A Steyn on the dress of the Grand Old Lady of D'Olier Street
In a 1942 movie called Strange Holiday Claude Rains goes away fishing for a few weeks while his nation is at war and returns to find blank expressions and a prevasive climate of fear where he comes from. It's a pretty unsubltle dig at those in the US who let other people fight the Nazis who were never going to impose their way of life on the US but could easily have become the bullying superpower that that America is right now.
I thought of this movie after as I've been away for most of the last two months and haven't had much chance to read the Irish papers (It costs €80 a year for a subscription to the Irish Times- Fuck that!) but it seems that on my return they've been taken over by aliens from a distant planet that bears no relation to the world I live in myself.
To be fair, the main object of my shock and horror is a man whose been writing for the Irish Times for a while, Mark Steyn. Looking like a surly younger version of Osama bin Laden when he wasn't quite old enough to grow a full scraggly beard, but having far more extreme views,he originally wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times when it was owned by Conrad Black who brought him over to England to write for his far-right titles like the Telegraph and the Spectator. How he ended up writing for the D4 chattering classes is a bit of a mystery, but his appointment did coincide with the beginning of former PD Geraldine O Kenneide's tenure as editor. He's already been the subject of an angry demonstration by anti-war activists outside the Times' office in D'Olier street, yet the baggy-eyed one seems to be standing by her man as she did with that other swivel-eyed bearded psychopath Kevin Myers a while ago.
Last week he outdid himself for extremism by suggesting that George W Bush is being a wimp over the Iraq situation and should use the nuclear option, not in any metaphorical sense, but in the sense of dropping a big bomb on Iraq that would kill millions of people and spread disease around the area for centuries and possibly make the whole area uninhabitable. His justifiaction is that nuking Japan in 1945 brought an end to the war and ultimately saved more lives than it terminated, even if most of the lives that it ended were civilian. He glosses over the subtle differences between the two conflicts, like the fact that Japan attacked the US first, that they were fighting the whole nation whereas they claim to be friends of the Iraqi people today, and that nuclear profliferation has meant that an attack would almost certainly result in Iran, Pakistan and other muslim nations stepping up their arms programmes and making the world a much more dangerous place.
The really scary thing is that he's saying in print what the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney are probably saying in private, though they know that a nuclear attack on Iraq would make things worse and alienate the US from the rest of the world even more. Still, you know that deep down they'd love if the middle east was one big arid desert with no sand niggers getting between them and the oil they need for their SUVs. Cheney actually said a few years ago that there was a problem caused by the Good Lord choosing to put the oil under countries that weren't democratic.
But why a neo-con like Steyn should be writing for the Grand old Lady of D'Oleier street is still a mystery. I'm considering a boycott of the paper until Baggy eyes gives him the heave-ho, but the trouble is that it's still the Irish paper with the greatest plurality of views, even though it doesn't give any genuine left-winger a regular column and instead lets fuddy-duddy Ken Barlow types like Vincent Browne and Fintan O Toole share their equivocations with us. Then you've got people like Breda O Brien telling us that the tide of history is turning against abortion, making statements like: "A foetus is not a child, but then a teenager isn't a grown woman". I kind of agree. I never thought being born was such a big deal and always wished that I celebrated my conception day instead of my birthday, as Breda obviously does. Presumably she celebrates Christmas in March as well, and thinks that if the 3 wise kings were really wise they would have shown up 9 months earlier.
Still, there are worse things than the Times. Like the Sunday Independent, for example. I came across a piece from the lifestyle section which complained that Irish universtities teach the work of "frauds" like Noam Chomsky instead of "genuine intellectual titans" like Conor Cruise O Brien and Eoghan Harris. (I'm not making this up) He claims that there's a "Cosy liberal Consenus" on campus. I'd love if that were true, but the words "liberal" and "consensus" don't really go together which is why the right, who agree to think whatever the Sindo leader writers tell them to think, has been in power for so long, no matter how irrational that may be.
This Sunday, Eilis O Hanlon was suggesting in her wrist-slashingly unfunny "Satirical" way that Ireland wasn't really a democracy any more as (according to her) Bertie had done some sort of dirty deal with the the Shinners to bring the Columbia 3 home from that bastion of democratic values that is Columbia. As someone who's been abroad and listened to how my country is regared as the terror state it's sickening to see the Irish people swallow the US line on Columbia. It seems that most of us think the country is a genuine democracy and that the government have nothing to do with the right-wing paramilitaries that shot all four left-wing candidates before the last election, just as many people in Britain believe that the RUC have no links with loyalists. What's more sickening still is that the Sindo printed 8 articles about the 3, none of which deviated from the line that they were anti-democratic terrorists even though it's clear that the situtation in Columbia is far more complex than they give it credit for.
But there's no room for complexity in the world of CNN, Fox News, or our own Sindo. You're either for them or against them. I'm happy to say that I'm against the Sindo. I hope the hypocrites who write for it all choke on the Columbian Cocaine they probably snort every night.
I thought of this movie after as I've been away for most of the last two months and haven't had much chance to read the Irish papers (It costs €80 a year for a subscription to the Irish Times- Fuck that!) but it seems that on my return they've been taken over by aliens from a distant planet that bears no relation to the world I live in myself.
To be fair, the main object of my shock and horror is a man whose been writing for the Irish Times for a while, Mark Steyn. Looking like a surly younger version of Osama bin Laden when he wasn't quite old enough to grow a full scraggly beard, but having far more extreme views,he originally wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times when it was owned by Conrad Black who brought him over to England to write for his far-right titles like the Telegraph and the Spectator. How he ended up writing for the D4 chattering classes is a bit of a mystery, but his appointment did coincide with the beginning of former PD Geraldine O Kenneide's tenure as editor. He's already been the subject of an angry demonstration by anti-war activists outside the Times' office in D'Olier street, yet the baggy-eyed one seems to be standing by her man as she did with that other swivel-eyed bearded psychopath Kevin Myers a while ago.
Last week he outdid himself for extremism by suggesting that George W Bush is being a wimp over the Iraq situation and should use the nuclear option, not in any metaphorical sense, but in the sense of dropping a big bomb on Iraq that would kill millions of people and spread disease around the area for centuries and possibly make the whole area uninhabitable. His justifiaction is that nuking Japan in 1945 brought an end to the war and ultimately saved more lives than it terminated, even if most of the lives that it ended were civilian. He glosses over the subtle differences between the two conflicts, like the fact that Japan attacked the US first, that they were fighting the whole nation whereas they claim to be friends of the Iraqi people today, and that nuclear profliferation has meant that an attack would almost certainly result in Iran, Pakistan and other muslim nations stepping up their arms programmes and making the world a much more dangerous place.
The really scary thing is that he's saying in print what the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney are probably saying in private, though they know that a nuclear attack on Iraq would make things worse and alienate the US from the rest of the world even more. Still, you know that deep down they'd love if the middle east was one big arid desert with no sand niggers getting between them and the oil they need for their SUVs. Cheney actually said a few years ago that there was a problem caused by the Good Lord choosing to put the oil under countries that weren't democratic.
But why a neo-con like Steyn should be writing for the Grand old Lady of D'Oleier street is still a mystery. I'm considering a boycott of the paper until Baggy eyes gives him the heave-ho, but the trouble is that it's still the Irish paper with the greatest plurality of views, even though it doesn't give any genuine left-winger a regular column and instead lets fuddy-duddy Ken Barlow types like Vincent Browne and Fintan O Toole share their equivocations with us. Then you've got people like Breda O Brien telling us that the tide of history is turning against abortion, making statements like: "A foetus is not a child, but then a teenager isn't a grown woman". I kind of agree. I never thought being born was such a big deal and always wished that I celebrated my conception day instead of my birthday, as Breda obviously does. Presumably she celebrates Christmas in March as well, and thinks that if the 3 wise kings were really wise they would have shown up 9 months earlier.
Still, there are worse things than the Times. Like the Sunday Independent, for example. I came across a piece from the lifestyle section which complained that Irish universtities teach the work of "frauds" like Noam Chomsky instead of "genuine intellectual titans" like Conor Cruise O Brien and Eoghan Harris. (I'm not making this up) He claims that there's a "Cosy liberal Consenus" on campus. I'd love if that were true, but the words "liberal" and "consensus" don't really go together which is why the right, who agree to think whatever the Sindo leader writers tell them to think, has been in power for so long, no matter how irrational that may be.
This Sunday, Eilis O Hanlon was suggesting in her wrist-slashingly unfunny "Satirical" way that Ireland wasn't really a democracy any more as (according to her) Bertie had done some sort of dirty deal with the the Shinners to bring the Columbia 3 home from that bastion of democratic values that is Columbia. As someone who's been abroad and listened to how my country is regared as the terror state it's sickening to see the Irish people swallow the US line on Columbia. It seems that most of us think the country is a genuine democracy and that the government have nothing to do with the right-wing paramilitaries that shot all four left-wing candidates before the last election, just as many people in Britain believe that the RUC have no links with loyalists. What's more sickening still is that the Sindo printed 8 articles about the 3, none of which deviated from the line that they were anti-democratic terrorists even though it's clear that the situtation in Columbia is far more complex than they give it credit for.
But there's no room for complexity in the world of CNN, Fox News, or our own Sindo. You're either for them or against them. I'm happy to say that I'm against the Sindo. I hope the hypocrites who write for it all choke on the Columbian Cocaine they probably snort every night.
posted by seamus @ 1:46 pm
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