales as the coffin draped in the Union Jack arrived back in England. Surgeon Boland of Wine Street had treated survivors at Sligo General Hospital.

    Years later Paul Maxwell’s courageous father, John, somehow found it in his heart to publicly support the release under the Good Friday agreement of one of the perpetrators, Thomas McMahon of Carickmacross, after nineteen years in prison. McMahon would refuse requests to meet with John Maxwell, who wanted to see as he put it, “Would he be capable of putting himself in my shoes?”

    The Good Friday agreement having settled more or less the Troubles in Northern Ireland, rendered possible the Royal visit and the elegant speeches coming over the car radio. It occurred to me that seeds of sadness in me, the trickle of tears on my face, may have their origins in grief and loss engendered by leaving Sligo as a small boy, Ireland itself as a young man.

    In the late seventies, there was nothing much in the way of opportunity for young people. For most of the eighties Ireland exported a hundred thousand young people annually – a diaspora largely forgotten and wholly ignored in the country’s public discourse. Idealism and romance were calling my name and I chose to flee to the States with my American beloved.

    It took several years to break upon me what had happened. I had removed myself from places, landscapes, language, people, culture and the very air I took for granted breathing. The poet Eavan Boland put it this way, “An ordinary displacement, had made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.”

    To be sure, my migrant’s longing was no match for loss and grief suffered by Paul Maxwell’s family and the families of those killed and maimed by the troubles in the North. Sitting there in the car, I felt grateful for the magnitude of John Maxwell’s compassion, inspired to follow his example – to deploy further measures of compassion toward my uprooted younger self.

    A few days later I would take a small sugary pellet, the remedy Maura doled out, and feel a further calm descend. The sinus problem would abate a bit.

    Beyond the chilly tidal channel, clouds cast a shadow across Knocknarea. Evening light played hide and seek with the burial cairn of Maeve, ancient Queen of Connacht, atop the mountain. As teardrops dried on my cheekbones, Elizabeth Regina declared, “We should bow to the past, but not be bound by it.” I felt my neck muscles relax further as a soft rain peppered the windshield.

    All Images (c) Daniele Idini

  • Is Medicine Out of Touch?

    In a recent review, my colleague Ben Pantrey argues Richard Kearney’s Touch is itself out of touch with the ‘maddeningly Baroque … meme-ified soup of internet discourse.’ Given the Boston-based Irish philosopher is from an older generation, a relative lack of insight is perhaps unsurprising, but in dismissing the work in at times caustic terms, the reviewer perhaps missed its central thrust.

    Touch provides a compelling narrative on an intimate connection between healing and touch, pointing to a dominant tendency in Western medicine – writ large during the Covid-19 pandemic – to disregard the role of the healer, in favour of what Kearney calls a ‘model of outmanoeuvring and overcoming illness.(p.68)’

    That this view now appears risqué – in the face of coercive public health – demonstrates how the argument for the type of healing that Kearney points to is being lost.

    The flag of the World Health Organization, with a rod of Asclepius.

    Hippocratic v. Asklepion

    Kearney identifies two paradigmatic schools of medicine originating in Ancient Greece, one emanating from Chiron who taught his disciple Asclepius ‘the art of healing through touch’; and another from Hippocrates, ‘followed the way of Zeus, Chiron’s brother, who dwelt on Mount Olympus and promoted a method of optocentric supervision. (p.66)’

    Following a Hippocratic approach, the patient is viewed from a distance – objectified – before the prescribed remedy, or prophylactic, is applied to an undifferentiated ‘case.’

    In contrast:

    Chiron comes from the word kheir, meaning hand, or, more precisely, one skilled with the hands. The related term kheirourgos means surgeon. As healer, he accompanied the art of touch – often portrayed as laying on of hands and bodily massage – with medicinal plants from the earth, music, and sleep potions. (p.66)

    Asklepion healing is a two-way process that includes: ‘tactile acts of bathing, ritual massage, and the ingestion of curative herbs. (p.68)’ This sounds similar to so-called ‘alternative’ medicinal practices – dismissed as ‘unscientific’ by some doctors – and also encompasses much of the fading role of the general practitioner, where a physical presence before each distinct patient is generally considered important.

    This form of healing, however, is severely compromised by exhortations – backed up by unprecedented draconian laws – to ‘socially’ distance – which is surely an oxymoron.

    Kearney’s work points to profound damage that occurs when physical contact is lost, heightening a pre-existing epidemic of loneliness, which a report in 2014 found to have even worse effects on our health than obesity. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist goes so far as to argue that all medicine should be viewed ‘as a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy.’[i]

    Indeed, recognising a psychological origin to physical symptoms might explain our current impasse: transfixed by the challenge of a particular virus, seemingly to the exclusion of all else. This collective hysteria suggests widespread trauma, which may be the legacy of diminished physical contact in a digitally mediated age, accelerated by what Naomi Klein described as a ‘Screen New Deal,’ rolled out under cover of lockdown.

    It begs the question: what happens to society when we shrink in fear from the flesh, blood and microbes of one another? ‘Touch’, Kearney says, ‘serves as the indispensable agency of intercorporality – and by moral extension, empathy. (p.47)’

    The School of Athens by Raphael.

    Aristotelian Touchstone

    According to Kearney, Plato’s Academy held sight to be ‘the highest sense because it was deemed the most distant and mediated.’ In contrast, according to Kearney, Aristotle, ‘makes the startling claim that human perfection is the perfection of touch, (p.35)’ writing in Metaphysics (chapter 10, 105ib, 23-25):

    The being to whom logos has been given as his share is a tactile being, endowed with the finest tact.

    Kearney argues convincingly that in Western medicine the Aristotlean approach, drawing on Asklepion wisdom, has been drowned out by a Platonic, ‘heroic-Hippocratic model’, which ‘only tells half the story. (p.68-69)’

    In support of this thesis, in his history of the origins of the scientific discipline from the late eighteenth century, Richard Holmes has drawn attention to a delusional optimism wherein there emerged, ‘the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost.’ This was the idea of a ‘Eureka’ moment: ‘the intuitive inspired instant of invention or discovery, for which no amount of preparation or preliminary analysis can really compare.’[ii]

    Arguably, blind faith in dazzling scientific genius distorted public health priorities in the era of COVID-19. Lockdowns were aimed at keeping the population ‘safe’ before the invention of a ‘miraculous’ vaccine. Many seemed to assume this would act as a panacea, allowing us to awaken from the nightmare of ongoing restrictions. But a cycle of anxiety endures with the arrival of each new variant, however mild the symptoms it produces, suggesting an underlying anxiety is itself the problem.

    in pursuit of a single-minded, Hippocratic “model of outmanoeuvring and overcoming illness”,  morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 was inadequately weighed against the health impacts of lockdowns. According to Ari R. Joffe, the response of Western nations threatens to make ‘and likely has already made, several Sustainable Development Goals for the most vulnerable among us in low-income countries out of reach.’ The same paper also argues the ‘destabilizing effects may lead to chaotic events (e.g., riots, wars, revolutions).’

    A van set on fire during the riots in Rotterdam on 26 January 2021.

    Merleau-Ponty

    Another philosopher Kearney cites is Maurice Merleau-Ponty who ‘took the novel step of applying the phenomenology of touch to the question of healing. (p.49)’ In response to increasing dependence on ‘optocentric’ remote diagnostics, it is worth revisiting passages Kearney quotes.

    Merleau-Ponty emphasises the importance of tactility in the treatment of psychiatric illness in particular:

    In treating (certain illnesses) psychological medicine does not act on the patient by making him know the origin of his illness: sometimes a touch of the hand puts a stop to the spasms and restores to the patient his speech.

    Moreover,

    The patient does not accept the meaning of his disturbance as revealed to him without the personal relationship formed with the doctor, or without the confidence and friendship felt towards him, and the change of existence resulting from this friendship. Neither symptom nor cure is worked out at the level of objective or positing consciousness, but below that level.

    He concludes with a revolutionary idea in the context of this pandemic, where the patient-doctor relationship is side-lined in favour of generalised prescriptions, addressing one particular disease:

    What this implies is that human symptoms cannot be explained by either biochemistry or intellectual volition alone – though both have their role. Ultimate healing involves an existential conversion of one body-subject in tactful communion with another. (p.49)

    Moreover, Kearney adds that ‘untimely withdrawal of touch may do worse psychic damage than outright hostility or anger. (p.102)’ He refers to the findings of the Austrian doctor René Spitz in 1945, concerning an orphanage, which prevented contact between children in order to reduce a risk of them being exposed to contagious diseases, while giving them excellent nutrition and medical care. Startling, thirty-seven percent of the infants died before reaching the age of two.

    Kearney also draws attention to epigenetic research demonstrating ‘key alterations in our bodies are made not just by toxins and biochemical stimulants but by the way we resonate with our fellow beings. (p.104)’

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    Responding to Covid

    Given Kearney completed the book just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, his observations are of a provisional nature.

    Nonetheless he makes a far-reaching claim that ‘In the first half of 2020, the virus went viral. Homo sapiens became Homo cybernens. (p.136)’ He assumes, however, an upbeat tone that now seems misplaced, saying ‘what we lost on the roundabout we won the swings’, recalling, how friends had received ‘unexpected messages from old friends and old flames (the “ex-factor”) wishing to “reconnect” at a time when physical travel and tactile contact was suddenly suspended. (p.134)’

    Almost two years into the pandemic another philosopher, Byung-Chul Han has a far less rosy assessment. Writing for The Nation he describes what he calls ‘The Tiredness Virus’ in the pandemic’s wake. A triumph of sight over touch has generated what Han describes as ‘Zoom narcissism’ such that a ‘digital mirror’ encourages ‘dysmorphia’ (an exaggerated concern with supposed flaws in one’s physical appearance).

    ‘Digital communication is a very one-sided, attenuated affair’ Han argues, ‘There is no gaze, no body. It lacks the physical presence of the other.’ Moreover, he fears this this form of communication will become the norm, recalling all that we have lost:

    The rituals we have been missing out on during the pandemic also imply physical experience. They represent forms of physical communication that create community and therefore bring happiness. Most of all, they lead us away from our egos … A physical aspect is also inherent in community as such. Digitalization weakens community cohesion insofar as it has a disembodying effect. The virus alienates us from the body.

    Prolonging Covid?

    Could an enforced absence of touch be linked to outright pathology in the context of COVID-19?

    In the U.K., on March 22nd, 2020 the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, known as SPI-B., worried that ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group’; subsequently stating that: ‘the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’

    In response, Professor Robert Dingwell criticised ‘this very strong message which has effectively terrorised the population into believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you.’

    Is it possible that widespread conviction that a disease “is going to kill you” had unforeseen consequences in terms of adding to the burden of ‘Long Covid,’ or Covid ‘Long Haulers’ as it is referred to in the U.S.?

    Long Covid is a condition fitting within the general category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue, which is ‘a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection.’ which ‘can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’ Notably, prior to the pandemic there were up to 150,000 who were already affected by ‘extreme and disabling exhaustion,’ with no apparent origin in the U.K.. Yet virtually no attention was given to this condition until the pandemic.

    Moreover, in October, 2020 a leading advocates for sufferers, Professor Trish Greenhalgh clarified that Long Covid is only very rarely a long-term affliction: ‘The reviews we’ve done seem to suggest that whilst a tiny minority of people, perhaps one per cent of everyone who gets Covid-19, are still ill six months later, and whilst about a third of people aren’t better at three weeks, most people whose condition drags on are going to get better, slowly but steadily, between three weeks and three months.’

    Ordinarily, one would expect public health officials to downplay such a condition, given broad acceptance that psychological stress – including a lack of touch or loneliness – is a factor in the subjective evolution or pathogenesis of most diseases. Instead, Long Covid has been widely highlighted in the media, often as a warning to young people, who might otherwise be insufficiently scared of a virus highly unlikely to kill a person under the age of fifty.

    Frequent, graphic accounts, espeically via social media, may have had unintended consequences. Curiously, an informal survey of 450 people by Survivor Corps, a patient advocacy group for people with Long Covid, found that 171 said their condition improved after vaccination. That a vaccine would alleviate a post-viral syndrome is surely grounds for suspicion, hinting at a psychological origin to objective pain and suffering.

    Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, has argued for a more critical appraisal of Long Covid. Having expressed scepticism around a condition characterised by symptoms such as ‘brain fog’, he recalls being contacted by a journalist who said: ‘I’m asking as much as a person as a journalist because I’m more terrified of this syndrome than I am of death.’

    Gaffney acknowledges ‘myriad long-term effects, including physical and cognitive impairments, reduced lung function, mental health problems, and poorer quality of life’ from severe bouts of COVID-19, but cites a survey showing two-thirds of ‘long haulers’ had negative coronavirus antibody tests, and another, organised by self-identifying Long Covid patients indicating around two-thirds of those surveyed who had undergone blood testing reported negative results.

    He asserted: ‘it’s highly probable that some or many long-haulers who were never diagnosed using PCR testing in the acute phase and who also have negative antibody tests are “true negatives.” In other words, for many this may be a disease with a psychological origin, which Gaffney attributes to ‘skyrocketing levels of social anguish and mental emotional distress,’ referencing a paper showing that about half of people with depression also had unexplained physical symptoms.

    Getting Back in Touch

    Recovery from the trauma of the pandemic should lead to a reappraisal of public health priorities. It is apparent by now that no “miracle” cure is available, decisively “outmanoeuvring and overcoming” COVID-19, and that lockdown measures, including pysch-ops instilling fear, have left deep wounds.

    Works such as Kearney’s remind us of the importance of healing touch, inspired by Asclepius, which should be accorded equal importance to the Hippocratic inheritance. Now, with an ever-increasing burden of morbidity in society, particularly a veritable epidemic of mental ill-health, a paradigm shift is required.

    However, Bessel Van Der Kolk describes in a recent work quoted by Kearney how mainstream medicine ‘is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs, [that is] by such basic activities as breathing moving and touching … is rarely considered.’[iii]

    For any shift to occur it will be necessary to confront the entrenched financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry that profits from the current model. A revealing question was posed at a medical conference in 2018 by a Goldman Sachs executive: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

    This issue could become one of the most important political questions of our time, and may lead to political realignments in the wake of a pandemic that has changed our lives.

    Featured Image: A member of the Peruvian Army with a police dog enforcing curfew on 31 March 2020.

    [i] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, New Haven/

    [ii] Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p. xvii

    [iii] Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, New York, Penguin, 2015, p.38.

  • Sunnyvale: Eviction on Prussia Street

    Who Protects Landlords?

    It was about one in the afternoon by the time I reached 23 Prussia street. Earlier in the day I had received a group text saying: ‘Illegal eviction, Help Needed’!

    By then a human wall had formed outside the front door to Sunnyvale and the mood was upbeat. I was told the police had tried to break up the crowd but failed miserably. Instead some of them had been absorbed into the crowd, swamped by it. Now clinging to the wall, under the heat of both sun and crowd, they were sweating hard.

    ‘Illegal eviction’, cried a voice from the crowd.  A cheer rang out.

    Another voice called out, this time singing: ‘Who protects landlords’?

    ‘GARDS PROTECT LANDLORDS’, the crowd sang back.

    Who protects landlords?

    GARDS PROTECT LANDLORDS!

    As the singing continued, I asked around to find out what had happened. Everybody was telling the same story.

    Morning Raid

    When they came, they came spitting flame, vitriol, and all sorts of hatred. No eviction notice for this one; no ‘please-fuck-off’ letter through the door; no legal nicities this time. Just a dozen thugs or so, swinging two-by-fours and crowbars: aiming for window and skull.

    The sun had not yet risen when they arrived, cutting power in the dark, before stealthily scaling the back wall. Thieves in the night, and bailiffs come dawn – bollocks to the lot.

    Sent by Paschal Donohoe’s former ministerial driver and Fine Gael constituency treasurer Martin Sadlier of the McGrath Group, these men were ‘just doing their job’. Yanking folk outta their homes and destroying whatever remained. It’s nothing new. The same job has been done for centuries.

    After finishing with the residents and cutting the power, they had gone to work on the roofs, walls and plumbing. Making certain there was nothing left of the homes that were there before – sure it’s nice work if you can get it.

    A Sudden Melee

    In front of me a Garda screams frantically, ‘Get back, GET BACK’!  Meanwhile other Gardaí are picking people up and throwing them aside. ‘Get off me, a young man screams, GET THE FUCK OFF ME!’

    At that point I felt confused, as until then things had been relatively calm. The Gardaí had been allowed to get by the human barricade at the front door, which had by then moved in front of the back entrance.

    The Gardaí had merely been observing until that point, standing around in groups of two and three. But I could see something was afoot, when they all clustered around the Garda who seemed to be in charge. After he gave the word, all eighteen of them turned back towards the crowd and started forcefully breaking it up.

    ‘GET BACK’, the Gardaí screamed, shoving people out of their way, ‘GET BACK’!

    ‘I’m just here to make sure nobody gets hurt’, responded a man that had just been shoved off his feet by the incandescent Gard.

    ‘Get, Back,’ said the Gard, ‘nobody’s gonna get hurt’, he says.

    ‘I don’t know about that,’ said the man, brushing himself off, and gesturing to the surrounding melee.  ‘Yous have a reputation for reefing people out of it and breaking their arms. Know what I mean’?

    State Protection

    I was still trying to figure out why the Gardaí only decided at that point to break the crowd up. Then I noticed the back gate had been opened, and realised they were clearing a path; which hit me like a punch I should’ve seen coming. Instead I had walked straight into a door.

    The Gardaí weren’t there to keep the peace, but to seize a landlord’s property. McGrath’s security men must have been getting hungry. I figured they were allowing the Gardaí take charge, knowing they had done their work for the day. Having smashed up the premises, they were now ready to leave.

    On cue, two white builders’ vans rolled out, full up with them, state protection on either side, as Gardaí pushed back the throng of protesters trying to stop the vans from leaving.

    Hard questions to answer

    Transcript:

    Yous assist evictions, know what I mean kicking people out of their homes, is that why you joined the Guards?  

    It’s a hard question to answer but that’s the truth isn’t it?

    Illegal evictions, with thugs, smashing people up and all. Like I just think it’s tragic,know what I mean? And I think you do too, and you keep the mask up and you keep your arms crossed and you tuck them into your vest. Trying to keep up the facade that you don’t care… I just think it’s tragic.  And very easily you could have been in the same situation these people are in where they were without a home. Now they’re gettin reefed out of it… easily could’ve been any of yous.  

    It’s sad, you have jobs and you need your jobs to live.  But… I don’t think you thought this was what being in the Guards was gonna be. I mean you probably thought you were gonna be helping I’m sure, but you’re clearly not doing a service to the community. You’re doing a service to landlords and people who have been making millions and billions out of this crisis that we’ve been in for the last ten, fifteen, twenty years!  All you’re doing is helping that.

    You can’t actually justify it, so you keep your mouth shut. You know back in the day, like a hundred years ago? When people were brought in to help evictions, they were socially ostracised. Know why? They were betraying their people, and everyone knew it. You’re working people right? Well, you’re betraying other working people. It’s as simple as that!

    Community 

    Once McGrath’s men were safely escorted off the premises the Gardaí also took their leave.  Their job was done. To take action against any illegal eviction that may have occurred was apparently not under their remit. They were there to protect the safety of the men who had reefed people out of their beds in the dark and thrown them out on the street. To protect McGrath’s men, who had smashed up a home out of spite.

    Once they left the residents of Sunnyvale re-entered their now broken home. Oil had been thrown over all the surfaces, walls had been smashed, support beams destroyed … an horrific scene to behold. Nonetheless they persevered and began to clean up the mess. A community clean up was organised and the long road to recovery began. Of course, without resources it’s not an easy road to walk.

    People sat around a fire that night talking over the day’s happenings. I didn’t make it myself, but imagine it felt good, despite all the shit.

  • The Empty Unconscious

    Banality is the byword of mass consumerism

    There’s a piece of public art that for a year or more languished on the edges of Union Square in Manhattan, before moving to a more innocuous location in Midtown.

    It’s a piece of bronze and laser cut steel in the form of a thick-waisted businessman, peering up into the sky. The statue, by Jim Rennert, is called, “Think Big.” This rotund figure struck me as a bizarre but predictable contrast with Union Square itself, site of labor protests, political demonstrations, and various working class events over the past century and a half.

    Then, on its cusp, a fattened, besuited, becalmed, moronic middle-manager stands, gazing into the clouds wonderingly. The figure itself looks like the Everyman of modern capital, depicted in the altruistic framing of business propaganda: a harmless, innocent, well-intentioned, exceedingly milquetoast middle-aged man of the people who does his earnest best to help his genteel corporation make a tidy profit, and drawing his modest share of the revenues to support his family. What could be wrong with that?

    Aside from the stomach-churning inanity of it, the statue has elided every conceivable aspect of its form that might imply or evince the raging class war between workers and suit-wearing corporate servants, themselves alighted like parasites on the broad husk of the Big Capital. A class war that is blood-soaked and pitiless.

    Yet our statue goes to great lengths to present the antithesis: the anodyne complacency of the humming mid-century office space, a hive of drones doing their daily duty. It is truly nondenominational, reflecting the most catholic of images, the most generic.

    “Think Big is a sculpture that serves to inspire everyone who works hard every day to achieve their dreams and goals. The towering businessman gazes upward at the Manhattan skyline, contemplating the possibilities that lay within his vast surroundings and reminding us that if we “think big” any dream is attainable.” – jimrennert.com

    Ersatz Replica

    Philosopher and aphorist E.M. Cioran once wrote that, “Existing is plagiarism.” If to be is to simply be an ersatz replica of the palatable, then why exist, either as individual, artist, or work of ‘art’? Nobody has asked Rennert.

    The statue, the name of which is like much modern advertising – quite clearly it is the first name that entered the brain of the artist (or advertiser, as the case may be). Thinking big, as it were, entails thinking big on behalf of the corporation for which you work; the ideas are not truly your own; the mission of the business is not your mission (unless you internalize it); and the life trajectory, even, is one set by the whim of the corporate market to which you sell your labor.

    Rather differently, the labor strikes and protests that once occurred in this space, were fuelled by men and women fighting to have all of the things elided by the statue, shaved away by the sculptor’s judicious hand: your own mission; your own ideas; your own life and career trajectory. Thus, Herbert Marcuse wrote: ‘Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties, but work in alienation.’

    How well the Think Big man resembles this perception: a drone, like others in appearance and wardrobe and function, alienated from his own desires, subordinated to those of a faceless overlord of industry. As a representation of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), it is equally apt, as that class sits as a bourgeois buffer between elitism and populism, between a secular aristocracy and the abject proletariat, both classes growing exponentially so that the metaphorical abyss widens in two senses: vertically and horizontally.

    This bourgeois buffer provides an aesthetic disguise for the dirty business of capitalism. They are not the sweat-drenched coltan miners in the Congo, but the svelte marketers who ply the ether with iPhone ads. His hard edges have been sanded down; he is perfectly polished, nonthreatening, inoffensively bland.

    Eugene V. Debs five times candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.

    Virtue Hoarders

    In her book Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu historicizes this class. As the Socialist Left in America was progressively destroyed by the public relations efforts of big business, the haute bourgeoisie sided with capital. She writes:

    When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised. The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable.

    She describes them as ‘salaried mental workers,’ including doctors, lawyers, advertising managers, IT professionals, and bank managers who reproduce the status quo, having abandoned political radicalism in favor of cultural wars and careerism.

    This is the buffer class, idealized in the sanitized vision of Think Big. Yet Think Big betrays the idea of simple reproduction, revealing the compulsion of neoliberalism to shave cost to stave a falling rate of profit. As Liu puts it:

    In the United States, generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility. Liberals have sat by while finance capital and corporate interests gutted the public treasury.

    Image: © Constantino Idini.

    Delirium

    E.M. Cioran says Western societies are beholden to – fatally obsessed with – technology, innovation, and the drive of capitalism for rapid obsoletion, and the process of ceaseless enhancement and replacement. He says they are in a state of ‘delirium,’ but adds (in Drawn and Quartered) that this kind of breathless preoccupation with novelty is itself relatively new in history:

    Archaic societies have lasted so long because they know nothing of the desire to innovate, to grovel before ever-new simulacra. If you change images with each generation, you cannot anticipate historical longevity. Classical Greece and modern Europe typify civilizations stricken by a precocious death, following a greed for metamorphosis and an excessive consumption of gods, and of the surrogates for gods. Ancient China and Egypt wallowed for millennia in a magnificent sclerosis. As did African societies, before contact with the West.

    Given that societies are anchored in historical circumstance, they are subject to the same iron law of all civilizations, that they will eventually ‘sag and settle’ as the initial dynamism dies. How much more likely in a society built on an idée fixe, a fetishistic mania.

    And yet – small consolation for those whose lives are on a far faster downward trajectory than civilization itself.

    Hence the siren call of rebellion will continue to outline itself precisely against this insipid, pulseless figure paradoxically anchored at the center of a monomaniacal society. A society the signature of which is the fixity of its preoccupation with profit – and the consumption that enables it.

    U.S. President Donald Trump displays the signed Executive Order for the Establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on May 11, 2017.

    The American Dream and Authenticity

    This cultural underbelly outlined above is eviscerated not just by the corporate art we are confronted with, but by the modern narrative of the American Dream™ ; this statue is just a recent embodiment of it.

    Anyone, color and creed aside, through their efforts and ingenuity, can do or be anything they wish to be. No material circumstances obtain in their pursuit of happiness. Class is a byword of another era, trampled underfoot by the ascent of free-market capitalism, which brooks no discriminatory practice in its market-rendered even-playing field.

    As any sentient being can observe, this is a historical fiction, a deceit reproduced daily through the channels of mass media and its advertising, entertainment, and news content, all of which is owned and operated by elite capital and managed by its flyblown class of sycophants.

    Essayist and playwright John Steppling gets at much the same thing in his book Aesthetic Resistance And Dis-Interest (2016). He writes, in the context of the dissolution of art as an anchor of culture, of the loss of art’s radical conscience in favor of corporate cliche.

    Steppling would despise the ‘Think Big’ statue. Its banality is that of a Jeff Koons work, the more celebrated the less memorable. He argues that mass electronic screen culture has destroyed something critical in the collective consciousness, namely the space for authentic art.

    He also notes that art is radical insofar as it refuses to adopt particular meanings, just as space is forever unyoked to purpose, yet radically ratifies none, and is the necessary background to all purpose.

    He quotes Robert Kullot-Kentor, biographer of Theodor Adorno, ‘Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society…’ As Steppling later adds, ‘It’s purposelessness is its radical expression.’

    And again: ‘Art is self destructive. It is guided by impulses that are anti-social, but only insofar as they question the status quo, because the status quo cannot survive history or memory.’

    What artists like Rennet and Koons produce is effortlessly mainstream; it doesn’t challenge the status quo but rather reifies it. It is therefore not art. There is no question posed by the skygazing statue, no threat emerges. It is the reproduction of the placid mind of endless consumption, of ceaseless salesmanship, the mind of the individual cog in a system that it neither sees nor questions. Deification of the quotidian.

    Steppling says the clue to the decay of society is the sense that culture is themed by ‘the inauthentic and counterfeit.’

    That sensibility, that sinking feeling, for me, is most evident in the hypocrisy of modern advertising. Ads relentlessly tell us they are making commodities to make our lives better – that is their mission and purpose. Yet that is a half-truth at best, a full-blown deceit on a bad day.

    Products are produced for profit, first and foremost. They are made to solve the sometimes real but largely artificial needs of consumers only insofar as they must. The initial aim of the product line is the MVP, or Minimally Viable Product.

    This is the industry jargon for a commodity that meets the minimum threshold for sale-ability. Beyond that – innovations that improve the product – are seen as incurred costs, unnecessary but sometimes preferable if the cost-benefit analysis predicts higher profits with higher quality. This corrosive smile that fronts modern culture is the clue to the erosion of meaning but also somehow echoes the voice of the Cassandra exposing its desiccated spirit, having submitted itself to the hegemonic ideal, represented by the bland everyman that serves none but the needs of blind profit.

    Mass Infantilism

    Alongside the denuded character of the Think Big skygazer – alongside the erasure of individuality, i.e., authenticity, in its homogeneity – is its infantile sensibility; yes, the only quality it truly has.

    Its puffy childlike hands loose at its side; its rounded babyface; its gaze more wondrous than critical. Steppling says the infantile is a product of capitalist culture.

    To paraphrase: the Oedipal narrative of the child overcoming his father as a path to self-actualization is denied by modern neoliberal society.

    Neoliberalism denies meaningful work in a race to the bottom rungs of servitude. It denies meaningful leisure as labor is stripped evermore of its rightful surplus, no small measure of that margin being lost time. And it ultimately leaves in its infectious wake a featureless figure, bereft of purpose and means, a man unable to exceed or even succeed the father.

    In such a state, the man opts for a permanent infantilism. Hence our recidivist culture that seems to drag us back, back, back toward childhood, finally into the warmth of the womb, the original safe space, protected by ignorance just as ignorance is unconscious bliss.

    Benjamin Barber was an earlier prophet of our devolution. His seminal work Consumed detailed the ways in which commodity culture manufactures artificial needs beyond the realm of actual needs, an entirely predictable eventuality given the desperation of capital to continuously expand the marketplace of consumption.

    Industry compels consumers to confuse needs with wants and then promises happiness through the instant gratification of that wanting. As one reviewer astutely noted, Barber, ‘…ably identified many of the contributing factors, not the least of which are our collective cultural boredom and our naive but doomed expectations of fulfillment via uncontrolled acquisition.’

    The consequence of unlimited choice and acquisition is an infantile impatience with what one has as one is perpetually enthralled by novelty, the tradition-destroying feature Cioran lamented.

    We see this trend everywhere. Often in Hollywood, which has found a stupendous revenue stream in the marketing of superhero comics to adults. Once, Superman was a movie for kids; now it is a movie for adults who have yet to put away childish things. Which is all of us.

    As Steppling notes, the superhero story is the dream of childish omnipotence, a kind of puerile fantasy that adults once shed by the time they exited their teens. Now the happy myth persists well into adulthood. Its Manichean quality is a mirror of the imperial narratives of the state: one side is all good and the other all bad.

    This reductive dichotomy is the cornerstone of modern consumer narratives, whether in entertainment or news, and has been instantiated in the programming strategies of major media entities.

    Another feature of the infantile is what Stuart Jeffries alludes to in Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), his biography of the Frankfurt School. Namely, the infantile nature of modern man as his culture radicalizes identity politics by the insistence that its demands be instantaneously gratified, less an urgency than an hysteria. What more emblematic aspect of childhood than the baby that screams when denied what it wants?

    But we see it in advertising, especially, and in general marketing. What does a professional basketball franchise ask its roster of players when interviewing them for promotion? [Giggling] What would your superpower be (if you could have a superpower)? As game show music plays in the background.

    Likewise in broadcast advertising. A bank commercial shows a middle-aged father dancing around in a virtual reality headset while his more mature daughter plays on her mobile. Faces of consumers are increasingly banal in disposition, blank gazes, wide innocent eyes, awaiting information from the sales shill embedded in the commercial, the messiah of commerce. In the idealized playground of consumerism, modern man is a tabula rasa at 35, eyes awaiting the advent of the next shiny distraction.

    If the endless spectacle of mathematically correct diversity casting is defended as reflecting the social ideal, and hence instructive, what is the repetition of the unsophisticated and simpleminded consumer in ads but an admonition?

    Steppling interestingly notes that the infant mindset in adults feels incomplete, perhaps through its Oedipal failure to assert its worth and power. As such it must deny many facets of reality that might undermine its fragile psyche.

    It must turn away from the wars raging, the coming barbarities narrated by arbiters of power, the afterthought that is endemic poverty and illness. We must turn to safer, more simplistic answers and the narratives that attempt to legitimate them; the ones espoused by the cult of decrepit professional liberalism, window-dresser of society’s distemper, pollyanna in purgatory, to whom we light a votive every day at dusk.

    What Lies Beneath: Sometimes Nothing

    As an art theorist, Steppling notes a simple dichotomy in art that applies more broadly: good art, or art, shows an artificial reality and then shows the actuality beneath it; bad art, or non art, just show the artificial reality. In this sense, most broadcast advertising is bad art, or non art. It normalizes artificiality, the uncritical acceptance of every sales pitch, taking the pitch at face value.

    This is reflected in bourgeoisie art criticism, which seems to again and again strip art of its system critique and either reinterpret it as a celebration of industry or a critique of individual foibles within a benign landscape of earnest employee/consumers.

    Hence the narrative of history is penned not by the victors but by their dutiful scribes, the professional parasitic class who earn their livelihood through sycophancy and servitude. In service to the status quo.

    Fold your hands behind your back and think big—on their behalf. Your passage through will be as frictionless as first class air travel. But say bon voyage to your dreams. This is inimical to the artist. Because art undermines. Art challenges. Art unsettles. There is no safe space in art. No diversity calculus. No appeasement of the herd.

    We are thus left with a modern culture which no longer understands the term ‘sell-out’, which sees brand partnerships as a path to social uplift, not recognizing the inherent contradiction of allying with the perpetrator of inequity in order to rectify inequity. The irony is lost on us because there is no irony. The artificial is all. Irony would require a second perspective. In the marketplace of consensus, no second opinions exist.

    Feature Image: © Constantino Idini

    Jason Hirthler is a writer, media critic, and veteran of the digital media industry. He has published in a variety of progressive publications including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice and The Hampton Institute.

  • Ciarán O’Rourke: Breaking the Cycle

    One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke. The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.

    The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:

    Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.

    In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal. 

    You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying. 

    This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.

    Hole in the Wall Blues

    Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book. 

    In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.

    The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.

    It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”. 

    In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.

    Satisfying Punch

    Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019. 

    What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:

    The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias

    I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials. 

    Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.

    With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.

    Critique

    One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.

    These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.

    My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.

    For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.

    Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetry will gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.

    One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net