Satisfy This!

Some may be familiar with employee satisfaction surveys, which are ostensibly to gauge the employee’s satisfaction with his work and associated considerations.

Now a hardened veteran of such surveys, I accord them no importance. For the firm, they fulfil many functions, the principal of these being to measure how much the firm can continue paying its employees at current rates without people packing it in when they are still needed to do work, thus causing the firm to incur costs for hiring new employees.

Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Believed Citizens Had Rights

Some recollections, which may need checking against the record:

I watched some of the televised debate between Rabbitte, Sargent, McDowell and Adams last night, and turned off just after Rabbitte had compared McDowell to a ‘menopausal Paris Hilton’, a remark far more minger than zinger.

Although I might be happy to see Michael McDowell be the object of some gratuitous insult and I care little also for Paris Hilton’s feelings, this piece of sexist claptrap was out of order. In an all-male panel, Rabbitte thought he could score points by feminising his opponent. The scene says something about Irish politics and what you need to do to win power.

Up until that point, though, I thought Rabbitte had done quite well. His opening speech was quite good.

Gerry Adams, on the other hand, was leaden, unsure of himself, and surprisingly inarticulate. His apparent popularity may be more a function of the peace process than any enduring aspect of his character. Now that things have been sewn up in the North, there is a danger (for him and his party) that hitherto sympathetic people start to get sick of him. The problem here with his party’s all-Ireland approach to politics is that without a unified state, you are talking about a country that does not really exist. This might work in Northern Ireland, but unfortunately, for really existing elections in the Republic, this seems to entail a sky-based approach to pie.

On pie. Was I just hungry before bedtime, or was there quite a lot of talk of pie and cake? There was one point where I thought I heard Gerry Adams mention the ‘tax cake’, but this was probably the ‘tax take’. I shall give him the benefit of the doubt in this case, but McDowell’s criticisms of his lack of economic knowledge appeared to be generally correct.

Trevor Sargent was the most impressive speaker, and I liked his story about the woman waiting in the car for her train. I found it amusing how Gerry Adams had made a point of making some stumbling remarks in Irish during his speech, whereas Sargent, who seemed to be wearing his fainne, began his with a quick ‘dia daoibh’, and that was it. During the debate he was the most effective critic of McDowell.

I don’t think Michael McDowell appeared on the programme to win votes from Sinn Fein or Labour. Rather, he was there to retain and win over people who are primarily concerned with holding on to the gains they have made in the last 10 years. Part of this entails raising the spectre of ‘left-wing’ politics, hence the pre-debate poster session and the joke about the “the left, the hard left, and the left-overs”, which probably pleased many of his potential voters.

If I have not much to say about the substance of what I saw of the debate, it is probably because I could not discern any substance to it. Besides, it was way past my bedtime.

Knowing me..

These remarks by Larry Flynt on the passing of Jerry Falwell, which I came across via Angry Arab’s site, strike me as true:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Before the gap between image and reality gets bridged, you tend to demonise people who hold views you find highly objectionable, until you discover that the views they hold may really only constitute a fragment of who they are as a person. Once you get to know someone, it becomes a lot harder to subject them to ridicule, which can spoil some of your fun.

..but the dianetic is interested in you

I caught some of the Panorama documentary on Scientology the other night. John Sweeney’s outburst formed the focus of the publicity prior to the documentary, and it appears to be shaping debate in the aftermath of its airing too.

My first reaction when seeing him responding with quasi-military barracking to his pursuer’s constant harrassment was to laugh. He was clearly attempting to retain some sense of journalistic order, but these attempts -in such a surreal and oppressive situation- led him to mirror the full-on approach of his opponent. A person less concerned with the pressures of delivering a documentary might have been more inclined to respond with a foul language, or a knee to the opponent’s crigs. Neither response would have been justified, but it would have been certainly understandable. I also thought the scientologist missed a trick by not offering him a ‘free stress test’.

I don’t have much to say about Scientology itself, but there were some features of the tactics employed by its practicioners in the documentary which are recognisable from other situations. The incessant recourse to the vocabulary of reason – facts, bias, objectivity, reason, bigotry, prejudice and so on- allied to the presentation of all sorts of ‘facts’ is employed to force the opponent into submission and compliance.

How does a rational individual deal with such people? By attempting to debate with them and their practices, are you not engaging them on their own terms? Have you not lost before you’ve begun?

As long as Scientology is recognised by the public as a cult, there is the hope that people have the knowledge to recognise it and steer clear from it. But what happens when this false rationality is not tethered to a recognisable ‘brand’? What if the existence of Scientology is merely a symptom of a wider malaise in human relations?

For example, on the television every night of the week (I am sorry if this comes across as one of my hobby horses), you have programmes broadcast that highlight the need for receptiveness to the advice of ‘experts’, in property purchases, household cleanliness, personal grooming, child rearing, and so on. The storyline of each programme is the same: as long as the clueless and confused -even humiliated- participant follows the expert’s advice, then things will work out better. If you watch these programmes night after night -as many people do- do you not end up acquiescing in the receptiveness that these programmes demand? Is that not the whole point of the programmes: so that you are receptive to purchasing the products advertised before, during, and after?

The easy and desirable answer is to say that people who watch the programmes enjoy independence and freedom, and one should respect them enough to realise that they are able to make up their own minds about what they see. But what if they are neither free nor independent?

If they are independent, why do they watch these programmes religiously, when the principal lessons proferred -be observant to the conditions and demands of the marketplace, and behave according to the expectations of ‘experts’- is the same every time? If they are free, why do they choose to submit to the same programmes every week?

The secular power of bum cheese, or what’s Ottoman Turkish for ‘theologocentrism’?

Would someone please explain to me what Mr Kevin Myers means by the following:

He emancipated women, gave Turkey a form of democracy, and aware of the religious power of language, replaced Arab script with Roman.

On my holidays in Turkey last year, I was very grateful for this particular instance of Ataturk’s modernisation. It meant that I could recognise some words to help me overcome my near complete ignorance of the Turkish language, with the aid of a guidebook. It was not enough, however, to stop me –sans guidebook- holding an imaginary bottle to my head and making glugging noises in front of a puzzled ice-cream vendor and a queue of people in a Turkish village, in my search for some water.

But that is a distraction. What does Myers mean when he says that language has ‘religious power’? One infers that Myers thinks that Turkish written in Arab script has less ‘religious power’ than Turkish written in Roman script. But –and this is where I get confused- it is still the same language. If one Turk says to another ‘by God I am going to batter the lugs off you’, it is hard to see how his words hold less ‘religious power’ by dint of the fact that the language is widely printed in Roman script instead of Arab.

Perhaps Myers means that the language reforms instituted by Ataturk, including the replacement of Arabic and Persian loanwords with Turkish words deemed more suitable, were intended to put in place a language with less ‘religious power’. But that does not lead us any closer to the question of what constitutes ‘the religious power of language’.

My brethren, there is vocabulary in every language that has particular religious associations. Verily I say unto ye, these associations may be manifest not only in vocabulary, but also in the style of speaking and writing. Yet this does not mean that one language has more ‘religious power’ than another.

Does one think that the words of the millions of Arabic-speaking atheists out there hold ‘greater religious power’ than their French- or modern Turkish-speaking counterparts? Is the Farsi rendering of ‘just this bottle of Jeyes Fluid please’ more religiously charged than its Irish version?

O blog readers, in the beginning there was the Word, but it was not an English Word. What came next was what people made of it.

An example, perhaps, of the ‘religious power of language’?

Left On The Streets

Fianna Fáil today promised to make Dublin one of the best places in the world to live.

I am guessing that this grandiose nonsense -usually the preserve of multinational corporations- comes in response to the observations of many that Dublin is actually a bit of a shithole.
But let it never be said that I simply hurl from the ditch. I can think of one low-cost measure that would improve life in Dublin immensely. Among those who actually walk and do not spend the year decomposing in their cars, the residents of Dublin walk hundreds of unnecessary miles every year in trying to dodge people coming in the opposite direction. This is not because Dublin is particularly overcrowded, or because it is full of fearful homo consumens, but because many people are first-generation city dwellers with no idea of how to live in a city. Cattle Marts and packed hotel discos from years past have left many thinking that walking amid the madding crowd as though your legs were the buckled front wheel of a bike is just the way it is.

Well, it isn’t. My humble suggestion is that people walk on the left hand side when proceeding along the street. It would cost a fraction of the amount spent by political parties on election posters in the Dublin area, and would improve people’s life quite considerably.

Blinding Dates

I have a problem with dates. When I read history, I rarely remember the dates mentioned. In fact, I go out of my way not to remember them. For me, what happened and how it happened is a lot more important than when it happened. It seems to me that chronology only comes into it when you want to consider how or if two or more events were interrelated. Or if you are Columbo.

Actually, that’s not entirely right. Thinking about the events of the last 90 or so years, I find it illuminating to think about an event in world history -say the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War- and map those to the history of my own family and other people I know and think about what they were doing at the time. I find this a useful way of, er, ‘keeping it real’.

When I say dates, I mean it in the more punctilious sense. Like finding some sort of significance in the fact that Neville Chamberlain resigned on 10th May 1940.

With this in mind, I found this article by Jim Gibney a bit odd.

At 11.45am, 16 minutes after proceedings began, all the ministers of the new administration were affirmed. Sixteen minutes of time changed the face of Ireland’s political landscape and set the scene for the next phase of the republican struggle – the countdown to the reunification of Ireland.

This paragraph, and those which immediately precede it in the piece, seem to be an attempt to confer some sense of historical resonance to the occasion he describes, by means of a spot of date-fetishism. This sort of thing -the most prominent examples of late are ’9/11′ and ’7/7′, but you also have the likes of 1690, 1916- has always struck me as the first cousin of numerology and astrology. The dates per se have no importance, but they get filled with meaning by those who deem it necessary.

At a personal level, I have no objection to people wishing me a happy birthday. But once you get to commemorations at a collective level, ideology rears its fat carbuncle-blighted arse. (Granted, there is an ideology behind the celebration of birthdays, and then you have political birthday celebrations but I don’t have time for that right now, so shut up) This means that certain interests decide that some things are worth remembering more than others. Furthermore, it takes the ‘thing’ worth remembering, and reinterprets it, usually putting it to some official purpose or other.

So, to use an obvious example, George Bush uses American Independence Day to validate the ‘war on terror’ of his own administration (but maybe this is not such a great example: for him and his handlers, a visit to the barbers is a validation of the war on terror).

I guess that what bothers me about Gibney’s article is that his odd preoccupation with dates is accompanied by a tendentious rewrite of recent history. It is as though the dates are there to lend legitimacy to the history.

This is why his date matters:

‘From this point forward through the operation of the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement – the all-Ireland ministerial council, the executive and assembly – all the people of this island for the first time since partition will be part of a single, island-wide political entity.’

This might be true, but all the people of this island have already been part of a single political entity post-partition. It’s called the European Union. To give the statement some sort of proper significance, Gibney has to insert the rather dreary qualifier of ‘island-wide’.

Then there’s this:

On Tuesday the building housed those with a story of a different kind – nationalists. A displaced people, a maligned people, a marginalised people at last found their rightful place at the centre of political power.

Nationalists were not in the main ‘displaced’. Palestinians, for example, are a displaced people. But every Irish nationalist had citizenship rights. Displacement might have meant Craigavon, but we aren’t talking refugee camps here. Second, they were not in the main ‘maligned’. By fearful unionists maybe, but not by citizens of the Irish republic, and not, as it happens, by citizens of the United Kingdom or the rest of the world. Third, nationalists are not -or at least were not- a people. I never once heard someone in an adult conversation say ‘we nationalists’. But this may be the company I have kept over the years.

You get the feeling that Gibney has had to talk up nationalist oppression in order to justify the rather dreary institutions that have been set up after decades of fear, murder and bombing. Then he calls forth a dramatis personae of Irish republicanism, as if their presence in Stormont can serve as a distraction to the fact that partition still exists, and all the death was worth nothing. Yet the facts on the ground -whatever his hyperbole- indicate that partition is still there, and will remain for a fairly long stretch. Not that it matters that much now that we’ve got the EU, though.

He then says:

Bobby Ballagh, Ireland’s leading artist, recalled fallow times when revisionists held sway in the south.

He could have added that it’s now bumper season for revisionists in the north.

Who dat-a

Someone called “John Reid” says that the most valuable thing we own is our identity. He also says that it is ‘our most precious possession’ and an ‘increasingly precious asset’.

Fine. The only thing is that you cannot own your identity. Nor is it an asset that you can get shot of. I am who I am only in relation to other people. If I owned my identity, surely I could do something to change it, or to get rid of it. But because identity is a historical thing, attempts to change it or get rid of it are vexed. I might try and change my name to Nissan Micra 88-D-4097, but I would still end up being known as the madman who used to have a fairly normal name. My normal name would still be there in the background. That is only on the public side. My identity is also bound up with own my memories. I cannot decide  arbitrarily that I have spent the last 50 years hunting down fugitive Nazis, since a) I have not reached 50 and b) I have all these contradictory memories which make this impossible to carry off, like watching Crimewatch in my school uniform. This part of one’s identity can prove very difficult to shake off.

I personally do not see how I ‘own’ my kidneys, since they are not attached to my body because of some sort of contract, but because I was born with them. However, I could understand how, in a social sense, I could ‘own’ them because of the fact that I can exchange them -or at least one of them- for cash. But I cannot exchange my identity.

When “Reid” talks about ‘identity’ he is really talking about the means by which others can verify that I am who I say I am. Having such means is a good thing, as I would not like to arrive home to find another man sleeping in my bed, eating my porridge etc, and claiming the right to do so based on the fact that he is really I.

These means also entail making it pretty much impossible for me to be anyone other than who I say I am. Maybe this is also a good thing, but it has nothing important to do with my identity in terms of how I know myself.

But “Reid” conflates the two notions -identity as a personal fact, and identity as an administrative function- to make it seem as though having an identity card is very important. I suspect that one of the reasons he performs this sleight of pen is because he sees people purely in terms of units to be managed and administered. The outworkings of this approach could be very bad for one’s sense of identity.

Head Line News

Not sure where this one is leading. Maybe an extended essay on the production of cancer stories in newspapers: I think they are of the same order of things as astrology readings. Today’s gem in the Herald AM claims that oral sex increases risk of cancer.

The Ego and The It

What is the ‘it’ in those Progressive Democrat posters showing Michael McDowell with the line ‘Don’t throw it all away’?

I have been talking to people, and they have some suggestions:

• It’s hundreds of hours a year spent travelling to work, headbutting the steering wheel to Matt Cooper’s drone;
• It’s fainting on public transport;
• It’s the dawning reality that the work you do every day may sent to the other side of the world for someone else to do, and to avoid getting thrown on the scrapheap you must learn new skills to work longer hours with deteriorated conditions, and that the decision to give you your notice will be made by a man somewhere in America whom you have never met and whose first name is his mother’s maiden name;
• It’s the primary school for your children that doesn’t exist;
• It’s a dilapidated health service;
• It’s getting tailgated by an SUV;
• It’s telecommunications companies having you by the nads;
• It’s the remainder of my breakfast roll;
• It’s our love, as sung by the Bee Gees;
• It’s my portfolio of rental properties;
• It’s my consultant salary;
• It’s an appeal to the dominant anal hoarding characteristics of the Irish middle class.
• It’s a fat baldy man in glasses.

And so on.