Authors: John Waters
Had he stuck around, would he have repeated his trick of the early 1980s and blown the whistle on a spiralling economy, a spendthrift government, a banking sector out of control? The very idea is almost too tragic to contemplate.
39
Paddy O’Blog
A
ll the time nowadays you meet people, usually males, who tell you there is about to be a revolution. When you do not, in response, begin to nod aggressively in agreement, they then tend to peer at you earnestly. No, they stress, there
really
is going to be a revolution. Don’t you know?
What you know, immediately and with certainty, is that yer man is a blogger. He spends every spare minute, and many minutes that he cannot really spare from his personal hygiene routine, thumping aggressively at a keyboard and imagining that he is doing something to change political reality.
Blogging brings out of the cultural undergrowth and into the light the ‘bah!’ of those whose investment in public action is confined to the hours they spend jerking off in front of computer screens, usually anonymous and always in a disposition of rage and spite. Politically without content and intellectually brain-dead, this cyberspace cornerboyism imagines itself to be hugely sophisticated and threatening to the status quo. Its sense of self-importance is nourished by elements in the mainstream media which have become alert to the possibilities of slipstreaming on the popularity of the web among ‘the youth’. In truth, these virtual Don Quixotes do nothing but compete with one another to utter the most immediate and banal opinions in the most poisonous way, but this does nothing to dilute their sense of themselves as plucky and beleaguered dissidents in some repressive dictatorship. In their heart-of-hearts, they long for some totalitarian tyrant to persecute them.
Paddy O’Blog, the Hibernian sub-species of an international phenomenon, is even nastier and more stupid than most of the foreign variations. Pasty-faced and under-sexed, he sits in his darkened room waiting for someone to say or do something, and then he gets to work. He spits fury and indignation like a neurotic Kalashnikov with a jammed trigger mechanism. Everything comes from the top of his head, which is as flat as the earth he inhabits. No inanity is too asinine, no banality too boring for him to hammer vigorously into his keyboard. His first thought on anything becomes his settled opinion, and usually this is received from some other blogger, who just happened to get up a bit earlier and, having nobody to slavishly imitate, delivered himself of the scintillating opinion that George W. Bush is a ‘moron’ or that Christianity, the civilization which to its sorrow begat him, is ‘mumbo jumbo’.
Paddy O’Blog has a limited vocabulary. His compositions are studded with words like ‘crap’, ‘pathetic’ and ‘arsehole’. He does not think beyond the obvious, but taps out the obvious as though it is the most interesting thing he has ever thought, which very often it is. He is a coward: almost always hiding behind some ridiculous sobriquet, like ‘Slugger’ or ‘Nemesis’. Nobody knows where he lives or anything much about him, other than the opinions he expresses about other people. He is a parasite. He is jealous, mean-spirited, malevolent and petty. He is full of rage and spite. He knows nothing of beauty or love, but only what he hates and whom he envies. No, let us cut to the chase: he knows nothing. He communicates with nobody other than his blogging mates, who are just as ignorant as he is. He considers himself on the same level as journalists who must go out into the world every day, gather information, collect facts, submit themselves to editorial and legal processes, and ultimately take responsibility for every word they write. In fact, a regular theme of his contributions is the idea that he is in the process of supplanting conventional media and making journalists redundant.
This is the only thing he is right about. Because the mainstream media have insisted on seeing the Internet as a cultural as well as a technological ‘development’ and are afraid of seeming ‘out of touch’, conventional journalism has been extending an extraordinary level of deference towards O’Blog and his chums. It is a part of the daily cant of journalism that ‘citizen journalism’, blogging, interactivity and other ‘new’ forms of communication are changing our democracies, in radical and, it is implied, positive ways. Journalists, terrified of seeming unhip, declare that the bloggers do essentially the same thing as themselves. It does not appear to occur to any of them that the relationship of bloggers to newspapers, for example, is that of a flea to a dog, that the blogger is a parasite who leeches off the ‘old’ media, especially the printed category, feeding off what the newspapers produce and giving nothing back, but gradually squeezing the life out of that which he subsists on. Newspapers, instead of holding back and allowing the bloggers to choke on their own spite, have opened up their publications, inviting O’Blog to ‘comment’ on their content – largely unedited and for free!
It is ‘interesting’, though for dubious reasons, to study the ‘threads’ which nowadays are attached to many newspaper articles on web editions, like dingleberries from a sheep’s arse. These are not neutral conduits for spontaneous opinions, but channels dedicated to forms of mob disgruntlement which has, for perhaps good reasons, no other outlet. Contributors appear to come to the process with a mindset possibly symptomatic of the isolationism involved in Internet communications generally, and anticipating a certain group dynamic. Most contributors appear mostly to want to draw attention to themselves, seeking to convey an impression of strength, cleverness, cynicism or aggressiveness, while pre-empting the possibility of hostility or ridicule by pushing these responses in front like spears. It is often difficult to perceive any intellectual or democratic distinction between most of what they write and the ancient rite of public urination.
Yet, newspapers seem to believe that offering space to P. O’Blog & Co. is a contribution to democracy requiring all conventions and inhibitions to be laid aside. Loyal readers, who carefully consider every aspect of an issue before taking out a writing pad and fountain pen and composing a careful and balanced letter to the editor, are expected to shell out
€
2 or more for the newspaper, and requested to keep their letters short. But O’Blog can rant and rave at the newspaper’s expense for as long as he likes, leeching off its content, insulting its journalists and predicting its imminent demise. If a reader includes in his letter what is euphemistically called a ‘four-letter word’, it is either excised or disabled by asterisks before publication, yet, on the free website of the same newspaper, O’Blog can refer to ‘cock’, ‘cunts’ and ‘fuckers’ as if he were sitting on a high stool at the bar of his local pub.
As a result, there is now a major crisis in the global newspaper industry. Arising from the complacency and stupidity of the commercial media, bloggers have been enabled to create, for next to nothing, sites in which the content of the professional writer is regurgitated and offered up to the malevolent attentions of O’Blog and his ilk.
Within a short time, this crisis will claim its first casualties in the Irish newspaper industry. It seems not to have occurred to anyone that, if this process runs its projected course, the world will before long be left to the tender mercies of O’Blog and his mates. But, without the ‘old’ media to leech off, Paddy O’Blog will have nothing to blog about. The ‘conventional’ media, having been obliterated, will have to be resurrected in an entirely new form, and the old standards and values restored. The public will have to come to realize that, if they want to have decent professional communications, they will have to pay for them. Media organizations will have to find ways to make this work. It would be too much, one supposes, to ask that they and the profession of journalism might find ways of dealing with the problem before it is too late.
40
The Begrudger
F
or a long time, through good times and bad, perhaps the most maligned species in Irish society was the Begrudger. The case for the prosecution was comprehensively laid out some years ago by Professor J. J. Lee, in his excellent volume,
Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society
. Lee credited the Irish with coining the word ‘begrudger’, but he also argued, in the course of a brilliant mini-essay on the subject, that the documentary evidence of begrudging Irish behaviour was pretty thin on the ground. While noting that it was a tradition of Irish society that ‘immense amounts of time were devoted to spiting the other fellow’, he also observed that ‘the begrudger mentality did derive fairly rationally from a mercantilist concept of the size of the status cake’, and that since the size of that cake was more or less fixed, ‘one man’s gain did tend to be another man’s loss’.
It was noticeable that, during the Tiger years, members of the Irish entrepreneurial community employed the concept of begrudgery almost in the manner of a club to beat down even the most tentative hint of criticism concerning the boom and its benefits. Even the merest hint of questioning of their motives, methods or manoeuvrings immediately invited the taunt of ‘begrudger’, which proved a handy way of discouraging all scrutiny of their activities. To listen to a particular brand of entrepreneur, one would think that the only thing standing between the Irish people and boundless wealth and happiness was this unfortunate tendency to ‘begrudge’ those who got up at the first burr of the alarm clock and went out to lay two blocks where only one lay before. Those who did not wholeheartedly endorse the entrepreneur’s breathtaking path to glory, his
savoir faire
, intelligence and wit, his hale and uninhibited enjoyment of the fruits of his endeavours, were portrayed as malevolent and small-minded, carping sneeringly out of the sides of their mouths about the achievements of their betters. For years, while the Tiger thrived, it was impossible to say a ‘bad word’ about the handling of the economy without being savaged as a ‘begrudger’.
Something interesting happened to journalism also. It’s an odd feature of Irish newspapers that, whereas what you might call the engine and chassis of the vehicle is provided by solid economic commentary of an orthodox, market-centred nature, the bodywork is of an entirely different cast. Most of these so-called ‘stars’ are people who in the old days would have described themselves as socialists and who remain, in spite of improving personal circumstances, of a left-leaning disposition.
Back in the 1980s, it was the height of fashion. All you needed to do was adopt a pessimistic attitude, predict the worst possible outcome for any given aspect of public policy and, above all, accuse the government as often as possible of being wrong-headed and incompetent. Back then, the country was in such a state of chaos that it was impossible to be excessively pessimistic.
But the journalistic doomsters were extremely chagrined by the arrival of the Celtic Tiger. Not only was it neither expected nor predicted, but its arrival, and more especially its timing in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, seemed to represent for the doomsters an accusation, suggesting they had been wrong about everything. For years they had been insisting upon the intrinsic unsustainablity and amorality of the capitalist system and predicting the final meltdown of the Irish economy. Now, far from melting, the Irish economy was confounding everything they said and believed, right in front of their eyes. They had no choice but to button it.
Things would have been lean had it not been for the tribunals, but Flood and Moriarty provided an opportunity to transmute the doomsters’ ideological pique into a kind of postmodern fiscal puritanism, allowing them to maintain a continuous high moral tone during a period when their portfolios of opinions were otherwise at risk of redundancy.
Thus, the nature of Irish journalism altered fundamentally in the Tiger years, manifesting a dearth of criticism of economic policy, or of issues of societal justice and fairness in a contemporaneous context. Gone were the old journalistic standbys, like attacks on cutbacks in public spending, appeals on behalf of ‘the less fortunate in society’ and the angry polemic against incompetence in high places. A new tune was created: All Politicians are Crooks and Shysters. Interestingly, this new score related purely to times past, avoiding other than passing and often tortuous reference to the contemporary management of the national affairs, which appeared so unassailable that the erstwhile doomsters had to bite their pencils and keep any doubts to themselves.
Thus, although he was later to re-emerge with the chill winds of recession, the fabled begrudger abandoned Irish society when it needed him most.
As a result of the decades of anti-begrudger propaganda, we tend to identify begrudgery purely with negativity, envy, jealousy and spite. In fact, there may, in the modern world, be a profoundly redemptive quality to this maligned disposition. Back in the 1990s, as the Celtic Tiger was finding its stride, a British clinical psychologist called Oliver James published a book called
Britain on the Couch
, in which he gave rise to the ineluctable inference that what the Irish call begrudgery might be one of the most effective defence mechanisms employed by the delicate human psyche against the seemingly unavoidable tendency of reality to treat different people in an arbitrarily uneven-handed fashion.
Dr James argued that the principal difference between the 1990s and the 1950s was the fact that most or all of us were able to ‘know’ far, far more people than if we had lived a generation before. Whereas our grandparents ‘knew’ just their immediate family, neighbours, a small circle of friends and acquaintances, most of us today, courtesy of mass media society, have come to ‘know’ hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. This, he argued, has multiplied the effects of our natural tendency to compare ourselves with others. Being surrounded on a daily basis by the manifest ‘success’ of the rich and famous, we are confronted at all times by the evidence of our own relative failure. This constant, invariably negative comparison, James argued, creates chemical imbalances which attack our self-esteem, confidence and sense of self-possession, creating envy, depression and spiritual malfunction, spawning drug-addictions, obsessive compulsive disorders and insatiable appetites for newer and greater forms of gratification.