In the final part of his essay on the joys and woes of being an Irish Manchester City fan, Desmond Traynor delves into psychological and emotional reasons for sustaining sporting allegiances, through thick and thin.
Even if nothing in the foregoing fact-based rant convinces City-sceptics, it is not the main plank of my justification for my continuing City fandom. Facts don’t care about your feelings; but, equally, feelings don’t care about the facts. Support for City, or any sporting association, is an unchanging and unchallengeable tribal loyalty – it is instinctual. Economics is science, albeit it a dismal one – it aspires to rationality. These impulses speak to very different parts of our nature as human beings. Despite the discipline designation ‘Political Science’, politics is where instinct and reason try to intersect – and usually fail. The personal is political; but the political is also personal. My love for City is emotional – like the feelings of fans of any other sports club – and I will present the facts to suit my feelings as much as they do, because I love every single bedbug in the mattress I’ve chosen to lie on as much as they love whatever bloodsuckers are infesting theirs.
My hero Michel de Montaigne wrote: ‘Mistrust a man who takes games too seriously; it means he doesn’t take life seriously enough.’ Perhaps this is true. But, then, it means there are an awful lot of people (and not only men) who don’t take life seriously enough – myself included. Noam Chomsky goes further in his criticism of sport. In one interview in his book Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1988), the linguist and social commentator asserted that sport is one of the means by which capitalist ‘special interests’ that dominate government control public opinion, providing a distraction from more important and meaningful matters, after the manner of Roman ‘Bread and Circuses’ (food and entertainment) to mollify the unwashed masses. However, it is worth noting that Chomsky’s analysis was formulated before English football, as the late lynchpin of Manchester musical legends The Fall and lifelong City fan, Mark E. Smith, put it, ‘went middle class’, with all-seater stadiums replacing the terraces of old because of health and safety concerns following several crowd disasters at matches, the formation of the Premiership to replace the League and the Champions League to replace the European Cup, and the sale of television rights to the highest bidder (predominantly Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV) – all accompanied by the concomitant rise in ticket prices to the exorbitant levels of today. What was once a boozy day out for a bunch of lads is now fireside family entertainment, or an adventure in corporate hospitality. Granted, many of those enjoying the Thatcherite dream of ‘everyone his own home-owning, sole-trading, small business operating entrepreneur’ middle-class heaven may have sprung from working-class backgrounds, but they could have chosen to spend their new found disposable income elsewhere.
Besides which, such reductive critiques ignore the sublimatory social functions of sport. After all, battling each other on a soccer pitch, even in a particularly dirty game, is better than waging all-out war between countries. For example, for many nationals of both nations, England’s 4-2 victory over West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final signalled the real end of the Second World War. (It doesn’t always work, of course: football as metaphor for war can occasionally turn into actual war. As every schoolboy knows, the immediate casus belli for the so-called 1969 ‘Soccer War’ between El Salvador and Honduras was the two-legged World Cup qualifier and subsequent play-off the two countries played against each other, in preparation of the 1970 World Cup hosted by Mexico. But, in truth, longstanding tensions already existed between these two small and very poor Central American countries. For more than a century they had been accumulating reasons to distrust one another. Each had always served as the magical explanation for the other’s problems. Hondurans have no work? Because Salvadorans come and take their jobs. Salvadorans are hungry? Because Hondurans mistreat them. Both countries believed their neighbour was the enemy, and the relentless military dictatorships of each, forged at a U.S. factory called the School of the Americas, did all they could to perpetuate the error. El Salvador suffered about 900 mostly civilian dead. Honduras lost 250 combat troops and over 2,000 civilians during the four-day war.) Here, I cannot help but succumb to the temptation to quote one of former Liverpool manager (from 1959 to 1974), the late, great Bill Shankly’s most famous pronouncements: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’
Football is a serious business, then, for many. But what differentiates City fans from those of sundry other clubs, in my opinion, is that we retain an ability to see the funny side, to laugh at ourselves. Apart from their ubiquity, my other chief gripe against supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United is their ingrained sense of entitlement. They take it very seriously. Despite City’s accumulating successes over the past ten years, I cannot as yet detect the slightest note of triumphalism among our fanbase. Sure, we like to indulge in ‘the bants’ (as it is abbreviated) as much as the next person with a strong affiliation, a practice posh people call ‘schadenfreude’ but which is known locally by the more colloquial term ‘slagging’. While this practice can degenerate into mere trolling, that is largely a matter of perspective, as to how seriously one takes the banter. Where is the line, and when does it get crossed? Irish practitioners of the two major English footballing religions seem especially quick to take offence. But then, they are fundamentalists, who follow the one true faith. If you are looking for an illustration of real, blatant, vicious trolling, there used to be a banner United fans would unfurl across the Stretford End at Old Trafford for every single home match, in the form of a mock digital clock, a wind-up to commemorate the number of years their cross-town neighbours – us – had not won a trophy. This ticking Date/Time reminder was finally retired in 2011, with the notch stuck between 34 and 35, after we lifted the FA Cup v Stoke.
Manchester City supporters invade the pitch following their 2011–12 Premier League title victory.
Underhand Spying
Worse than trolling was stealthy, underhand spying, as exemplified by Liverpool FC employees allegedly hacking into City’s scouting platform in 2013, to gain access to its database, resulting in an out-of-court settlement of £1m being paid by Liverpool to Manchester City – without any admission of guilt. Worse than that again was the attack by Liverpool supporters on the Manchester City team coach in 2018 (‘Let’s show them what money can’t buy’ ran the rabble-rousing rallying cry on their social media groups) as it made its way to Anfield for the Champions League quarter final first leg. Bottles, coins, flares and cans were thrown by home fans, rendering the City bus ‘unusable’ for the return journey. All the while the Liverpool Metropolitan Constabulary – who publicised the route the bus would take in advance – were noticeably uninterested in intervening in any potential standoff between supporters of either club, or in bringing any of the perpetrators of this criminal activity to justice. Liverpool FA were subsequently fined a paltry £20,000 by UEFA on foot of the incident.
City was, and is, a club with a heart and a sense of humour, which is often turned on itself for good measure. They say we have ‘no history’. But every football club in existence has a history, from Grimsby Town to Leyton Orient to Wycombe Wanderers to your local GAA Under-15s squad. What they really mean is, ‘you have no history of winning big, important competitions’ – an approach curiously akin to the ‘great men’ methodology of historiography. Yet, as outlined above, even that is not true either, as we have won League titles and Cups in the past. As with most history, it all depends on how far back you want to go. Granted, no matter how far into the distant past you care to venture, until recently we’ve had no history in the European Cup/Champions League, as they are constantly fond of reminding us. So what? Neither have Arsenal or Spurs or Newcastle United. Nor Grimsby.
We are an eccentric club, to be sure, with a neat line in self-deprecation – something I didn’t know when I became a devotee aged seven, but which I find is congruent with my personality now. Helen Turner, a flower-seller outside Manchester Royal Infirmary, would sit in the front rows of the North Stand and offer Joe Corrigan a sprig of lucky heather before every game, and then thunder her bell every time City won a corner. In 1978 the club bought Kaziu Deyna, the Polish World Cup captain, for a consignment of toasters and fridges, a deal arranged by electrical goods magnate and megalomaniac chairman Peter Swales. Someone once stumbled onto the away terrace at West Brom with an inflatable banana and, within weeks, there were thousands of them at every game, joined by paddling pools, crocodiles and fried eggs. (Such playthings have long since been banned by the F.A. as a health & safety hazard. It’s not the same in an all-seater stadium anyway.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5RtnXcQ_lw
Poznan
Then there is our adoption of the Poznan, a celebratory dance which involves supporters turning their backs to the pitch, linking arms and jumping up and down while singing favourite songs or chanting in unison. It all began in 2010, when City were playing in the same Europa League group as Polish side Lech Poznan, who came to the City of Manchester Stadium on October 21st of that year. Throughout the game the Poznan fans impressed with their noise, organisation and creativity. While City fans were initially unimpressed with the backs-turned bounce, they were gradually won over and soon appropriated it as a mark of respect. The Poznan supporters are still widely thought to be among the best away fans ever to have visited Eastlands. We acknowledge the debt by retaining the name. Now we ‘break out the Poznan’ when we score, or simply when we are dominating play. The explanation – if one is needed – seems to be that it is done in order to taunt the opposing side, as much as to say, ‘Our team is so good that we don’t even need to watch what is happening: we know we’ll win.’
If more evidence is needed that nothing is quite as appealing to City fans as the irreverent and the absurd, consider some of our oldest terrace chants. For example, ‘We never win at home and we never win away/We lost last week and we lost today/We don’t give a fuck/’Cos we’re all pissed up/MCFC OK’ did sterling service when we were ‘down among the dead men’. Another song of denial, Camusian in its sense of existential dread, was, ‘We are not, we’re not really here/We are not, we’re not really here/Just like the fans of the Invisible man/We’re not really here’ (sung to the tune of ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’). Various myths circulate about the origin of this one. Some say it began at Luton Town in the 1980s, when away fans were banned, while others claim it was a reaction to media claims that City had no fans. Another story is that the City fans who defied the ban on away fans at Millwall’s notorious Den began singing it after managing to sneak into the ground – although it is unlikely anyone who did that would survive to tell the tale. At first it was a fitting reflection on the woes and misfortune of the old City, a big club that found itself wallowing in the murky depths of English football. But in the last ten years it has metamorphosed into an ode to hope and joy, an expression of incredulity at the transformation wrought at the club by Sheikh Mansour’s takeover. Again, equally an expression of chronic insecurity as an affirmation of fragile or grounded identity, there is, ‘I’m City till I die/I’m City till I die/I know I am/I’m sure I am/I’m City till I die.’ Like a character from Samuel Beckett’s work, the verbal reiteration might just make it true, even if you’re not so sure. Then there is our official club anthem, the Rodgers and Hart standard, ‘Blue Moon’. With its narrative trajectory over three short verses and a bridge from the yearning loneliness of searching for ‘Someone I really could care for’ to finding ‘The only one my arms will hold’ and the Blue Moon turning to gold, it would seem perfectly to encapsulate City’s recent journey – although it was adopted as long ago as 1989. The fact that the first verse is sung as a slow-tempo forlorn ballad and the second verse speeded up to the breakneck pace of hardcore punk adds to the sense that it represents a reversal of fortunes.
Finally, mention must be made of that recurring two-word phrase which has become a byword among City fans for the club’s travails: ‘Typical Citeh’. The Urban Dictionary sums it up well: ‘When Manchester City somehow mess up an easily winnable situation and everyone is disappointed but not surprised.’ We have never done it the easy way. Even the Agüero moment was ‘Typical Citeh’ after a fashion, although on that occasion we just about managed to win. It may have less currency now, yet it is part of the fabric of Manchester City, because it is living and breathing in every single one of the fans who can remember anything before 2010.
Sadly, there is a feeling that, mixed in with all this hilarity, it was a product of a time when City had become a joke team. Fans of other clubs generally warmed to us, but there was a sense in which they were just patronising the lovable-losers. We were told we had a great sense of humour – a humour that was used, as so much humour is, to hide massive hurt – but secretly they were laughing at us, not with us. Well, no one is laughing now. Except City fans. They liked us when we were struggling. They don’t like us now that we are strong.
Dublin Branch
I have been a member of the Manchester City Supporters Club – Dublin Branch since 2011. Prior to that, I had thought I was ‘the only City fan in the village’. But the branch, founded in 1975, currently has 104 members, and there are other branches all over the country. A quick Google search helped me to unearth it – social media is useful for something. We meet every three weeks on a Monday evening in an upstairs room in a city centre pub. Apart from the social interaction, the branch is mainly a focal point for topping up one’s account and ordering match tickets – although, post-Covid, these functions have gradually shifted online. We travel to matches together, organise trips and social outings, yak about City. I enjoy the comradery. It is an egalitarian freemasonry – guys help relative strangers out, with lifts, loans, mortgages, that sort of thing, like any other mutual benefit society – with a conducive absence of petty politicking, where the only qualification for acceptance when you walk through the door is that you support City. (Liverpool-loving Declan Lynch is still welcome to visit, if only for research purposes.) You meet people from all walks of life, whom you might never encounter elsewhere. The brain surgeon mingles with the binman, the senior civil servant with the rank-and-file bank or post office clerk. Plus we have your usual quota of cops and taxi-drivers, your ex-cops who are now tax-drivers, or freelance ‘security consultants’. We have an accountant, a chef, and a postman (who used to be a car salesman). We even have déclassé, would-be literary intellectuals like myself. We are prepared for every eventuality.
My feeling of welcome and at-homeness in the Supporters Club is all the more noteworthy because I am not, and have never been, a great joiner. Also, I tend to lack a competitive spirit. (Maybe I was more driven, once upon a time, but I can’t remember.) But I admire it in others – at least when there is something tangible at stake, be it as arbitrary as club affiliation, national pride, even individual will. As an inveterate observer, I am fascinated by people of action and ambition, probably because they seem to be animated by a force that I do not possess.
In Crowds and Power (1960) Elias Canetti explored the recurring battle between individuality and the urge to lose ourselves in crowds. He writes:
A crowd isn’t just a large number of people – it’s a mass in which members identify with one another. When that happens, people enter into something that’s greater than the sum of their individual parts: a crowd. In that moment, there’s a sense of equality. Every member enjoys the same standing, regardless of previous differences.
Attendees at football matches and music concerts are more than familiar with this feeling. It is the same impulse which motives religious people to undertake pilgrimage so they can gather to be present at Mass offered by the Pope in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, or to go on Hajj so they can circle the Kaaba in the Al-Masjid Al-Haram Mosque in Mecca counter-clockwise seven times, in both cases blending in and losing themselves in the throng of their fellow faithful. Some may even be aware of the great paradox at the heart of such gatherings: how many times have we heard popular singers on stage in a large auditorium or stadium exhorting tens of thousands of their hysterical fans to ‘embrace their individuality’ and ‘just be themselves’? Canetti continues:
Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd… Each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.
Musicians, too, are cognisant of this transcendent feeling – not only in witnessing the euphoria of the audience, but also in the experience of playing with their peers. It may not happen often, but occasionally all egos dissolve in the performance of a piece, as it comes to seem that the music is playing itself rather than being executed by each individual participant. As with team sport when enacted with unselfconscious fluidity, it becomes a synergistic endeavour where everyone contributes to achieve something which is not only beyond what they could produce by themselves, but much more than what the ensemble could be expected – on paper – to realise as a functionally competent unit. Alas, this form of collaborative creative magic is one to which solitary writers are not privy.
And so, I can understand the desire to gather, to club together, to compete, and to win (if only voyeuristically and vicariously) – even if, for me, it is largely confined to my support for a football club I was attracted to before I could rationalise my attraction to it. What I share with my fellow countrymen and women who are fans of Liverpool and Manchester United, and any other instance of the Not-Manchester City, is not only our common humanity, but the fact that we all have a passion. They have just chosen different – if more popular – sides in the pursuit of the same goal: the ecstasy of being part of a winning crowd.
We are all party to the truth of group sport: when the tedium vitae hits, even when you think you’ve lost everything, even when you have lost everything, when you are at the lowest of your lows (as well as the highest of your highs) there is always your team, and your fellow supporters. As a means of developing a social network, and sometimes life-long friendships, it seems relatively benign. Even if, at least for the time being, my team is magic and yours is rubbish, or not as good as ours. In Ireland, you may be many, and we are few. But I realise that all I am really saying here is that, due to a penchant for independent thinking, my group affiliation in this land is more uncommon and less of a legion than your group of choice – and therefore partakes of the cachet that derives from esoteric exclusivity. My support betokens more rugged individualism than yours, which is, or was – relatively speaking – an easier route to glory. You just want to be on the side that’s winning, and for a long time you were. So, deep down, did we; and now, surprisingly, we are.
So there: I have removed my fig leaf, transformed it into an olive branch, and am offering it to all of you now. Let us practice peaceful coexistence.
All empires crumble. For my part, I hope City’s reign lasts for a thousand years. It won’t, of course. Is there any need to quote Shelley here?
And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
But should City someday in the not so distant future wind up back in the Championship, or worse, League 1, stripped of every trophy we have won over the last decade, with all our star players hotfooting it to the exit doors for clubs where they can compete for top honours (and earn wages comparable to what they now rake in) – because we have been adjudged guilty of one or more of the infamous alleged 115 breaches of Financial Fair Play rules against us – I for one, and many others, will still be following them. To reiterate: I was there when we were shit. And I’ll be there again if we are shit again. Blood is thicker than principle when it comes to football. Your team is your team is your team, as much when it embarrasses or shames you as when it delights and gratifies you. How could I walk away from my team after all these years? Remember those words again, previously sung with shy ambivalence, now with full-throated force: ‘I’m City ’til I die/I’m City ’til I die/I know I am/I’m sure I am/I’m City ’Til I Die.’ And, who knows, maybe even after that.
And that is how I can be Red-as-they-come politically, but when it comes to football, ‘once a Blue, always a Blue.’
Desmond Traynor continues his analysis of the financial and political morality of top flight English soccer, and attempts several rebuttals of the frequently voiced criticisms of Manchester City’s current success.
That was the attack. Here is the defence – bearing in mind that attack is often the best means of defence. (The middle ground will be contested later.) Let’s talk about the filthy lucre first, before moving on to the human rights issues – although the two are surely not unrelated, and are in fact inextricably linked.
Regarding the lavish wealth, there is the glaringly obvious riposte to the criticisms outlined above that City’s accelerated spending was merely conducted in an effort to catch up with clubs which had previously always spent heavily. From this perspective, Financial Fair Play rules – as instituted by both the European governing body U.E.F.A., and the Football Association governing the domestic English Premier League – were introduced solely as a form of protectionism, under pressure from the then so-called ‘elite’ clubs who felt their positions at the top table were under threat. So, cordon off gains made, syphon off profits, pull up the drawbridge, and stop others following. But this circling-of-the-prestigious-wagons method was also the reason for the foundation of the Premier League itself in 1992 (replacing the old Division 1), and the Champions League too in the same year (supplanting the old European Cup). Both competitions came into being to prevent the threat of breakaway movements (‘super leagues’) by the crème de la crème clubs, and to maximise their bargaining positions when the contracts for television coverage came up for renewal. The counterargument to any aspersions cast at the motives for FFP goes that the already established clubs generate their own income, rather than depending on investment, but this line of thinking does not stand up to much scrutiny. FFP punishes spending, not debt, because this is the best mechanism for the elite clubs to ‘pull up the ladder’. Besides which, since when are business owners not allowed to pump personal funds into their own businesses to keep them afloat – even if they are throwing good money after bad? Few people complain about Jack Walker ‘buying’ the Premiership title for Blackburn Rovers in 1995 – but that was before FFP reared its questionable head. As for those who say that City signed up to FFP and must abide by it like everyone else, one could ask: what alternative did we, or anyone else, have? It was a gun to the head, if you wanted to keep competing.
There is a trope in circulation that the Premier League is becoming, or has become, about as competitive as the Bundesliga, where Bayern Munich have won the title every year since Jesus was a boy. This ‘Bundesligafication’ states that nobody can cope with City’s ‘high ceiling’ (if in fact there is a ceiling at all), since they can ‘spend what they like’. Generally, it’s just not fair, we are constantly told. While some arguments carry a little more weight than others, this is one that does not convince for a minute. Since a Jurgen Klopp-inspired Dortmund carried off the German title in 2011-12 (ironically the same month Mancini delivered City’s first Premier League win since the fateful year of 1968), Bayern have been champions in the Bundesliga every single year. That is eleven consecutive titles. In the same period in England, Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Leicester and City have finished first. City have won seven of the twelve titles on offer and, admittedly, five of the last six, giving critics the chance to say this is the fast-moving ossification process of the domestic game. But Liverpool enjoyed similar dominance in the ’70s and early ’80s and were feted for it, while United in the ’90s and noughties did the same and were similarly acclaimed. If comparisons with the Bundesliga are valid, then it is worth looking east for a minute. Klopp, after all, managed in the top echelons in Germany for many years and was a serious challenger for honours at Borussia Dortmund between 2008 and 2015. Dortmund collected two titles in his time there and also reached the Champions League final. However, the club also sold Mario Gotze, Robert Lewandowki and Matts Hummels to Bayern, which would roughly correspond to City’s Director of Football Txiki Begiristain descending upon Anfield Road and splashing out for Mo Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold. Those that tell us the Premier League is heading towards a closed shop may be right in a sense, but it has been on this trajectory since the mid-80s when what then constituted ‘the Big Five’ started their Machiavellian journey towards what we see today.
City have, on the whole, spent very wisely. Liverpool, United and Chelsea have spent massively for decades, but if anyone else dare flash the cash, they are ‘ruining football’. After City’s initial splurge to gain access to the higher echelons, the last five years have seen spending on players and wages broadly bottom out to meet that of their nearest competitors. The dreaded net spend puts City at the bottom of a league table currently being ‘won’ by neighbours United. Judicious spending has been the answer at the Etihad, not careless overspending. Whilst City avoided the car crashes of Sánchez, Maguire and Ronaldo, United piled in regardless. While City refused to pay over the odds for Kane and waited for Haaland, Liverpool shelled out nervously on Núñez. While City offloaded the inconsistent scoring exploits of Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus, they settled on Haaland to do the job. Maybe we should be asking how Liverpool, United and Chelsea can get their respective transfer policies so disastrously wrong and how City can more often than not get it right, nine times out of ten spending less. That City’s massive wealth has been put to better use than Liverpool’s massive wealth, and Chelsea’s massive wealth has been spent almost as willy nilly as Manchester United’s massive wealth, is neither City’s fault nor the dastardly work of a tilted playing field, but rather the application of dedicated professionals at the top of their game, on and off the Etihad pitch. If we consider budgets, all the sides in what currently constitutes the top six should be competing, and competing hard. Throw in the biggest spenders of the lot, Manchester United, and you have – potentially – as fascinating and thrilling a title race as those of the early 1970s that so many people now nostalgically eulogise. If City continue to be serial title winners the clamour of feedback noise will steadily increase to fever pitch. Money will surely be the ruination of the sport, we will hear. Perhaps it has already done untold damage, but the road to this bleak scenario can be traced way back to 1986, or 1992, not to the arrival of City in the game’s corridors of power in 2008; and the money ruining professional football is being spent on players who fail, not those who succeed. Besides all of which, what City are doing may be different in extent, but it is not different in kind. You either go along with the global monetisation of soccer, appalling as it surely is, or you don’t. But you can’t back out simply because another club suddenly has more money than you do.
Malcolm Glazer (1928-2014).
A Merchandise Club Based on ‘History’
Erstwhile United manager Louis van Gaal (they’ve had six since Sir Alex Fergusson retired in May 2013 – including one ‘interim’, plus two ‘caretakers’ – all dispensations ending in tears) surely had it right when he asserted that his former employers were a merchandise club based on ‘history’. The owners, the six Glazer children of the late Malcolm Glazer, who bought the club outright in 2005, do not care about what happens on the pitch – or only insofar as it might effect revenue. Given that the club’s only discernible (business rather than footballing) policy is one of recruiting tactically ill-fitting star-name players to wear their jerseys, resulting in shirt sales remaining a marketable money spinner, this is hardly surprising. But such short-sightedness has come home to roost. Real Manchester United supporters know this, which is why they resurrected the original United club Newton Heath as a breakaway protest against the club they follow being run into the ground. Already one sees fewer red United jerseys around Dublin, unless one is a regular frequenter of charity shops, their fans being too ashamed to parade them in public because of the ridicule they will invite. Most of the capital used by Glazer to purchase Manchester United came in the form of loans – rather than from his own funds – the majority of which were secured against the club’s assets in what is termed a ‘leveraged buyout’, incurring interest payments of over £60 million per annum. The remainder came in the form of payment-in-kind loans, which were later sold to hedge funds. It has been estimated that the Glazer buyout has cost the club more than £1 billion in interest and other expenses over the years. At the end of 2019, the club had a net debt of nearly £400 million.
All the while, United were lashing out exorbitant sums for players who failed to do the business on the field after they arrived at the Theatre of Dreams. The flops include a club-record £89m for Paul Pogba, £85.5m for Antony, £75m for Romelu Lukaku, £73m for Jadon Sancho, £59.7m for Angel Di Maria, £44.5m for Anthony Martial and £40m for Donny van de Beek. (See John Brewin’s ‘From Sánchez to Sancho: Manchester United’s Lost Boys in decade of waste’. TheGuardian, 6/10/2023). In fact, Manchester United have the highest transfer spend in world football since 2017, at £765m net. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who has just bought a 25% stake in the club for 1.3 billion, is eager to find out how the organisation has blown £1.4 billion in the transfer market since 2013, for such little return. Their trophy haul since they last won the League in that year, Fergusson’s last, is: one FA Cup in 2016; one Europa League in 2017; and two League/EFL Cups in 2017 and 2023 – but most importantly, no title.
When John Aldridge played for Liverpool in their heyday, every summer Liverpool would buy a couple of the best players around and pay what were, for the time, huge wages. Judging from his Sunday World columns, it seems Aldridge thinks this practice was okay then, but somehow not fair now. As for saying they could afford it because they were serial Champions, Liverpool were in fact on the brink of administration due to years of reckless spending and mismanagement, and were only rescued when Boston’s Fenway Sports Group purchased the club in 2010. Since then, they have not been shy about making record signings, which include: Alisson Becker (£65m from Roma in 2018) – then the most expensive goalkeeper in Premiership history; Virgil Van Dijk (£75m from Southampton, also in 2018) – then the most expensive defender in Premiership history; and Darwin Nuñez (£85.36m from Benfica in 2022) – the most expensive signing in the club’s history.
United and Liverpool fans complain about their respective owners – United’s about the debt and lack of investment in infrastructure like their increasingly dilapidated stadium, Very Old Trafford; Liverpool’s about perceived parsimony in the transfer market (only really in comparison with City’s funds) – and want them out, yet they decry City’s owners, who run the project very well, and not exclusively for the purpose of financial profit. It is enough to make you suspect that jealousy is the chief motive for their rabid dislike of City, rather than any sudden faux concern for fairness, equality, level playing pitches, or human rights. It would seem that the glib rejoinder frequently mumbled among City fans is correct: ‘they hate us ’cuz they ain’t us’.
Which brings us to the other main counterargument often voiced in opposition to City’s success: that there is a fundamental difference between clubs being owned by private individuals and companies (with finite resources), and those owned by a state (with infinite resources), especially when that state is using the club as a public relations exercise to camouflage its dodgy human rights record – a practice dubbed ‘sportswashing’. The flawed logic runs something like this: in a liberal democracy – such as the United States purports to be – private individuals are allowed to own private property, whereas in an elective monarchy like the U.A.E., theoretically the royal family owns everything. Therefore, private individuals in the United States are not directly responsible for the policies and actions of their government on the world stage, whereas the Abu Dhabi United Group (itself a private equity company and the official owners of Manchester City FC, which insists it is separate from the Abu Dhabi government – even if it is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, member of the Abu Dhabi Royal Family and Minister of Presidential Affairs for the U.A.E.) is directly responsible for all the policies and actions of its country. To me, this is merely the semantics of ownership. Does it mean that no tax-paying U.S. private citizen is ultimately responsible for any of their country’s misdeeds; or, indeed, that no U.S. citizen is above and beyond personal reproach? Conversely, does it implicate every U.A.E. national in responsibility for their country’s offences? Besides all of which, the resources of Abu Dhabi may be vast, but they are not infinite.
Construction workers at the Burj Dubai.
Human Rights Abuses
As to the human rights abuses themselves, they concern both the Emirates’ domestic and foreign policies. Internally, between 80 to 90 percent of the U.A.E.’s over nine million population consists of foreign nationals – most of whom are low-waged, semi-skilled workers from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East – so the country’s economy is heavily dependent on migrant workers.
According to Human Rights Watch, their wages are low, payments are made infrequently, and living, working and sanitary conditions are poor. Passports are routinely confiscated, either at the airport on arrival, or subsequently by the employers. The workers inevitably fall into situations of debt bondage and find themselves compelled to accept the terms and conditions imposed on them by contracts they signed without fully understanding them. This is particularly common among construction, domestic, and lower-level service workers. The U.A.E.’s labour laws exclude domestic workers from protections, and they face a range of abuses, from unpaid wages, confinement to the house, and workdays of up to twenty-one hours, to physical and sexual assault by employers. The ‘kafala’ sponsorship system ties migrant workers’ visas to their employers, preventing them from changing or leaving employers without permission. Those who do leave without permission face punishment for ‘absconding’, including fines, arrest, detention, and deportation, all without any due process guarantees. Many low-paid migrant workers are acutely vulnerable to forced labour. At the same time, Human Rights Watch also reports that ‘Scores of activists, academics, and lawyers are serving lengthy sentences in U.A.E. prisons, following unfair trials on vague and broad charges that violate their rights to free expression and association.’ Add to this laws which heavily discriminate against women and LGBT people, and you have what is regarded under western eyes as a toxic cocktail which should be roundly called out.
But, and it’s a big BUT… (to anyone who will take me to task here for the crime of ‘whataboutery’: 90% of philosophical discourse depends on ‘What about?’; the other 10% originates in ‘What if?’) …it can be argued that we in the West are in no position to throw stones, considering the glasshouses in which we live. Here are three examples, chosen relatively at random.
1) U.A.E. has many western accomplices. According to the Harvard International Review (29/07/2022): ‘Altrad, the French multinational construction company, is only one of the many Western establishments that seem to forget the laws and regulations of the countries they are based in once they start operations abroad in the UAE. Altrad is joined by New York University (NYU), Hilton, the Louvre, Guggenheim, and the British Museum in conducting alleged malpractice against migrant workers’. On this score, it might interest those occupying the high moral ground, especially Liverpool FC fans, to know that Fenway Sports Group’s third biggest shareholder RedBird are in business partnerships with Abu Dhabi.
2) In the Republic of Ireland, we operate a system of Direct Provision for asylum seekers who are waiting for the outcome of their applications for refugee status. It has been criticised by human rights organisations as illegal, inhuman and degrading. The main bone of contention is the length of time people spend in direct provision, with the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission calling the delays faced by asylum applicants as ‘systemic and pernicious’. The accommodation centres are run by private sector hospitality and catering companies under contract with the Irish government, and so living conditions and food provided are basic, so that these suppliers can maximise profits. Other problems include: not having permission to work until you have been waiting for six months for the result of your application; a paltry living allowance of €38.80 for each adult and €29.80 for each child, plus meals; overcrowding and consequent health concerns; and stringent sign-in and sign-out regulations and regular room searches by management and staff. People are robbed not only of agency, but privacy. Plans were underway to introduce a new system in 2024, whereby applicants for international protection will stay in a ‘reception and integration centre’ for no more than four months, with new centres run by non-profit organisations. However, this initiative looks set to be shelved in light of continuing accommodation pressures exacerbated by the influx of refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Given that direct provision was originally introduced as an emergency measure in 1999, these changes are long overdue. But, as Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker (‘Ireland’s Strange, Cruel System for Asylum Seekers’, 4/06/2019), ‘There are worse places than Ireland to be a person in need of international protection. The U.S. is one such place. In this country, people are routinely incarcerated in so-called detention centers.’
3) The U.S. is also not a great place to be black, or from a disadvantaged background. The mass incarceration of African-Americans today is a continuum of America’s original sins of chattel slavery, which fostered ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority. Economic gain was the fundamental underpinning of slavery. In many ways, the contemporary prison industrial complex has similarly become an economic venture, with the emergence of private prisons in many states. The prison industry did not become a form of compelled, low-cost labour overnight: prison labour’s historical roots show how officials intended to use prison labour to counteract the elimination of slave labour and rebuild economies across the South. Slavery was an essential industry in early America. Slave labour allowed landowners and businessmen to expand their enterprises without paying workers. After the Civil War, that free labour source dried up. But many states were entrenched in an economic model that relied on free labour. Prisons offered a convenient and official way to maintain segregation, use free labour to drive industry, and largely eliminate black citizens from the American labour market. The expansion of the U.S. inmate population has resulted in economic profit and political influence for private prisons and other companies that build and maintain such facilities, and supply goods and services to government prison agencies. The U.S. continues to lead the world in per capita incarceration of its citizenry. The reach of the criminal justice system on American society is vast, as 70m Americans, representing one in three adults, have a criminal record of some description. There are circa 3m people in prison in the U.S. today, far outpacing population growth and crime. Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated increased from roughly 500,000 to 2.2. million. Despite making up close to 5% of the global population, the U.S. has nearly 25% of the world’s prison population. 32% of the U.S. population is represented by African-Americans and Hispanics, compared to 56% of the U.S. incarcerated population being represented by African-Americans and Hispanics. In 2014, African-Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. African-Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African-American women is twice that of white women. 7% of adults in the U.S. are under correctional supervision. That equates to one out of every 37 adults in the United States. In 2012 alone, the United States spent nearly $81 billion on corrections. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20%, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50%. If African-Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%. If this is not institutionalised racism, what is? At the same time, the death penalty continues to flourish in the U.S., both at the federal and state levels, and especially in southern states. Muslim countries are regularly castigated in the west for the severity of their horrific punishments of those found guilty of contravening their laws; but can you think of many methods of execution more barbaric than the electric chair?
Ibrahim Hashem addressing the crowd at the Irish anti-war movement on the 26/03/22 in front of the GPO.
Yemen
Externally, the U.A.E. is criticised for its part in the Saudi-led coalition waging an ongoing war against the Houthi-dominated government in Yemen. However, in truth, the hostilities in the Arabian Peninsula between the Houthis in Sana’a and the Saudi opposition are part of a complex proxy war, essentially between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but with several other actors. Ironically, in this geopolitical situation, the Houthi rebels have links to Iran, while the Saudi coalition of which U.A.E. was a part, has U.S. logistical and intelligence support, and occasional direct military intervention. Criticising the U.A.E.’s participation in this Saudi-led coalition is akin to castigating Iran for its support of Palestine, which is an understandable counterweight to the U.S.’s backing and bankrolling of apartheid Israel, especially given the fact that the U.S. and Saudi are ostensible allies. I do not pretend to be an expert in this knotty arrangement of alliances, but I’d wager neither are the likes of Miguel Delaney. Besides which, in another instance of my ‘whataboutery’, are we being asked to conveniently forget that the United States has been involved in foreign interventions throughout its history – both through overt outright invasion and covert destabilising of democratically elected governments – too numerous to detail here? By the broadest definition of military intervention (including non-combative C.I.A. ‘psy ops’), the U.S. has engaged in nearly 400 such operations between 1776 and 2023, with half of these occurring since 1950, and over a quarter in the post-Cold War period. Of course, John Henry of the Fenway Sports Group or the Glazer kids are not in any way directly responsible for these overt and covert operations, and their ownership of soccer clubs is strictly business, and nothing to do with sportswashing.
As outlined above, Delaney has been amongst the most vocal in bringing up the U.A.E.’s human rights record when highlighting the unfairness of City’s ongoing successes. It might be revealing to ask him if he feels conflicted by the fact that he is employed by Alexander Lebedev, formerly of the K.G.B., and Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel, currently of Saudi Arabia – both major shareholders in the London Independent? It could be asserted that his conflicts-of-interest make his biased opinions extremely suspect. He regurgitates this geo-political guff every time City hand some team he favours (Liverpool? Real Madrid?) a hiding, or lift a fresh trophy. He spouts his sanctimonious codswallop while supporting Generalissimo Franco’s state sponsored Real Madrid, which is highly ironic, since Real are the original ‘sportswashing’ project, if ever there was one. Yet hypocrites like Delaney or Ken Early have few qualms about travelling to Qatar to cover the World Cup – because they are ‘only doing their job’. They attend, and then express their reservations – whereas if they had an iota of moral courage between them, they would have boycotted the whole affair.
Fact: Ireland receives over €8 billion per annum in investment from Saudi, Israel and U.A.E. – but boo Manchester City for benefiting from such deals. Manchester United’s and Liverpool’s owners have made their billions from the fruits of North American free market capitalism – which never hurt anyone, right? At least ‘sportswashing’ has the virtue of the commitment of the owners to entertaining, class football, and to the ongoing development of the club which produces it. Also, if the project at City is being conducted as just a soft power PR campaign, as detractors allege, it appears to be singularly unsuccessful in achieving its intention: fans of rival clubs (or, more accurately, our closest rivals) still condemn us. How can something be ‘sportswashing’ when every time Abu Dhabi, Qatar or Saudi Arabia are mentioned in the sports media, the coverage is uniformly negative? Are there opinion polls which indicate that the public attitude to these countries has improved due to ownership of football clubs, or hosting of World Cups? Critics behave as though ‘oil money’ is somehow more reprehensible than the rewards of American neoliberal capitalism. Yet I’d sooner take my chances with oil-rich Arab sheiks than rapacious, profit-driven American (late) capitalists. Such is the relentlessness of the demonisation of these Middle Eastern states’ investment in football among the Irish soccer media mafia that it is enough to raise suspicions that the root cause of it is simply good old-fashioned Islamophobia.
Neville receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Salford in 2014.
Gary Neville
I disliked Gary Neville as a Manchester United player (for perhaps entirely subjective reasons), but have come to respect him as a pundit. His pronouncements in an interview last year (FourFourTwo, September 16, 2022) are noteworthy because they are refreshingly different from the typical anti-City jibes, particularly prevalent in Ireland but found across the water as well. Also, they affirm the arguments I have rehearsed above. (Like most people, I like it when people agree with me – especially when the agreement comes from an unlikely source.) Highlights include:
I have more problems with American investment owners than with nation states. Nation states don’t want to mess with the format or rules or ethos of the game. American owners want to change the rules and structure of the whole game.
American investment funds take and don’t give. They’re not involved in urban regeneration like what happened in East Manchester.
Financial Fair Play was brought in out of self-interest and greed, to prevent other clubs emerging as competitive forces. There needs to be a space for Chelsea, Manchester City, Leicester and others to compete and win, otherwise it would have been Liverpool, Arsenal, and Manchester United at the top for ninety-nine years.
Admittedly, it is hard to paint your club’s fanbase in Ireland as an oppressed and beleaguered minority, when you are so cash and asset rich, and are ‘winning everything’. How can you be leading a revolutionary charge when you are so patently nouveau riche? (On the other hand, rarely winning anything must be soothed somewhat by being part of a ‘moral majority’, when every second person you meet follows the same club as you. If misery – or a sense of injustice – loves company, then there is plenty of it to be found in this country.) But it wasn’t always thus. I was there when we were shit. Personally, I’m proud to be the football club supporting equivalent of a working class Lotto winner. What is more, it would take a propagandistic fascist show of strength along the lines of the 1936 Berlin Olympics as hosted by Nazi Germany to make me disavow my commitment to Manchester City as an abstract entity, simply because of whoever its owners might happen to be at a given time. One set of monied scoundrels – if such they be – is as good or as bad as another, and adopting a sliding scale of moral turpitude is to embark on a slippery slope – and it is foolhardy trying to get to the top, or slide to the bottom, of it. And I haven’t even got started on ventilating the argument that even if City’s current owners are an entirely unscrupulous bunch of cheats, great art – such as City are now producing – has always depended on generous patronage. The Medici and Borgia families, including the Popes they spawned, were not famed for having ‘clean hands’; but without them there would have been no funding for the Italian Renaissance. Que Anton Karas’ iconic The Third Man soundtrack theme tune, while Orson Welles delivers Harry Lime’s ‘Swiss cuckoo clocks’ speech.
In Dublin last week, riots and looting that broke out in the wake of a horrifying and inexplicable attack on three small children, and their carer, has been widely attributedto nascent fascism. We regard this as an inappropriate and, potentially, insidious suggestion; which is not to say that inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric did not fan the flames, or that repugnant and misleading ideas about a Great Replacement are not doing the rounds.
The historian Roger Eatwell describes the amorphous ideology of fascism as ‘a latter-day symbol of evil, like the Devil in the Middle Ages.’ It is a term now bandied about to describe all forms of authoritarianism, as well as nativism or racism, and everything in between.
What we can say about fascism, historically, is that it has arisen in circumstances of economic decline where a disgruntled pool of military or quasi-military personnel supported by the petit bourgeois – and a less apparent wealthy elite – adopt extreme nationalist rhetoric and scapegoat ethnic or religious minorities.
The association of fascism with the military or police has been crucial, as these groups are almost uniquely capable of overthrowing democratic governments and opposing worker movements that lack military training.
What we witnessed in Dublin last week is, in some respects, nothing new, but simply an amplification of a general lawlessness that has afflicted parts of Ireland’s capital city, in particular, since the period of lockdowns. It is also clear that mass immigration has generated serious disquiet among the indigenous community.
The crime that gave rise to the riot and subsequent looting, allegedly perpetrated by an immigrant, appeared to vindicate those who are opposed to immigration, but the looting that followed demonstrates that native Irish are quite capable of random acts of violence.
The simplistic use of the term fascism prevents us from diagnosing the real drivers of criminality in deficient education, homelessness and housing insecurity, a lack of community policing and rehabilitation of perpetrators of crimes.
The government ought to be addressing serious deficiencies in the delivery of public services rather than doubling down on hate crime laws, or extending the powers of the Gardaí, especially if we recognise how fascism really emerges. Apart from ameliorating the social conditions, the best way of confronting hatred of minorities is surely through rational debate.
One could be forgiven for thinking that certain elements within the Irish government are actually keen to see an anti-immigrant (far right?) political movement emerging as a political force in Ireland, as this could split the working class vote and deflects attention from their own failings.
Meanwhile, mercifully, we have seen an interruption to Israel’s incursion into Gaza. Earlier this month Fra Hughes speculated on whether US support for Israel’s war on Gaza acts as a veiled threat to any nation considering joining a fledgling multi-polar world order.
Also Dr. Billy Ralph argues that moves by the HSE to measure health metrics in G.P. practice serves the interest of Pharma, and could foreshadow a dystopian future.
David Langwallner suggests that older artists generally repeat earlier tropes or descend into irrelevance but finds this is definitely not the case with the Rollings Stones‘s latest album.
Frank Armstrong reveals that Irish restaurants served as a forum for both Nazi sympathisers and opponents of the Reich, while Jammet’s may have had the finest French cooking in the world.
Musician of the Month Lewis Barfoot admits to loving winter. She finds the stillness and darkness supportive of creative work. Her new album HOME is out today.
And finally, “Love keeps a record of you singing to yourself, / tallies your tears.” No Record of Wrongs is a new poem by Haley Hodges.
We are living in a time when there are no gentlemen.
So, women stand for hours without being offered any seats.
It’ s a privilege which they have laboured for and for centuries,
It appears! Madness, I know, but you must respect them.
As you watch their small fists tightening on the headrests,
And the veins on their slight wrists seeming to almost split…
That is just at the point when you must resist to offer them a seat
And rather plant your own arse further into it!
As I have said before, we are living in a time without any gentlemen
And highly vocal women, who apparently know exactly what they want.
The children are so dissolute you could be forgiven for not showing!
Resist, resist, resist! Resistance, apparently is the source of all Art.
Resist recapitulating altogether. And whatever you do,
Don’t Fart!
Cup a pear, hear it abscise,
number the days until ripe;
the river chuckles with swollen pride –
back to a ditch by six,
drained away to the scaly, selfish sea.
At dawn there’s steam across the water,
a cloud of egrets scuds over;
old and waiting, mud for water,
leaves for a last breath
of wind, tremor, helical free fall –
after life, lope and leap
to nattering heaps; then left
to turn to mull, down horizons sift,
forgotten shades of ochre,
lignin nets over rheumy, russet stones.
Fish the shilletts from their dark homes
in the deep, brown ocean;
grateful, cosseting crumbs swirl in,
close and ready for roots:
succouring limbs of bulb, corm, meristem.
Here my mulling days are numbered,
pride in appearance doomed;
hares teem across the water,
while clouds of regrets scud over;
for I am old and loping after life.
If you follow me baby I’ll turn your money green I show you more money Rockerfeller ever seen Furry Lewis, ‘I Will Turn Your Money Green’ (1928)
First of all, it is good to have some of it. Second of all, it is good to have enough of it – which means not too much. I define ‘enough’ as that which allows you to avoid having to have any dealings with bank managers or landlords, or debts or debtors in general.
No one should have to live in constant fear of the spectre of homelessness. No one should have to tie themselves to a twenty-five year mortgage, simply in order to avoid the precarity of the private rental sector (by entering the equal precarity of perhaps not being able to keep up their mortgage repayments to a bank or other lending institution – which are here acting as de facto landlords). No one should have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
Is an elephant big? Is a mouse small? They are only big or small relative to each other (or to some other object or objects, bigger or smaller than they are). Enough is sufficient. But, given the cost of living where I live (including the cost of somewhere to live where I live, whether renting or buying), ‘enough’ has come to mean ‘a lot’.
Ostensibly, this is a problem of human greed, but its real roots are meretriciousness. Does it really matter whether you live in a multi-bedroom mansion in Killiney or in a two-up, two-down in Stonybatter or Ballybough (from the Gaelic, ‘Poor Town’); in a four-story Georgian house on Fitzwilliam Square or in a two-bedroom apartment anywhere? Is it necessary or desirable to own multiple properties?
The only reason for dwelling in one of the former over one of the latter – outside of having many dependents to shelter, or lots of ‘stuff’ to store – is simple showing off. It is the flaunting of conspicuous wealth and consumption, an ostentatious one-upmanship which betrays an underlying insecurity.
Is it the safety of living in a ‘good neighbourhood’ that you seek, or the status? I suspect that most instances of greed stem from snobbery, which then becomes a vicious circle feedback loop, with snobbery engendering more greed. Which is all the more risible when one considers that most snobbery – social or intellectual – is merely tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence.
‘But I have worked hard for it’, say those who have it, sometimes aggressively and other times defensively, and maybe they have. But, under the present dispensation, most people work at something, unless a) they are independently wealthy enough not to have to work, or b) they cannot find or make work. How hard they work is difficult to determine, given the variety of walks of life, and the disparity in their relative financial rewards. Are we talking about physical or mental work? And what about ‘labours of love’?
Many people work less and earn more than others who work more and earn less – mostly because the latter are exploited by the former. Also, implicit in the argument of those who claim to be worthy of their earnings is the idea that they should therefore be allowed to keep most if not all of what they have accumulated to themselves. (One thinks of a former President of the United States boasting that dodging his taxes ‘makes me smart’. It is also worth remembering that we live in a country where Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney think they are deserving of their more than generous state pensions.)
They prize their individual wellbeing, and that of their charges, over the common good, with the masses of ‘other people’ invariably dismissed as too stupid or too lazy to make something of themselves and do well for themselves (and thus, in their terms, they are contributing to society by not taking anything out of it). The premise of ‘When you’re not doing so well, vote for a better life for yourself. If you are doing quite nicely, vote for a better life for others’ would be alien to them, as they believe a better life for others would dimmish a better life for themselves.
So don’t even try quoting the familiar Marxist motto, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to them, unless you expect short shrift.
But, as David Foster Wallace hypothesised in his last, unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), tax payment and collection is an excellent index of civic virtue. As unlikely hero Mr. DeWitt Glendenning Jr., the Director of the Midwest Regional Examination Center, puts it: ‘If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.’
Musk
Juxtapose this attitude with Elon Musk’s warning that President Joe Biden’s proposed ‘billionaire tax’ would eventually increase taxes on everyone else, quoting the hoary monetarist mantra, ‘eventually they run out of other people’s money and come for you.’
FYI, it would take someone on the average industrial wage 800,000 years to earn what Mr. Musk made on a single day in October 2021, a cool $36.2 billion. But, in the eyes of the right, I am ‘just envious’. No, I’m not. Really, I don’t need that much – even if I would quite like to try ‘Life On Mars’ someday – and, given the extent to which our home planet has been run into the ground, may well have to do so. Although, clearly, as a faint-hearted socialist trying to survive in an aggressively late-capitalist world, I would never be able to afford the ticket – not even one-way, let alone return.
Besides which, the glorification of the Protestant work ethic is just a neat trick to get some people to slave their guts out for other people’s profit (cue easy signifiers such as ‘wealth creators’, ‘employment opportunities’, ‘increased productivity’, ‘trickle down’, etc.). Everyone actually, if secretly, knows that – unless you are doing something you like – ‘work’ is vastly overrated.
As Les Murray has it, in his gloss on TheBook of Common Prayer, ‘In the midst of life we are in employment.’ Or, as Dennis O’Driscoll recast it, ‘We are wasting our lives, earning a living.’
The whole dream of winning the lottery is that of never having to work for a living again. This is the real meaning of ‘hitting the jackpot’: being able to tell the boss what you think of him or, if you are self-employed, not even having to be your own boss anymore.
As David Graeber contends in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates employment with self-worth. He credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labour of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity (or technology) as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they have been indoctrinated to believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless.
Graeber describes this cycle as ‘profound psychological violence’ and ‘a scar across our collective soul.’ Yet, as he notes, people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills, but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. The psychological effect of spending our days on tasks we secretly know do not need to be performed, or could be performed by anyone, or by a machine, is deeply damaging.
This abuse is internalised at the level of language itself. Have you ever read people’s job descriptions of their own career summaries on LinkedIN? An example, taken at random:
– – is the M.D. of the European branch of the Australian boutique consultancy – -, where she leads the delivery of impactful and sustainable organisational diversity models, promoting inclusive leadership, collective intelligence, and creative innovation. – – has over 15 years of programme delivery experience and success in the development of cross-sectoral, scaled innovations for learning, informed by evidence-based research. She has a keen interest in interdisciplinary team approaches that promote diversity and inclusion, creative problem solving, leadership development, and change expertise. A former Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, – – is an expert on social impact and has a proven track record in the strategic development of pioneering creative innovation models and has presented her research internationally, including at the European Parliament. She is part of Trinity College Dublin’s Women Who Wow mentorship scheme which promotes an ideal collaborative environment to launch new start-up ventures.
What does any of this mean? Lest you conclude that this type of balderdash is the product of Civil or Public Service speak, be assured that it more than extends to the Private Sector too:
I am a Dublin-based Customer Success Manager, with experience across Mid-Market, Enterprise and Global accounts in both Corporate and Search & Staffing industries. I am a trusted partner to my clients and cross-functional internal stakeholders. I use data and insights to mitigate churn, demonstrate ROI and encourage utilisation of the product suite in which they have invested. I am proactive, customer-centric and thrive in fast-paced environments.
This is the worst kind of gobbledegook going. Naturally, it is de rigueur to be ‘passionate about the industry’, rather than stating you have a major concern about putting food on the table and keeping a roof over your head. If you are not a grafter you are surely a grifter.
"The Irish state has been reduced to the role of croupier at a casino table where the super-rich trouser their winnings without being required to even tip the attendants."@frankarmstrong2 argues that human flourishing should be the objective of politics.https://t.co/BVjveb741S
Add to Graeber’s analysis the concept of ‘time millionaires’. First named by Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation. ‘Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake,’ writes Roy, ‘but I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life.’ Here she is near-plagiarising Annie Dillard’s brilliant aperçu from The Writing Life (1989), but this idea has a long and noble historical tradition.
In ‘Of Idleness’ (1574), Michel de Montaigne cautions against the dangers of idleness, yet his essays are the product of someone who retired to his country estate at the age of thirty-eight, ‘to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live’ in order to meditate and write, yet it is the ‘thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination’, of which he is so fearful, which are the fuel for the depth and variety of the essays he wrote.
Samuel Johnson founded a magazine called The Idler (1758-60) and told his readers: ‘Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler.’
Kierkegaard, in Either/Or (1843), wrote:
Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is a truly divine life, if one is not bored… Idleness, then, is so far from being the root of evil that it is rather the true good. Boredom is the root of evil; it is that which must be held off. Idleness is not the evil; indeed, it may be said that everyone who lacks a sense for it thereby shows that he has not raised himself to the human level.
Learning how to use one’s free time well is the problem, not the leisure itself.
Perhaps the most famous refusenik of them all is the central character in Herman Melville’s short story, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853). Bartleby is hired as a copyist, and initially is diligent and hard-working, doing all that is asked of him. Then, shortly afterwards, he presents the narrator, his new boss, with what is to become his catchphrase: ‘I would prefer not to’.
There are several takeaways from this wonderful piece of fiction, but for my purposes let’s emphasise its focus on the dehumanisation of the copyist, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a photocopying machine.
In classic Marxist terms, the story is an exposition of the working man’s existence: oppression under the system of capitalism, in which he is alienated from his labour, offered only subsistence level wages, and is ultimately destroyed by that system if he cannot either conform to it, or change it.
Wilde reclining with Poems, by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
In his great essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), incidentally a pre-twentieth century masterpiece in its reconciliation of aesthetics and politics, dandyism and left-wing thinking, Oscar Wilde argues that:
And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation.
To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
Walter Benjamin’s vast, and sadly unfinished, Arcades Project (1939) is predicated on his wanderings of Parisian streets, and according to him, ‘Basic to flânerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.’ He also notes, ‘Idleness has in view an unlimited duration, which fundamentally distinguishes it from simple sensuous pleasure of whatever variety.’
Bertrand Russell in 1954
In Praise of Idleness
Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, in his extended consideration ‘In Praise of Idleness’ (1932), Bertrand Russell has much to offer on the topic:
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organised bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e., of advertising.
Russell’s most compelling point is the most counterintuitive – the idea that reclaiming leisure is not a reinforcement of elitism but the antidote to elitism itself and a form of resistance to oppression, for it would require dismantling the power structures of modern society and undoing the spell they have cast on us to keep the poor, poor and the rich, rich.
To correctly calibrate modern life around a sense of enough – that is, around meeting the need for comfort rather than satisfying the endless want for consumerist acquisitiveness – would be to lay the groundwork for social justice.
Derek Mahon echoes this theory in his essay ‘Montaigne Redivivus’, from Red Sails (2014), a eulogy to the kindred spirit he finds in his predecessor Cyril Connolly, whom he is anxious to rescue from undeserved obscurity. Mahon fulminates against ‘dumbing down’ (‘done to protect the market economy from criticism and to sell more junk’) and, if leisure is still regarded as a luxury, proposes in place of the lowest common denominator, a concept he calls ‘élitism for all’.
Jenni Odell has expressed similar ideas in her anti-productivity tract How to Do Nothing (2019): ‘In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living,’ she writes, ‘and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook . . . time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.’ Odell exhorts readers to recognise that ‘the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are . . . enough.’
Related themes have been explored, and comparable conclusions reached, in contemporary essays and creative non-fictions such as A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) by Rebecca Solnit, and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London (2016) by Lauren Elkin; and in fictions like Pond (2015) by Claire-Louise Bennett and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh. But the most pleasing up-to-date reiteration of this viewpoint comes in Ms. Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021):
There’s a fine art to being idle in fact. That’s right, there is an art to it, and very few people are naturally in possession of the gumption and fortitude necessary to pull it off.
Russell accounts for the difference between boredom and idleness in leisure by acknowledging:
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilisation and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no long exists.
However, it is regrettable that both Wilde and Russell were unfortunately overoptimistic in their belief that mechanisation would free us all to lead more fulfilling lives. Wilde elaborates his vision of a technological utopia:
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
Russell simply states: ‘Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all (but) we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.’
Such late 19th century/early 20th century sanguine sunniness now seems woefully wide of the mark, from the standpoint of our early 21st century hi-tech nightmare. Computers were supposed to make all our lives easier. Instead, because of the co-option of these means of production by the forces of Capitalism, they have made our lives immeasurably harder, or at a minimum our working lives – which now don’t stop when we knock off, but continue 24/7. If computers save us time at work, we must do some other work during that time saved. Otherwise, we are shirking.
Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that entrepreneurship is a specific talent, and those who choose to spend their time engaged in it should be rewarded appropriately. But some people have this gift, and some people don’t, just as artistic or scientific inclination and aptitude is not equally distributed to everyone – even if, arguably, a certain level of functionality can be acquired.
So why should entrepreneurship as a calling be recompensed more generously than others? Why, for that matter, should tech workers earn colossal salaries, while writers, artists and musicians are driven out of the cities they grew up in, because they can’t afford the rent? For the businessperson, Time is Money; for the artist, Money is Time.
But there are more business people exploiting artists than there are artists exploiting business people. As William Burroughs has it in The Job (1969): ‘And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and above all it eats creativity.’ Incidentally, upon graduating from Harvard in 1936, the privileged Mr. Burroughs was in receipt of a monthly parental allowance of $200 – a considerable sum in those days – which he used to underwrite his corporeal and psychic travels. Arriving with welcome regularity, it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, and was a ticket to freedom which allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forego employment, and to pursue his psychotropic investigations and reports. As J. G. Ballard has commented, ‘Never has a research grant been put to better use.’
Of course, art – especially of the less commercial variety – has always depended on patronage, whether private or public. No Medici or Borgia families, including the Popes they produced = no Italian Renaissance.
Harriet Shaw Weaver funded James Joyce to the extent of over €1 million in today’s money. Samuel Johnson’s ‘Letter To Lord Chesterfield’ (1755) signalled a shift in relations between artists and private patronage, with Johnson chaffing against what he considered ill-treatment by someone who claimed to be his patron, but did nothing to help him during the years spent working on his Dictionary, but instead tried to steal the glory when it was published. These days, we may thank the Gods for state-sponsored Arts Councils, and place our trust in their judgements.
So, where is all this free money, to finance all the pleasure of all this (un)productive leisure, going to come from, I hear you ask? In my book, Universal Basic Income is a great idea. Food and shelter are basic humanitarian and constitutional rights. In proclaiming ‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food’, the Old Testament was wrong, as it was wrong about so many things. To have to work for most of your life, simply in order to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head, will in two hundred years’ time be regarded as a mode of social organisation as ludicrous as the divine right of kings, sponsoring a feudal system. As Ursula Le Guin has written:
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Indeed, what is most depressing about the plight of the current under-30s (or is it under-40s?) generation (or ‘millennials’, as they are (un)affectionately known), is their hopelessness in the face of the impossibility of home ownership and an independent adult life, as though they have internalised and are thoroughly resigned to what the late Mark Fisher termed ‘Capitalist Realism’, and have no sense of any possible alternative.
After all, they could rebel, stage a revolution – or even just vote, for all the good it will do, if only just to register a protest – instead of stagnating in frustration and self-pity. In any case, people should be free to do nothing if they wish to, and still have at least a minimum level of security as regards the animal needs for food and shelter. If we can arrange things thus during a pandemic, why can’t we do it all the time? Because it is not sustainable in the long term? I beg to differ. Going to university is essentially doing nothing for three or four or five or six or seven years – except read books – and getting a piece of paper or two or three at the end of it, for your trouble.
But what would happen if everyone relied on this Universal Basic Income? Well, they won’t. ‘Communism doesn’t work because people like owning stuff’ Frank Zappa told us. I don’t know about ‘owning’ stuff, but I like having stuff, or rather, having access to stuff. But there are many avenues of access to stuff.
Mostly, what is in dispute is how long you have to wait your turn. However, if there was enough stuff to go around, waiting would not be an issue, and neither would ‘owning’, per se. Do you have a mortgage on your home? Then you don’t ‘own’ it: a lending institution merely lets you have access to it, until your make your final payment. But if you really must call stuff your own, then work for the money for your consumer durables, and satisfy your commodity fetishism, when you want to, not when you need to; and don’t when you don’t want to, not when you don’t need to.
But even if everybody did rely on such a subsidy (just as many businesspeople and industrialists already do), it would be no bad – or undoable – thing. For if we institute Universal Basic Income as a minimum at one end, surely we should also implement a Universal Maximum Income at the other, thus having reasonable limits at either end of the scale. The excesses of one will pay for the deficiencies of the other. This is only the next logical step in our current conception of the redistribution of wealth through taxation – or, more plainly, how we move money around to help each other.
Who wants to be a billionaire? I really can’t imagine every filthy rich plutocrat in the world suddenly giving up their extravagant earnings and lifestyle, and settling instead for a modest stipend, simply because they are debarred from infinitely growing their millions.
To be fair, after hitting maybe the 1 billion mark, or 10 billion, or whatever astronomical sum you care to nominate, the monied magnate should simply be taken aside and, like a contestant on a game show, given a prize – a big gold cup, say, or a fancy watch – and told, “Congratulations, you’ve just won Capitalism. Now, we hope you enjoy your retirement. You know, spending more time with your family.” Although, given that there will be more than one winner, and so no outright Number One, the competitive streak in such people may go ungratified, and so atrophy into seething frustration. But, we can throw in the necessary course of therapy – or ‘re-education’ – for free too. I can just see the headlines: ‘Billionaires’ Rights Infringed.’; ‘Freedom For Poor Billionaires.’
Furthermore, so much of the defence of, and endorsement of, mega-wealth is predicated on spurious notions of progress, or planning for the future – but isn’t really any kind of growth at all, except for the advancement of various small groups of vested interests, to the detriment or even outright ruination of the majority of people, and the environment.
At the same time, people in receipt of social welfare payments are frequently characterised as stupid or lazy or both, and dubbed the ‘undeserving poor’ – as though there is suddenly a class of ‘deserving poor’ at whom charity should be directed.
As Wilde has it, in the aforementioned landmark essay, ‘As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.’
The most egregious local example of this kind of poverty porn was RTE Radio 1’s documentary series Queueing for a Living, which ran from 1986 to 1997, and featured presenter Paddy O’Gorman interviewing people in dole queues and outside prisons. (From poverty porn to property porn – and good, old fashioned porn porn – one has almost run the entire gamut of the western mediascape.)
It is rivalled only by the memory of the farcically counterproductive fiasco that was 1986’s Self Aid, both telethon concert and theme song. Meanwhile, as conservative politicians the world over rail against ‘state-sponsored idleness’, landlords produce absolutely nothing for the income they receive. They don’t even have to do very much to provide the temporary and insecure service they render.
My last landlord – when I was having a break from domestic bliss/strife – was one such specimen. When the bathroom sink in the cottage I was renting from him broke, through no fault of my own, he refused to repair it unless I paid for it. I took the case to the Residential Tenancies Board, and it turned out he was not even registered with them. He then had the gall to upbraid me with the taunt, “You cost me my pension”, and promptly issued me with an eviction notice, under the pretence of selling the property. Of course, in public, this fly-by-night presented himself as a socially-concerned community worker. My nomination for the ugliest word in the English language: ‘rent’ – it tears me apart.
Or consider the presentation of drug and alcohol addiction in the media: it’s all ‘inner city deprivation’, ‘youth unemployment’, ‘gangster drug lords’, etc. (for example, one of the aforementioned Paddy O’Gorman’s most frequent inquiries of his marks was, ‘Was alcohol involved?’), when the majority of the regular cliental for Class A drugs are the white collar professionals who can afford them.
The same wilful blindness applies to the investigation and prosecution of white collar, as opposed to blue collar, crime. The same double-standard runs through the arts and its practitioners: the only difference between the consciousness-altering psychic experimentation and stress relief practiced by William Burroughs, Keith Richards, and other master addicts, and the guys burgling your house for drug money, is relative income – that is, money. Oh, and talent. Or rather, different kinds of talents.
What is perhaps most interesting about money is how people behave around it, and what lengths they will go to in order to get it. ‘Put money in thy purse’ counsels the villainous Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. What makes banker/industrialist Mr. Bounderby such a bounder in Dickens’ Hard Times? Why is John Self so messed up in Martin Amis’ Money? Attitudes to money and its pursuit are perhaps the greatest litmus test of a character’s propensity to virtue or vice, in life as in literature. It is the chief barometer of the capacity for Evil. Most people are ‘funny about money’, in some way or another. (Where there’s a will, there’s lots of relatives.) ‘Money is the root of all evil’ is a cliché more commonplace than most, but if we return to Samuel Johnson, he fulfils Alexander Pope’s definition of wit as ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’, in his great poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) – itself an ‘imitation’ of Juvenal’s Satire X – particularly, for our purposes, in the passage on money:
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold Fall in the gen’ral massacre of gold; Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin’d, And crowds with crimes the records of mankind For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws; Wealth heap’d on wealth, nor truth, nor safety buys, The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Watch what people do to make a (dis)honest buck. Or what they’ll do in order to avoid, in due course, having to toil to make a buck. Or if they’ll continue wanting to make even more big bucks, by fair means or foul, long after they have more than any one person, or their dependents, could possibly need. In which case, they are most likely much more interested in power than they are in money, money being merely a means to an end. And the wielding of power is just another way of showing off, or protecting what you have.
Of course, I cannot get through an essay (or piece of ‘creative non-fiction’, or whatever term you care to employ for these ramblings and rants) without making it personal, so I will now refer to my own family background. My father had a strong work ethic, and worked hard all his life in the state transport company ‘to support my family’ – even if his earnings were relatively meagre and his eventual non-contributary pension derisorily small.
But, in those days, so did everyone, since as the old Italian adage has it ‘Chi non lavora non mangia’ (Who does not work does not eat.) Nevertheless, watching him retire, when I was nineteen, I couldn’t help but find it both outrageous and disheartening that he had put in a lifetime’s worth of hard slog for such a paltry payoff. He had missed out on a lot of familial activity (including seeing me), due to doing the overtime he thought was necessary to ‘keep the show on the road’.
Again, as Russell has it: ‘The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.’ This perception was accompanied by my late mother – having spotted my burgeoning creativity during my adolescence – inculcating in me the notion that, ‘Art is for rich people.’ Of course, she was wrong. But, in another sense, and certainly from her perspective, she was right. Nor would she have been alone in having such an attitude, which was widespread at the time – one thinks of John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi telling him: ‘The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it’ – not that she actively hindered his pursuit of his dream of doing so.
After all, artistic production, and its attendant activities and industries – academia, media, publishing, curating etc. – are still predominantly middle-class occupations, filled by middle-class personnel, who become the gatekeepers to acceptance or rejection. Some will raise the cavil that this perception depends on one’s definition of what constitutes middle class and working class, and if one even allows for the reality of the class system at all.
Typically, these people hold that merely by achieving a college education (however easy or difficult that may be, depending on the personal circumstances you hail from), you automatically enter the hallowed mansions of middle-class heaven. But, apart from being a self-fulfilling prophecy, this is simply untrue, because it takes no account of what has happened before college and what will happen afterwards: your social and cultural capital (what networks and contacts your immediate and extended family have and the milieu it inhabits – i.e ‘who Daddy and/or Mommy know’); and certainly not of your economic capital (how rich your parents – if you have them – are).
For who can finance the ubiquitous internships (free labour for successful companies), without independent economic support, usually from family, without incurring huge debt, on top of student debt? At least rock’n’roll used to be egalitarian, and along with football, recognised as a ‘working-class escape’.
Nowadays, you can go to college to learn how to be a rock star, or go through an academy to develop the necessary footballing skills – which makes either endeavour seem rather more anodyne. Everyone may now be entitled to a degree – but only because you can pay through the nose at a private college in the event that you did not achieve the necessary academic requirements for entry to a ‘proper’ university.
Seventy percent of the world’s population may live three pay cheques away from financial disaster – but life is definitely easier when you have a safety net. If worse comes to worst, some people can always ‘move back in with the folks’.
Others have no folks to move back in with – or the prospect or the reality would be just too difficult, for either or both parties. All of the foregoing makes it hugely problematic for people of working class origin to establish themselves in any profession, but it is especially and acutely true for writers, artists and musicians, particularly if they are producing challengingly avant garde work. Racism, sexism and homophobia are all terrible prejudices, but can they exceed the obstacles created by the structural inequality of being working class – the poor, often elided, back-of-the-bus section of intersectionality?
Launching a career in literature was and is a more onerous undertaking for university educated women writers like Jeanette Winterson forty years ago, or Claire-Louise Bennett more recently, in contrast with their middle-class counterparts, because familial understanding and support may be minimal or unforthcoming or non-existent. Then, if you do happen to gain some recognition, you have to deal with the condescension of being made a token example of: if they can do it, anyone can. When I think of the undeveloped or underdeveloped potential of so many exceptional people, juxtaposed against the developed or overdeveloped potential of so many average people, it can fair make my blood boil.
Bye the bye, even further back, during my prepubescent boyhood, my maternal unit also gave me the lowdown on the evils of Russian Communism. Russia was this dreadful place where everyone was forced to believe the same thing and behave in the same way (so unlike Ireland, where we had freedom!), and they didn’t believe in God, and they were just waiting for a chance to invade Ireland, and make the whole world Communist, and they would surely martyr me for trying to defend my Catholic faith and preserve my immortal soul. I can see now that she was just another victim of the paranoid Yankie Cold War propaganda that was rife at that time, since Ireland was a vassal state of the U.S.. Still, it was quite a heavy and fearsome burden to lay on a small, impressionable lad with an active imagination. Thanks Mom.
Read history, any history. It is essentially the repeated story of the stronger exploiting the weaker, so that they can become richer while the others become poorer. You can dress it up with any fine justifying notion you like – crusades against the infidel, the white man’s burden, survival of the fittest, bringing the benefits of ‘progress’ to backward, uncivilised people, protecting ‘the gentle sex’ – but it doesn’t say very much for human nature. In fact, when I consider the outlandishness of the excuses usually trotted out, I prefer those with an eye to the main chance who are honest enough to admit that they are just self-seeking, self-serving, land-grabbing and fucking everyone else over for the money, without bothering to proffer any fancy reasons for their rapacious cruelty. The capitalist is at base a common or garden playground bully; the rest is just PR to cover up the fact.
Yes, Communism doesn’t work, because people like owning stuff. But Capitalism doesn’t work either, because it means too many people cannot own stuff, because other people own lots of stuff, at their expense. Mostly, neither of them work because of human frailty and venality – but Capitalism grants much more free reign for these traits and their spawn – aggression, callousness, selfishness, deviousness – to run rampant. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that it could function as designed without encouraging them, however covertly. Flaubert, as Julian Barnes tells us in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984):
thought democracy merely a stage in the history of government, and he thought it a typical vanity on our part to assume that it represented the finest, proudest way for men to rule one another. He believed in – or rather, he did not fail to notice – the perpetual evolution of humanity, and therefore the evolution of its social forms: ‘Democracy isn’t mankind’s last word, any more than slavery was, or feudalism was, or monarchy was.’ The best form of government, he maintained, is one that is dying, because this means it’s giving way to something else.
Wilde, again in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, presciently agrees: ‘High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.’
But of all the governmental systems humanity has already devised and tried, European-style social democracy would still seem to be the best bet yet. (Ireland, alas, in spite of E.U. membership, remains part of the Anglosphere, having thoroughly embraced the neoliberalism of the U.K. and the U.S..) Not that it couldn’t be improved upon – in ways I am ill-qualified enough to know I should not expostulate on here.
For it is certain that the first economic strategist who comes along will undoubtedly point to the fact that I am suspiciously short on detail in my surely flawed and embarrassingly naïve socio-economic analysis. I freely admit that I am no dismal scientist – in Carlyle’s sense of advocating for slavery, but rather a gay scientist – in Nietzsche’s sense of the art of poetry; or at least or at best, a sceptical artist. In the classical humanist tradition, I am basing my report on my lived experience, and that of those around me.
I have never flown first-class. I have never even purchased a first-class train ticket. I have no idea or experience of what it must be like to live as one of the super-rich, although fictions like the HBO television series Succession, to say nothing of practically every nostalgia-fuelled costume drama that has ever been commissioned, try to give us some inkling. Some people watch to ogle the wealth and lifestyle; I feel dirty after watching all those horrible characters doing terrible things to each other – but I keep coming back for more. To quote from Beckett’s Endgame (1957):
CLOV: What is there to keep me here?
HAMM: The dialogue.
Money Doesn’t Exist…
Ultimately, money doesn’t exist as a tangible entity. It is merely an abstract medium of exchange for goods or services rendered. A €20 note is not worth more than a €10 note, except by mutual agreement between interested parties as to what is written on them signifies.
Similarly, the stock market, and all such investment, is a giant, reciprocally arranged, confidence trick: if everybody buys in, regardless of external influencing factors, then values increase, or at least remain steady; if some people get nervous, and pull out, then others will follow suit, and the whole shooting match comes tumbling down. That’s why we have an incessant cycle of booms and busts – not because there is too much oil or not enough oil, or even because we no longer need or want oil.
The invention of credit (and its consequent debt) is what keeps people in thrall to this system. One thinks of the anecdote about Donald Trump pointing to a homeless man one day when he was $1 billion in debt, and telling daughter Ivanka, ‘See that bum? He has a billion dollars more than me.’ Not that this observation was of much consolation to the tramp – however much it may have been to Trump.
This is what makes the ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) so poignant: of all the things we strive for, money seems the least essential. Gatsby, the self-made ‘new man’ millionaire (and how did he make his money? – everyone has some dark, speculative theory about his past), has sacrificed everything for financial success and status, and achieving the American Dream has destroyed him. To put it simplistically, when it comes to his infatuation with Daisy: ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. ‘And so, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ The vanity of human wishes, indeed.
Like the Philip Larkin of the eponymous poem, I cannot help rueing the extent to which money controls and limits most people’s lives – those who attach much importance to it and strive, successfully or unsuccessfully – after it, as much as those who, through either ineptitude or lack of interest or a surfeit of basic human kindness, do not make a priority of pursuing it and so rarely have enough. And how it also separates us, where we live, and where we live in where we live, and how we live in where we live, while great impersonal institutions hoard, indifferently, merely dispensing charity occasionally, at their whim – after they have taken care of the shareholders. The business of business – in fact the whole money game – is, indeed, ‘intensely sad’.
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
N.B. Desmond Traynor gratefully acknowledges the assistance of funding from the Arts Council of Ireland towards the completion of this and other essays.
Cassandra Voices is an independent Irish media outlet, specialising in long reads on politics, art and contemporary culture. It was founded in 2017 by Frank Armstrong, an established Irish journalist and law graduate, and Daniele Idini, an Italian photographer and trade unionist. Produced in Dublin, Cassandra Voices has featured writers from around the globe.
The magazine aims to provide a non-partisan platform for voices across the political spectrum to inspire new thinking, while allowing for critiques and discussion on topics often overlooked in mainstream media.
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Our final bit of news is that we are delighted to welcome Ben Pantrey on board as a contributing editor.
Ben is a young writer from Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. His creative work, including poetry and an Irish-language short story ‘Eibhlín’ have appeared in student magazines such as Scáthán and Grass. As a non-fiction writer, he wrote a number of pieces for the music section of TN2 magazine, and later worked as deputy music editor for the same publication from April 2020. In Trinity College Dublin, he took an English Studies course, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 2021.
We might say with confidence that the world
is a lovely catastrophe—paradise
buried in a rubbish heap; devilish, angelic,
perishing, precious, priestly, proud;
one home to the light that is oil and the water that
is darkness,
this poor dazzling Earth a jar cracking
with the strain of their dueling dual containment,
each repelling ceaselessly the other, each true and
each toiling, warring for truest.
Us? We sip from the strange chalice
of these shocking simultaneities. The draught
makes us dance, and weep, and worship
and slay, and curse, and kiss, and pray.
2
This rainfall spends and spends itself
on the ground that can only receive it,
and my thoughts spent with it are hardly
a poet’s thoughts – I wonder is there anything
else like rain, and decide at last that nothing is,
but the conclusion makes me think
in this regard rain is like God, and have made
myself a paradox.
And then I think of your second name,
a challenge, fierce in its declaration
‘Who is like God,’ and fiercer still
in the silence that is the only true answer,
and the rain falls steady with my unsteady
thoughts; they are paired today in a dance
strange and tuneless, and breaking
over me like a jar of perfumed oil
is the thought ‘I get to be here,’
and the cosmic unfathomable voice
of the rain says this also, and with
the same measure of delight.
3
I passed the Dairy Corner on route 7–
it was evening and a storm had
begun in earnest and without apology,
yet the Dairy Corner stood neon and unblinking,
oblivious, resolute beneath relentless hammer blows
of rain. I can’t say just why,
but it warmed my soul to see the people
(and these were not oblivious)
huddled in a merry mass under the insufficient
awning, drenched with their sundaes and cones,
who–perhaps without even intending to–
counted it all joy.
Dublin Bay South by-election candidate Peter Dooley has an impressive track record of fighting for a just society, especially through the Dublin Renters’ Union, and unlike many on the left in Ireland, has drawn attention to the devastation to ordinary people’s lives caused by the longest lockdown in Europe.
This by-election in Dublin Bay South allows voters to say enough is enough with the FG, FF and Green coalition government’s inadequate approach to the housing, health and climate emergencies. But some lifetime left-wing voters are now feeling politically homeless due to the adoption by the established left-wing parties of a ZeroCovid policy, which apart from being hopelessly Utopian, would hand draconian powers to corrupt State institutions and impede the free movement of people in and out of the country, including the Irish diaspora living abroad.
Throughout Ireland’s never-ending lockdown, Peter has openly questioned the wisdom of handing extraordinary powers to the Minister for Health, which infringe basic constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly. Not only do lockdowns come with a huge human cost – in particular to school children denied an education for months and small- and medium- sized businesses prevented from trading – with little impact on the virus itself, but it has also created a political vacuum, where people affected don’t know where to turn for representation.
Observing the colossal transfer of wealth to the billionaire class, while small businesses go bust and workers see their jobs disappear, Peter asks whether the Irish government’s response has been proportionate.
Peter Dooley stands for an equal opportunity Ireland. He walks the talk through his daily activism, galvanising grassroots movements around housing and tenant rights.
As a co-founder of the Dublin Renters’ Union in 2017, he has helped prevent evictions and supported renters. Peter’s ideas on housing involve resistance to the vulture funds, and ensuring that the rentier class pays a fair share in taxes. Although Dublin Bay South is the most affluent constituency in Ireland it also has the highest number of homeless people living in tents in Ireland.
Peter has also called for a full public inquiry into the unprecedented scale of nursing home deaths at the beginning of the pandemic in Ireland, when the elderly seemed to have been sacrificed due to a flawed epidemiological assessment, and for the utility of antigen testing and drugs such as Ivermectin to be adequately examined.
Unlike the other main opposition candidates in the area he has expressed deep opposition to divisive and exclusionary vaccine passports.
He calls for the end to a two-tier healthcare system, and for a proper cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken if any lockdown is ever contemplated again.
You can reach Peter Dooley and his campaign policies here:
April is generally associated with fresh flowers and cooling rain showers. It is also the dreaded deadline to file taxes. Whether you were enjoying the foliage or sitting down to calculate your tax refund, I think we can all agree that April was particularly cruel this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.
As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.
NGO worker Justin Frewen drew on his experience of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. He recognised that ‘the potential onward transmission of Covid-19 is far greater than for Ebola, as it does not require direct physical contact with the carrier of the virus.’ By that stage, however, it seems it could not ‘be transmitted through the air directly which would greatly increase its range and ease of transmission.’
Frewen also recalled the failures of the WHO during the Ebola epidemic, and speculated as to whether the organisation had been too slow, again, in controlling the outbreak.
Meanwhile a pandemic doctor was steeling himself to the arrival of the grim reaper:
By recognising what death is we recognise what life is. That is maybe why this feels like such a moment of quickening. Death has come knocking at our doors and we are forced to open and acknowledge him. The door will close again, but the collective memory will remain, and when the pandemic is over this may help us to invest life with more meaning.
Last I saw her, rendered unrecognisable behind sheets of dehumanising plastic, she clutched at my hand with her failing limbs and begged me not to leave. But in every room, each now unadorned with the usual ersatz trappings of home and identity one finds in nursing homes – photographs, homespun blankets, love letters from grandchildren – fellow residents lie awaiting their rushed assessments. Oxygen saturations, pulse and respiratory rate, a survey of existing co-morbidities, and finally resuscitation and transfer status to be revisited and revised: who might possibly be saved by hospital transfer, and whose last comfort would be the inevitable cocktail of morphine and midazolam, slipped quietly under the skin at intervals until death arrives.
The pandemic created an enormous burden on the finances of most European States. By April according to Kyran FitzGerald the E.U. was teetering on the brink:
Across Europe, national Governments have moved to tackle the crisis by propping up incomes. Northern European states tend to have efficient bureaucracies and reasonable resilient national balance sheets. But even in places such as prosperous Denmark, there are concerns that many businesses will not reopen after what is increasingly looking like a long shut down.
The picture in Southern Europe is as mentioned much more bleak. In Italy and Spain, there is a real sense of let down amid the crisis, though better off nations like Germany have latterly moved to show solidarity by sending supplies and flying some patients from Eastern France and northern Italy to their hospitals for treatment.
I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.
No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.
Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.
Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.
It was a particularly challenging period for older people who were advised to cocoon in Ireland, another unwelcome neologism from this period. Fergus Armstrong reflected on the experience:
We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.
Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.
What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.
What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.
Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.
The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.
Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .
Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.
Also, across the water in the United States, Bull Moose was typically bullish about opening up, in a dispatch from Atlanta:
What the hell? Most people in the U.S. appear to be freaking out about Georgia ending its lockdown before anyone else. Even Trump weighed in, saying he disagreed with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As we stand, restaurants here opened yesterday, as have bowling alleys, parks, nail salons and other facilities. The State also just declared its one thousandth death from COVID-19.
On April 2nd Kemp admitted that he didn’t know that this coronavirus could spread asymptomatically, something the world knew since late January. Kemp may be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to re-open Georgia’s economy. With all respect to those who have lost loved ones or suffered from a bout, it’s time collectively we get back to our new normality.
Earth Day
Image (c) Daniele Idini
April 22nd marked the fiftieth anniversary or Earth Day, and leading environmental writer John Gibbons recalled how this had been closely followed by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon in 1972, along with a host of other key environmental protection legislation, writing:
Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.
Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.
The Public Intellectual Series continued with assessment by David Langwallner of John Gray, the U.K.’s leading intellectual, and Jonathan Sumption the former U.K. Supreme Court judge who became an outspoken critic of lockdowns, and a defender of civil liberties first formulated in England in the Magna Carta (pictured above).
It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so.
I sauntered up to the sertão
in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
to find the river
where my cousin drowned in 1973
the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
they called it the dry river
but as his sister Joan said –
‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’
One surprisingly popular article explored how the Longford town of Ballinallee featured in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ with a suggestion that it may have come about after a night Dylan spent in the company of fellow bard Shane MacGowan.
Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too,
The flowers are dyin’ like all things do,
Follow me close, I’m going to Ballinalee,
I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.
Uluc Ali Kilic in his studio in Istanbul. Daniele Idini
My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.
Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.
While Gary Grace brought us to the chaotic streets of Dublin to life after a night out in ‘A Slice’:
Robbie was in what his friends referred to as “swaying tree mode”. This meant the slender greying hipster was pissed, his eyes barely open, and not engaging with anyone but moving slowly side to side, mouthing the lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.
There was poetry in English and his native Romanian from Radu Vancu.
With no less haste than the crisis deserves,
All faces one mask of consternation,
We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,
This virus respects no race or nation.
Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber
Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,
Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,
Children in hiding, on their own, at home.
His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,
Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;
Warm April predicates wearing no hood,
His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.
Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick
Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick.
Walk down the bare,
trembling aisles of your
self. Everything dispensible
is now after its Best Before.
Pass by the Two for One indulgences
of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
of novelties that amused us
fade behind their
spent Use By dates. Remembered now
as infatuations bought to distract us.
Is it time to close shop?
Turn out the lights?
Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
We are open twenty four hours
and we must never close.
No matter the Feast Day.
The Plague or The Hour.
Turn toward that aisle within,
so often passed in the hurry
of what seemed to matter
there you will find the plenty that
always was and will be.
Load your cart, fill your bags,
weigh your trolley down.
Stock pile on hope!
