”What do you mean, “No”?
Quote of the Day
”Trump’s most outrageous innovation was dispensing with the pretense that he needed to provide reasons for his positions. The source for all of his claims was his own authority—he endlessly assured audiences that he knew more about anything than anybody (“Believe me”). Those who endorsed him—at first, mostly a motley collection of has-beens or outsiders—were winners. Anybody who challenged him was a loser whom Trump would dismiss, playground-style, as crazy, weak, sick, dumb, pathetic, a liar, a bimbo, a piggy. His greatest apostasy was not his rejection of any particular set of ideas, but his categorical rejection of the whole notion of ideas.”
- Jonathan Chait, writing in The Atlantic
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Lee Valley String Band | When First Into This Country
Long Read of the Day
The first surprise at the Other Voices festival in Dingle came on Friday night when Michael D. Higgins, who had just stepped down after 14 years as the President of Ireland, turned up unexpectedly to read three poems from a recently published collection of his.
Ponder that for a moment: a president of a liberal democracy who had found the time and energy at the age of 84 to publish a book of his poems. (He’d already published four other books of poetry and three collections of essays.) But then Michael D. (as he is universally known in Ireland) is sui generis. He’s also well known for ignoring the constipated reticence traditionally expected of Irish heads of state by his penchant for expressing distaste for neoliberal capitalism and other excrescences. Indeed, one suspects that members of the Irish political establishment thought of him as Mrs Breen in Ulysses described her husband: “a caution to rattlesnakes”.
When US Vice-President Mike Pence came to Ireland there’s a photograph of him with Michael D. in the latter’s study in the presidential residence. It shows the two statesmen in a bookish study almost as untidy as mine!
After watching him deliver his poems on Friday we went looking for supper and found a quiet corner of the Skellig hotel (where we were staying). And just as we were contemplating the choice of dessert, who should walk in but the former president, his wife and a couple of companions who sat at a corner table just across from us. No fuss, no security detail. No fawning maitre’d. Just a former president coming in for a spot of dinner.
Now, I know that Ireland is a small country in which life moves at a different pace and on a different scale. Still, there was something comforting in the quiet normality of it all…
It also brought back memories of a day in 1995 when I spent an enjoyable morning with Michael D. He was then a government minister with responsibility for arts and culture and his department had published a Green Paper on the future of broadcasting which was radically different from the normal run of Irish governmental publications. It seemed to me that the minister’s fingerprints were all over it and the Observer (whose TV critic I then was) dispatched me to interview him. So I flew to Ireland on a wet Sunday evening having arranged to meet him in the Great Southern Hotel in Galway (his constituency) the following morning at 10:30am.
The interview was scheduled for an hour because he had a Cabinet meeting in Dublin in the afternoon. I had booked a small conference room and coffee. He arrived slightly late and remarked on the box of cigars which had slipped out of my case when I was taking out my notebook. I asked him if he would like a cigar. “Yes, “he replied, “but don’t tell my wife”. So we sat there in a classic smoke-filled room smoke and talked. And talked. And talked. It was not so much an interview as a conversation between a couple of eggheads. We talked about media ecology, Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, censorship, the impact of TV on Irish society, the Late Late Show, and sundry other topics.
11:30 came and went. More coffee was ordered. Periodically, his Private Secretary would put his head round the door and be waved away. Eventually, though, the poor chap became more insistent. “Minister,”, he said, ” I’m sorry to interrupt, but if we don’t leave now you will miss the Cabinet meeting”. At which point, Michael D. conceded, shook hands and left.
For me, what was most striking about the experience was that I had been talking to a politician who was deeply, deeply interested in ideas! In a way, I suppose it might have been like talking in the 1970s to Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey or Tony Benn — to name just three titans of that vanished age.
So you can perhaps understand why, on a Friday night in the westernmost parish in Europe, I wound up unsuccessfully racking my brains trying to think of a contemporary British (or indeed Irish) politician who would be as engaging an interlocutor as Michael D. had been all those years ago.
My commonplace booklet
Gay Byrne’s Christmas Cake Recipe
Since it the first day of December you will doubtless be thinking of assembling the ingredients for the festive cake. In which case you will find this recipe by a great Irish broadcaster (who is, sadly, no longer with us) useful. Take a few minutes to learn how you can amaze your friends and family.
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