Tinfoil hat Chartists

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IN the political equivalent of rainbows and puppies, US president Barack Obama recently introduced a virtual petitioning system allowing the ordinary American to nail her grievances to the door of the White House. Look at that: an administration that appears to combine Martin Luther King and the best of Martin Luther. What could possibly go wrong?

The idea behind the ‘We the People’ feature on the White House website (whitehouse.gov) is that if you can gather 25,000 signatures for your cause in 30 days – the minimum had to be raised from 5,000 because the administration completely underestimated the number of crazies out there – then you can get the president to act on it.

Well, when I say “act” on it… “White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response,” says the website. In practice this means that, after all your hard work rallying supporters – you might spend days, nay weeks, toiling away on Facebook for this – you’ll be rewarded with a generous serving of fudge from some staffer.

The feature was launched at the end of September, so the responses to the first petitions have been fluttering out from the White House in the past few weeks like so many vacuous greeting cards.

“The US government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet,” came the response this week to twin petitions on that subject. One asked for an “immediate disclosure of the government’s knowledge of and communications with extra-terrestrial beings”; the other asked the White House to acknowledge an extra-terrestrial presence “engaging” the human race. But thank you for asking, said the White House. They’re so glad you asked.

There have been ten responses so far, including the one about aliens which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is likely to have no force whatsoever in dislodging the Roswell Incident from its position in the hearts of American conspiracy theorists.

The administration has also waffled a bit about reducing the operating costs of the postal service; promised action on student debt; refused to legalise marijuana ; said “that would be an ecumenical matter” (or words to that effect) about references to God in public life; and twice explained why it can’t comment on court decisions.

We the People is gaining around 31,000 new signatures a day. Last Monday, a petition was launched urging people to “fight” for Parrot, a pit bull cross who was shot by a policeman in New York. “What the officer did was wrong and we need to stand up for Parrot. It is not right what the cop did,” writes the petitioner. Admittedly the circumstances of the shooting look a little suspect, but even the petitioner must realise the poor dog is past help now. There’s nothing Obama can do for an ex-Parrot.

And already the thing is beginning to turn in on itself. There’s now a petition to “actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening”. More cleverly, another has been launched demanding “a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition”.

You get the idea. There are more tinfoil hat types than Chartists, and more champions of legalised marijuana than anything else. The issue arises in half a dozen petitions, and the response by Gil Kerlikowske, director of America’s national drug control policy, indicating that the administration is not for turning on the subject, has led to another stream of petitions calling for Kerlikowske to be fired. The entire exercise begins to look like an object placed between two mirrors: it reflects nothing but itself, and keeps getting smaller and less realistic into infinity.

Still, it’s tempting to wonder how a similar system might work here. What would we petition the government about? We the people would like to know what in heaven’s name you think you’re doing. Why did you claim not to know who the Anglo bondholders were? Can you fix the pothole outside my house? Do you seriously believe it’s the welfare system that’s the problem? Is Michael Healy-Rae a real person? What do we really know about rendition flights through Shannon? Job Bridge: are you having us on? What’s the going rate for a favourable planning decision these days? Would you kindly acknowledge that actually we didn’t all party? How do you plan to dispose of Gay Mitchell?

Of course we’d have to ask about the UFOs in Boyle, Co Roscommon, as well. And obviously Jim Corr would have to be barred; he would just hog it. But when you think about it, it becomes clear that we do need a ‘We the People’ system here. Freedom of speech is so diverting, even when it’s meaningless.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 13 November 2011

The wigger picture

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YET again, for the umpteenth time, many people will this week have been bemoaning the fact that they somehow ended up in the wrong line of work. Wig makers, we’ve discovered, must be the only people not wearing hair shirts these days. (Well, wig makers and members of the judiciary, but we knew all about them already.)

On Thursday, the Superior Courts Rules Committee decided to put an end to the compulsory wearing of wigs by judges in the higher courts, and the move was signed into law by Justice Minister Alan Shatter that night.

The BBC immediately reported that the decision was a consequence of the budget deficit, since the word ‘Ireland’ never appears in a story internationally these days unless accompanied by the words ‘IMF’ and ‘bailout’ .

“Ireland to scrap judges’ wigs to save money,” said the BBC headline, with every appearance of poking fun at Paddy’s hare-brained ideas about austerity. This seemed a bit of stretch, cutting hair to save a bob, but look here, have you seen what these wigs cost?

The change in the law governing judges’ attire will save the state €2,200 per judge, it was reported, since that is the cost of each of their wigs. First of all, hang on a minute: we’ve been paying for their wigs all this time? Second of all, how much did you say? A price of €2,200 for a wig that might get you through your chemotherapy treatment as gracefully as possible, that might be understandable, but €2,200 for a bit of grey matting barely big enough to cover the average judge’s pubic patch? That’s too much toupée.

The wigs are made in London, and a quick search of the internet will turn up the website of one of that city’s best-known legal outfitters, with an establishment at Fleet Street. You can order your wig, made “in the traditional manner” from horsehair, online. Try it for yourself.

They come in light grey or, interestingly, in blond, which was more than likely the favoured option of the permatanned Celtic Tiger-era female judge, now extinct. Sizes range from a lowly 54cm all the way up a whopping 64cm, to fit the judge who is more than usually proud of his record in administering jurisprudence. They cost stg£1,549.99 which, at the time of going to press, is the equivalent of circa €1,775, so we’ve been had in more ways than one.

Immediately, the image is formed of a wigger (for if that is not the word, it should be) welcoming a customer in central London. “Good morning, your lordship. What a fine morning. Here’s the small shred of horsehair your lordship ordered. That’ll be two thousand euros. Ha ha ha. What? No, nothing at all, your lordship. Forgive me. Just a private joke.”

At any rate, from now on, judges will be able to decide for themselves whether or not to wear a wig, which means that technically they now have the same freedom as the rest of us. In practice, though, it means judges, like the rest of us, will actually lose the freedom to wear a wig. Because unless you’re a country singer, or a transvestite, or medically bald, wig-wearing is just not done, and that is a great pity. It would have been better for judges had they gained the freedom to wear any wig of their choosing – for instance, a Cher wig. That is a freedom to which we all aspire.

Those judges who want to persist in the custom will presumably have to pay for their own wigs from now on. And just in case the referendum on judges’ pay should go against them in a few weeks’ time, they should be made aware that you really don’t have to spend two grand.

Perhaps the market will now be flooded with unwanted wigs, and démodé judges will be able to pick one up for a snip. Time was when retiring judges passed their old wigs down to their grandchildren, but young Ferdia won’t be needing it now, even if he ever does finally pass the King’s Inns exams. So either they will perch their wig comically atop the stuffed and mounted stag’s head in the billiard room, or they’ll stick it on eBay.

Failing that, another cursory search of the internet yields some quite edifying instructions on how to make your own imitation forensic wig for not more than €10. All it takes is a few metres of polyfill wadding, a pair of scissors and some glue. Of course you will also need some time to spare, but you may find yourself able to muster one or two free hours while the courts are in recess.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 16th October 2011

Pee for puzzle

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A REWARD has now been offered for information that might help crystallise matters in the case of the abandoned bottles of urine in Cork.

First of all, 62 plastic Coca-Cola bottles full of urine were found in a ditch in Glanmire at the end of September. Then, last weekend, another 175 similar bottles were found nearby, amounting to a total of 237 bottles.

The Cork Independent is offering a reward of €50 for anyone with information. The civic-minded freesheet also quizzed its online readers as to where they thought the mystery urine might have come from, to which the best answer by far was “bladders?”

Apart from sub-editors, who have been happily relieving themselves with puns on the word ‘wee’, everyone in the area is perplexed. Local councillor Noel Costello told the Cork Independent:“If someone had been caught short, they would have gone in a ditch. This is very strange. Who fills bottles of urine and throws it out?”

Who indeed? Well, as Sherlock Holmes would have it, once you’ve eliminated the impissible – sorry, the impossible – then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The British actress Sarah Miles, star of Ryan’s Daughter, has drunk her own urine for decades, believing it has health-giving properties. This means that, even if we can’t eliminate any other suspects in this inquiry, we can at least rule out Sarah Miles, since she should have wanted to keep it if it were hers. But everyone else, with the possible exception of Madonna, who is said to piddle on her own feet on purpose, must remain under suspicion for the present.

Councillor Costello is reportedly of the opinion that this is all the work of one person. However, this is not necessarily so. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) aged urine, known as lant, once had a startling range of uses, from freshening your breath to flavouring ale to glazing pastry. (Put the Danish down now. Step away from the Danish.)

Lant was also used for making gunpowder, and in that light, the cache of pee bottles can be viewed as a sort of pre-industrial arms dump. This must raise the possibility of an alarming new line of inquiry in relation to the find in the Rebel County. Urine the army now, if you will. Admittedly this is not all that plausible.

But supposing it is all the work of one person, then you can’t help feeling some sympathy. After all, when you get tired of your collection of blue Spode, for instance, or Chewbacca action figurines, or 78s, getting rid of them is a simple matter. You put them on eBay.

Even other, less desirable collections can be easily disposed of. Students find they can often simply walk away from a history of amassing traffic bollards, just by moving to a new flat. And when you finally acquire your 2,000th rubber duck, you can always organise a charity rubber duck race, and watch your tiresome collection float downriver under the guise of altruism.

Or consider the case of Edward Lovett, who collected hundreds of revolting objects from various Londoners in the last century, including shrivelled moles’ feet and shrunken sheep’s hearts. Lovett’s collection of amulets went on display at the Wellcome Collection in London this week, which goes to show that anything can become fascinating if you wait long enough.

Those of us who keep taking up new hobbies and then getting bored with them find our houses filled with inadvertent collections. Spools of candlewick here, bags of felt there, an archery set, Cantonese language discs, a Hammond organ… they supply daily evidence of our shameful want of commitment, and it would be no surprise if we wanted to get rid of them.

But the person who finally grows out of collecting their belly button fluff or, as in this case, their pee, faces a more intractable problem. Even the most committed egotist will realise that nobody is going to want to take that off your hands – certainly not in Glanmire, at least. There may be people in California with an interest in acquiring other people’s belly button fluff or fermented urine, but there can be no such person in county Cork, and long may it remain so.

Clearly, then, the culprit believed they had no option but to dispose of their unwanted pee collection in secret. The only question that remains is why did he or she not empty the bottles down the toilet first?

There can be only two possible answers. Either the culprit is all piss and vinegar, and left the cache as an eloquent statement of their misanthropy and ill will. Or they are even now laughing into their flavoured ale, and claiming a €50 reward from the Cork Independent.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 9 October 2011

Birdwatcher-watching

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STARBUCKS, it was reported this week, is considering introducing electronic displays so customers can play Angry Birds, the world’s most popular mobile game, while they sip their macchiato.

Perhaps this tells us something about the evolution of social mores. Recently enough it was bad manners to use a mobile phone in a cafe; now you can use your mobile to fire birds out of a slingshot at enemy pigs, while the other patrons in the cafe look on and maybe even, on the happiest of days, applaud.

Angry Birds has been downloaded some 350 million times, so this is probably just a simple matter of majority rule. Even British prime minister David Cameron is reportedly a fan of Angry Birds, which will be a comfort to those who look to the Bullingdon club for guidance on proper behaviour in polite society.

It’s funny, then, the way having an interest in actual birds is still so very uncool. It’s that time of year again, when the birdwatchers arrive in south-west Clare. You forget all about them from one autumn to the next. Then one morning you wake up and ten men in nylon jackets are leaning over your garden wall, looking through binoculars and pretending they can’t see you.

This is a place so windy that what few trees we have are all reaching longingly toward the more temperate east. Nevertheless we have birds which, like proper locals, we don’t appreciate. For many of us, there are really only three species of bird – ones that look like crows, ones that look like seagulls and ones that look like sparrows. The latter group includes robins; everyone knows robins.

“Oh look, there’s a kittiwake,” say friends who come to visit. “What? Where? Oh, you mean that seagull thing?” we reply.

One year a Canada Warbler got blown off course and ended up here by mistake, and apparently this is no place for a Canada Warbler. Bird-watchers flocked from all over the world to see it. This was an event so momentous in bird-watching circles that it even brought about a relaxation of the stringent rules governing birdwatcher/non-birdwatcher interaction. Customarily, when they see you coming, birdwatchers fly away, or attempt to make themselves invisible in the hedgerows, but the beatific presence of a stranded yellow bird led to a social breakthrough. They actually let us look through their binoculars.

There it was, a tiny yellow body sitting motionless on a low branch. The excitement was palpable. “Wilsonia Canadensis, you say? My word, how interesting.” The birdwatchers preened, visibly pleased at having impressed us. A new mutual regard became a possibility. Maybe this birdwatching lark had something going for it after all. Better go home and lock the cats up.

Then it emerged that nobody had a rescue operation in mind – nobody, not even the birdwatchers who had flown in from Canada, and so, you would think, might have been in a position to give a doomed Canada Warbler a lift home. Birdwatchers don’t interfere; nature has to have its way; the bird must die; they simply observe it in its last wretched hours and write what they see into their wretched notebooks.

It is at moments like those that you realise you will never be a birdwatcher. You can, however, become a birdwatcher-watcher. Why do they all have the same plumage? Is there a shop that specialises in navy rainproof clothing for birdwatchers? Except that one there, look – do you think that high-vis vest is an attempt to attract a mate? Shh, don’t laugh, you’ll startle them. Why are so few of them handsome? Is that why the handsome ones stand out so much? Why do none of them have young? Come to think of it, where are all the females?

Sometimes the bird-watchers arrive in such great numbers that the experience calls to mind wading through the pigeons on St Mark’s Square. Only by clapping your hands sharply can you get them to move out of the way. To their credit, though, it must be said of them that they leave very few droppings.

At night, tired and thirsty, they make their way in V formation to the local cafe bar, where they sit for two-and-a-half hours with one half-pint of Guinness, thereby subverting years of carefully-placed propaganda about the benefits of tourism to the rural economy.

Meanwhile, back in the real economy, the man behind Angry Birds will fly into Ireland next month. Mikael Hed, chief executive of the game developer Rovio, is attending the Dublin Web Summit on 27 and 28 October, which may be of interest to people who follow the migratory patterns of tycoons. This could be a chance to pitch him the Angry Birds spin-off – Angry Birdwatchers.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 25 September 2011

The idea of a university

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THE makers of Countdown are in for a bit of a shock. The new generation of students will not have either time or inclination to get stoned in front of daytime television; they will be too busy sucking up to captains of industry.

Dublin City University this week announced a new programme to make its graduates more attractive to employers. Professor Brian MacCraith, president of DCU, was quoted as saying,“It’s our responsibility to ensure we’ve done all we can to make sure they are developing the attributes that we know employers want today”.

Apparently there are six of these ‘attributes’. Graduates should be “creative and enterprising, committed to continuous learning, solution-oriented, effective communicators”… zzz… sorry I nodded off there for a second. Where was I? Oh yes, “globally engaged and active leaders”.

Clearly, the ability to put together a sentence that is not an affront to lovers of the English language is not among the attributes. Still, I suppose we should be thankful that at least DCU didn’t mention that accursed box, outside of which all exemplary thinking is said to be done.

It should be put on record, so that the graduates of tomorrow can some day tell their grandchildren about it, that there was once a time when education was an end in itself. You spent a few years finding your way around the ancient Mediterranean world with no obvious purpose in mind; you embedded yourself in the sort of mathematics whose application was neither here nor there; you flirted incautiously with Nietzsche and Rimbaud. You followed it up with some assiduous travelling, and the whole experience was enough to make a graduate of you.

DCU, like so many other third-level institutions, doesn’t promote that sort of learning. At DCU, you can get a degree in Sports Science and Health, which entails “Putting science into physical activity”. You can also get a B Sc in Multimedia, in which you learn how to “Use technology to create tomorrow’s interactive media” (though it’s not clear what, other than technology, you might use for that purpose).

This raises the question: can universities have it both ways? Can they encourage people to spend three or four years studying something that teaches them nothing about the human condition – something that is, in fact, neither more nor less than vocational training – and then expect them to be “rounded”?

The education minister, Ruairi Quinn, praised DCU for its “vision and foresight” in this, as it now seems to be common knowledge that employers don’t want your mind broadened, really. In fact, it would be ideal if every graduate was just broad-minded enough to regard a job bridge internship as a wonderful opportunity. ‘Got yourself a first-class-honours degree? Put that “global engagement and active leadership” to work for €50 a week on top of your jobseeker’s allowance! And be thankful!’

Under the so-called Generation 21 plan, every student at DCU will have a digital portfolio to monitor their development. They can then show this “validated record of personal development” to employers and,“if the portfolio is blank, that tells its own story”, according to DCU’s MacCraith.

A validated record of personal development probably is not appropriate for most students, whose personal development consists in updating their Facebook status, drinking, cramming, being hungover, pretending they’re not crazy about people they secretly are crazy about, living in abject filth (because unless everyone observes the cleaning rota then no one can), watching reruns of Antiques Roadshow in an ironic way, learning to speak like an American, and eating cheeseburgers because, oh man,they could, like, totally murder a cheeseburger right now. Students know intuitively that, as Oscar Wilde would have it, nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

In contrast, DCU’s model graduate – its Stepford graduate, if you will – is a generous player of team sports and is magnanimous in both victory and defeat; he drinks in moderation and takes regular exercise; he keeps up with current affairs yet reacts to them with neither anger nor despair – he doesn’t believe in anger or despair, he thinks you should Get Out There And Do Something ; he votes the way his parents vote; he is not discouraged by failure; he thinks trade unions are anachronistic; he says “entrepreneurialism” instead of “enterprise”; he runs marathons in aid of sick children; he is a walking Kipling poem; he is a massive pain in the neck.

The Generation 21 plan gets under way at the start of term next week. Is it too late now to switch to a different college? Because there may still be universities out there in which the object of an education is to produce outstanding citizens, rather than outstanding employees.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 11 September 2011