Cunning Hired Knaves

For God knows how many months now Donald Trump has been denounced in liberal media and by public figures for his narcissism. He is a narcissist, says Michael Moore, for example, who makes feature documentaries where he is the central character.

Well, maybe he is. I am intrigued though about where this preoccupation with narcissism comes from. I’m no expert on psychoanalysis but from what I recall narcissism was a term that described a tendency, or maybe a striving, inherent in everyone but one that could prove destructive if it could not be somehow transcended. So there is something that sounds a bit wonky to me when someone in particular is identified as a ‘narcissist’.

‘The millionaire worker’
By El Roto, El País. Title: ‘Populism’

Do you ever wake up and think: a bit more cruelty in my life would be just the thing?

Maybe you don’t think that. Maybe you think: there are some people who need a good dose of proper order. They may not like it, but it will be all for the best. You have to be cruel to be kind.

Maybe you joke about shooting some group of transport workers who are threatening to go on strike. Or maybe you hear someone make the joke and you chuckle at the audacity of it.

Some man says it, on the radio, on the TV, or in the news report you read. Maybe you feel a kind of admiration for him. Is he not the kind of fellow who will tell it like it is?

Does he not seem like the kind of fellow who is needed to put these politicians, or these public sector workers, or these Eurocrats, back in their box? What would it be like to have that kind of power?

LOVE HIM OR HATE HIM. That is how the news feature on his latest ‘controversial’ remarks begins. Reading that, which do you feel more of towards him – love, or hate?

Michael O’Leary is the CEO of Ryanair. He recently spoke at a Fine Gael breakfast fundraiser. He makes jokes about shooting cyclists. He says the EU seeks to become some sort of fucking communist Valhalla. When workers are protesting in airports, he stands in front of them and courts publicity for himself, promoting cheap fares.

Lots of people think he should be the head of government in Ireland. That he should be sent over to Brussels to negotiate with Europe on our behalf. Maybe you think that behind closed doors, things are different. All this is a front, a persona. He does not really mean those things and he is far more circumspect and canny, far more in tune with good business sense and pragmatism. You imagine that he is only riling people up because it serves his own ends, his bottom line. You could be right. Maybe this makes him all the more admirable to you.

Is there not something alluring about appearing disgusting to so many people, but concealing secret virtues that no-one really knows about, and can only speculate about?

A couple of days ago, RTÉ, Ireland’s public broadcaster, ran a feature, on its daytime TV show, on people in Doonbeg, County Clare who were celebrating Donald Trump’s victory.

The locals were buzzing with pleasure about Trump’s election. The parish priest made an appearance, admitting to have said prayers for him to win. The interviewer asked about all the offensive remarks Trump had made during the campaign.

I do not recall, since I only watched it the once, if it was the priest or someone else, who said in response that Trump had had a bad first half, but that he had come good in the second half to pick up the victory. He seemed to suggest that you have to play dirty sometimes, so that you can come good in the end.

It was a brief window onto the same country where the press presents men who murder their partners and children first and foremost as ‘pillars of the community’.

The worst part of the video for me was when they picked out the one dissenter. She was the one person who was not pleased with Trump’s victory. She muddled through with the mildest and politest of objections. When I watched, it felt to me like all the eyes in the room were searing into her, that all the jaws in the room had gone rigid, that the air in the room had gone dead while she was speaking, all conveying the message to her: don’t fuck this up for us.

Later I thought: was I right to think such a thing? Maybe the same person, if pressed afterwards, after the sing-song the locals put on for Melania, on whether she felt any pressure, would have said: not at all.

She might have said, I said all I had to say and I was happy with what I said. No, I suppose he is not a sexual predator or a racist or any of that, I am surrounded by great people here and I hope he will come good in the end.

And then I thought that that kind of denial, that kind of outward expression of hope for a silver lining, in spite of the glaring evidence to the contrary, and this feeling of not knowing at all what someone really thinks: these are the marks left by the winner, by the enemy.

I found myself watching a live video feed on Facebook, waiting for Hillary Clinton’s Press conference to begin. There were five or maybe 10 minutes of a shot of 12 American flags,and there were peppy, ‘socially conscious’ tunes playing in the background as people waited. The camera then turned on the left of the chamber, where there were two secret service agents or maybe corporate lawyers in suits, standing around. After a minute or so of enduring this I abandoned my morbid curiosity and went off to raid what remains of the children’s Hallowe’en stash of sweets.

What was I waiting for? I expect nothing of Hillary Clinton and there I was, lingering so that she would provide it. From what I could pick up off Twitter and news reports a little later, nothing she said was in line with my expectations. There were a couple of things, though, that give me some pause for thought. She said that American constitutional democracy demands continuous participation, and not just voting.

Coming from the professional politician par excellence, atop a Wall Street-funded machine that uses polling data and focus groups in place of real democratically organised institutions and that exists only to make sure that the decisions that matter are kept safely in the hands of the ‘experts’ and that the range of issues up for public debate is kept as small as possible and within the narrowest parameters possible, the remark is not without a hint of piquant irony.

She also said, calling for (the racist misogynist conman liar and thug) Donald Trump to be given recognition as the president, that people in her country had to cherish the principle of the peaceful handover of power. One might add here that this principle is not deemed to apply, by the state department that she used to run, to other countries. Such as Honduras. Or Chile, where her trusted friend Henry Kissinger had other ideas, or in Palestine, where Clinton supported placing a population under brutal siege because of the government it elected, and rued the fact that more had not been done to subvert the elections.

For all that, I still find myself regretting the fact that Trump won and Clinton lost, simply because the effect of a Trump victory will be far worse on the lives of people who did not elect him, on the tens of millions who voted against him because they knew the licence his victory would give to the resentments of White America.

In this regard, it is one thing for such people to demand of their own accord that they be recognised as American citizens the equal of anyone else in the country. It is quite another for them to be told by the likes of Hillary Clinton that since they are Americans, the President of White America is their President too, and that he should be welcomed with an open mind.

Once Clinton and her colleagues, along with the US political, military and media establishments, have seen to it that Trump is safely ensconced in the White House, the siren warnings from those quarters about fascism and Nazism will peter out to silence. The idea that Russia is pulling the strings of the US President will die before it is even born. What once appeared (and what are in fact) Trump’s dangerous predilections will be boiled down to appear as occasionally infuriating eccentricities. Perhaps common cause will be found, across the ‘political divide’, for the chanting of USA! USA!, against some foreign devil or some band of local malcontents, and it may begin to dawn on people that many of those warning of the threat from barbarism were part of the barbarism all along.

In the choice between socialism and barbarism, it is already too late, but then again, it always was.

‘All protest is resistance to authority’

During the last government, the Labour Party liked to crow about all the things it “delivered”. No-one remembers what any of those things were. The Labour Party probably doesn’t remember now either. But plenty of people will now remember how, after demonising social welfare recipients, after promoting schemes to undermine paid labour, and after boasting about how the Troika had crushed attempts at a political alternative in Europe, they “delivered” show trials and criminal convictions for children protesting their rule.

This is what ‘making the centre hold’ boils down to these days: preserving the sanctity of the State and its dignitaries, and their basic right to do whatever the hell they see fit -because they’re the ones in charge- by going after children. And they cloak it in the language of upholding ‘public morality’, according to which it is perfectly moral to socialise private banking debt, slash spending in health, education and social services, and operate a tax haven for multinationals. Sure isn’t it all legal?

By contrast, the way they see it, if anyone’s at fault, if anyone’s acting immorally, it’s kids who lift their heads and refuse to go along meekly with the prospect of being robbed of a future.

Jay Spencer Green‘s first novel, Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s, begins with Walter Benjamin’s famous observation that there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. In his second novel, Ivy Feckett is Looking For Love, we learn that the eponymous central character is a researcher who spends her days documenting all kinds of barbarism, from the pornographic to the genocidal. But to what end, and for whom?

The unrelenting dark seamy humour with a taste for the bizarre and surreal and tightly woven plotlines that characterised Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s abound in this offering. But the setting has shifted, from a Dublin in advanced neoliberal decay and debauchery, to the striving petit-bourgeois suburbs of Birmingham, and instead of the rakish and worldly CIA agent of the first book, Ivy Feckett is bookish and reserved unsure if she might ever fit in and find love, as the title says.

The subtitle of the book is ‘A Birmingham Romance’. Though the city has been doubtless the scene for many a romance among those who have lived there, it hardly enjoys the renown of Venice or Manhattan on that score. To my sensibilities anyway, a Birmingham romance sounds as incongruous as the homemade rhubarb or cauliflower wines served up by one of the main characters. Indeed, I imagine the kind of people who imagine Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s as the sort of thing they could get their teeth into might be a little cooler on this book, if they were to go by the title alone.

That would be a great pity, since I think this book in many ways outstrips Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s in depth and ingenuity. It comes in the wrapping of a romantic comedy-mystery, and with its narrative twists and engaging characters it works splendidly on that level alone. But it also reaches for weightier social, political and philosophical questions too: what if the objects of our desire in human form are the very things that turn us into a means to their end? What happens when we devote all our energies to producing the very things that might destroy us? Where do love and kinship lie amid social structures that prize the likes of family values, religious devotion and entrepreneurial endeavour but are really a breeding ground for sociopaths and con artists? And can riding in a donkey derby really give you an orgasm?

The answers, such as they are, emerge in an ingeniously tale suffused with warmth and affection, for its characters (well, most of them), the places they inhabit, and the social world that brought them into being. But Jay Spencer Green is too astute a writer, a narrator with too keen a nose for the scent of abounding darkness, to allow what is ultimately a story about love, friendship and solidarity in the face of pervasive villainy to be padded out by gratuitous sentimentality. At the very least, Ivy Feckett ought to cement Green’s status as a cult novelist, and not just because this is also a novel about a religious cult. The book is accessible enough, and so abundant in fiendish humour and grounded optimism, that it could well be the founding document of a worldwide religion.

Reposted from three years ago, with slight edit.

I fully support the Dublin Bus workers in their fight to maintain a decent standard of living for themselves and their families. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but it really is still hard to take the abject whinging and sniping from ordinary people who think collective action in protection of wages and conditions is some kind of outrage against natural justice.

What, you think the IMF wants you to live a long and prosperous life? You think the ECB is on your side? You think the weekend, paid holidays and sick leave are gifts from above, from the likes of Denis O’Brien and Dermot Desmond and John Bruton [ADDS 2016: or Tim Cook and Apple]? You think Leo Varadkar finds it hard to sleep at night because you struggle with your bills?

Things such as weekend, paid holidays and sick leave were fought for and won through long years of struggle on the part of working people. The thrust of public policy in Ireland, as elsewhere, is toward the destruction of the social fabric, in the interests of the wealthiest in society. The goal is to crush the power of organised labour, privatise public services and roll back the social gains that took decades of effort on the part of working people to achieve. This is a pattern we have seen time and again, in the US, in the UK, in Greece, in Spain, and presently, in Ireland.

It takes resolve and determination to stand up to that, and I have nothing but contempt for the sniveling hyenas who think other people’s wages and conditions should be destroyed simply because they themselves have no rights at work and because they think the best way of saving their own hide is to ape their boss.

Yesterday I dropped off €115 to the children’s primary school, to cover the cost of materials. This payment is on top of the hundreds of euro already paid for school textbooks.

As I may have mentioned before, this is something of an alien practice to me. In Northern Ireland, where I went to school, the costs of school materials are covered through general taxation.

There are advantages to school materials being paid for through general taxation: for one, it fastens the principle that education isn’t a commodity but a public good. Here, not only is getting a good education good for you, but it is also good for me and everyone else, and so everyone contributes to the education of everyone else. The reality of the UK education system as a whole does not quite reflect this principle, of course, yet the principle, for most people, is still worth having.

In the Republic of Ireland, the fact that school material costs have to be paid for by parents fastens the contrary principle: education is a commodity, not a public good. According to this, your education should, at the end of the day, come at your own expense. Anything else is a temporary concession, not a right.

When, in your childhood years, and somewhat beyond, it comes at your parents’ expense, this is bound up with the sense that you are your parents’ property, a commodity in their portfolio to be developed. In so far as you pay for the education of others, this is thought of as an unwelcome imposition, more than anything else. From this perspective, the State supplies education services as a consumer good. You pay for them through your taxes because this is the most cost-effective way of acquiring these services.

In practice, all the best people in the Republic of Ireland pay for their own children’s schooling out of their own pocket because educating your child means getting everything for them, even if it means nothing for everyone else. Well, not entirely out of their own pocket, mind you, since the cost of teachers in the exclusive fee-paying schools they use is borne by the State. And why shouldn’t the State pay for it? Aren’t these parents making a far greater sacrifice for their children than those who send their children to fully-funded state schools and who prefer buying cigarettes and alcohol to shunting their children further upwards the ladder of respectability?

While we’re at it, why shouldn’t the State incentivise top executives, who wish to move to Ireland to create jobs, by effectively subsidising them in sending their children to private schools? I am pleased to report, once again, the State actually does this at the minute. If you’re a top executive in, say, Apple, then Apple can pay your child’s private school fees up to €5000 tax-free, for each child. Better that the money goes in that direction rather than, say, providing school materials free to the undeserving, or making the gilded offspring of top execs endure the indignity of learning alongside the great unwashed.

I had a brief exchange on Twitter recently on related matters with a government TD, Noel Rock. Rock claimed that it was wrong for people who had to make do without a third level education to be paying in order for others to receive one, as would be the case if third level education were paid for through progressive taxation. Well indeed: and while we’re at it, why should older people pay for younger people to learn how to make the world a better place, when they’re going to be dead anyway? Let old people pay private firms through the nose for all their geriatric medicine before they die, and to hell with them if they can’t. Sure didn’t Christine Lagarde say people were living too long anyway. Conversely, why should the young contribute toward the pensions of the old, who have already had their chance? With intellectual heavyweights like Rock to the fore in politics, at least the war of all against all will be short.

The other night I was putting the school textbooks into the children’s bags and I opened up the Senior Infants textbook ‘Grow in Love’. It is a religious education book. It cost us €8.99. Earlier in the day I had read posts from people who were -rightly, in my view- incensed that the State broadcaster RTÉ had shown live of Mother Teresa’s induction into Heaven’s Hall of Fame. Well, here’s what they teach 5 year olds in Ireland’s state-funded schools in 2016, so it’s not as if RTÉ was doing a solo run on this. Just as you pay your licence fee to RTÉ so that it tells you why you need to give up your auld sinful attachments to pensions and universal benefits, you also pay for your children to learn to admire someone who thought the poor accepting their lot was a beautiful thing. But it doesn’t stop there: the child is supposed to read it with her family. So you are, in fact, paying for your child to proselytise to you about the virtues of charity.

‘Help us to learn from the lives of Mother Teresa, and other holy men and women’, says the prayer in the textbook made for the five-year-old in a State-funded Irish school but paid for by her parents because it is the responsibility of parents, not Apple and not Denis O’Brien, to pay for their children’s education. Many people who were poor lived in Calcutta, the tableau informs, as if they could just as well have lived in Blackrock or Foxrock but somehow wound up in Calcutta. The Catholic tradition of selecting and venerating saints has a very dubious history, to say the least. Most such saints either came from the upper orders in the society in which they lived, or, they were lowly figures whose sainthood was bestowed because they learned to accept their lot in life. And of course the example of their sainthood is usually contrasted with the venality and fallen nature of the rest of us. There is a kind of continuity, then, between the worship of saints and the cult surrounding stupendously wealthy CEOs and celebrities. There is something singular about them, something that confines us to individuality, not collectivity. The simple account of Mother Teresa in the book for five-year-olds is not all that different from the way such stories are presented to adults, either. You are led to forget, in Mother Teresa’s case, but also in the case of glittering billionaires, that most of the work was not done by them but by the great many others who elevated them to prominence.

All this has the effect of loosening you up to believe that if the likes of Apple have accumulated vast profits, then it is because people like Steve Jobs or Tim Cook have conjured them out of an unpromising nothing, something you, o lowly one, could never do. Or, as Marx puts it, the more value we create, the more valueless and worthless we become. Hence, maybe they are entitled to that money after all, and maybe they are right when they say that they pay tax because the people who work for them pay tax, and that in fact it is the rule of capital that gives life to us as political beings, and that we should just submit to it once and for all, less this life be taken from us altogether.