Liverpool 2 Manchester United 0 - An Apology

In my previous post I tried to convey the impression that Rafael Benitez is a total clown. This morning I would like to issue a correction to this assertion. He is in fact a total genius. I apologise for any inconvenience this misunderstanding may have caused.

Liverpool 1 Lyon 2 - An Apology

In my previous post I tried to convey the impression that Rafael Benitez has a personality which is made up of equal, independent strands of genius and clown. This morning I would like to issue a correction to this assertion. He is a total clown. I apologise for any inconvenience this misunderstanding may have caused.

Three Things

What the fuck is Bill Cullen up to? He fired Maria. The only normal one. He must have had a few jars on board. That’s the only plausible explanation.

Why didn’t John O’Donoghue make out that he had been taken hostage by extreme right wing French nationalists that time in Longchamp? No one would have batted an eyelid about him coming home on the government jet. Not like him to miss a trick like that.

Rafael Benitez is the only person that I know of who is simultaneously a genius and a complete clown. Tonight, against Lyon, he will show us the genius. On Saturday, against Sunderland, he showed us the clown.
Rafa can be summarized thus: (cl+pl-c/38)=(g+c)-g/6+4

Subhuman Resources

I have tried to give the protagonists on The Apprentice a chance, I’ve tried to like them but alas I appear to be fighting a losing battle with my better self. I can’t help but hate them all. And seemingly this is my default setting with so much of this reality based programming. I hate them all and I love Bill because Bill gives them all such a hard time. He abuses them unrelentingly and he seems to enjoy it. He takes pride in attempting to systematically dismantle their character from every conceivable perspective. I would enjoy it too. I love Bill.

They annoy us instantaneously; so self involved, so shallow and manipulative. And we know that the person or thing who devised the concept of humanity had the direct opposite of people like this in mind when he was coming up with his first sketches. And we wonder how people who are mostly in their mid twenties could be so numbingly dull.

It’s not of course that they are bad people but probably because they tend to take things a bit too seriously. And have a tendency to try to rationalize the most damning of situations into their favour. In blatant contradiction of the evidence. So their problems could be summed up by saying that they do not know when to let it lie. And in this regard they are probably no different to anyone born in this country after 1980. So it might not even be their fault per se. But that does not make them any more palatable.

This is why we get the likes of Brendan seeking to explain that his refusal to take responsibility for the management of a task in which he had a lot of experience reflected more poorly on his team mates than it did on himself. He did not know when to let it lie. And Bill came very close to cutting him loose as a result. But he won’t learn. They never do.

You don’t want to do it but it happens involuntarily; your mind casts back to your college days and you try to imagine sharing the same airspace with people of this ilk. Clean cut super heroes, learnt everything they know from long running American network sitcoms. Nobody comes out of that mental exercise smelling of roses let me tell you.

We will never embrace this medium, we knew that before we started. This medium with these young people in this young country in this unprecedented funk. And if we can’t embrace something like The Apprentice which within its genre is pretty mild, well what’s left, what slivers of modern pop culture are left for us. In America they seem to have got it figured out, like a lot of things that will eventually dawn on us over here. They have had their flirtation with reality but also had the decency to remember to make a few good TV shows while they were at it. They have something to fall back on. We have The Byrne Ultimatum.

We can at least give ourselves credit for starting the whole thing off in the first place all those years ago. Remember Superstars with Gerry Loftus and Declan Burns. They even had the odd celebrity like Pat Spillane and Jack O’Shea to add a touch of glamour. Reality TV ground zero right there baby. Don’t know if it’s any consolation, but it is the truth.

The Shrugs Don't Work

You look at some leaders and ascribe to them superhuman qualities. You marvel at their ability to do what they do, to motivate themselves day after day to deal with huge and complex issues, to navigate their way through the quagmire of partisan politics and global expectations to produce tangible results or at the least a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

There’s the crippling workload; the speeches, the committees, the meetings, the skill and nuances of diplomacy required to extract results from seemingly hopeless situations. There’s the unrelenting glare of the world’s media honed on them as go about their business, as they address world leaders, chair summits, give press conferences, do interviews or take part in live debates.

You see them do all this and think about the qualities they must possess. The composure, the poise, the work ethic, the confidence, the eloquence, the nervelessness. You know you could never do what they do, the mere thought is preposterous.

These people, people such as Obama possess such presence and charisma, such miraculous ability to lead and comfort people with the knowledge that whatever problems we face are eminently surmountable as long as he is at the helm. They have your admiration because you cannot for one moment imagine yourself in their shoes.

And then you look at Brian Cowen and you see what way things would pan out if by some bizarre mix up you yourself became prime minister of the country. You look at him and instantly recognize all the failings and shortcomings that you know you would be guilty of. The lack of motivation, the negative body language, the absence of any guile, confidence, enthusiasm or commitment. You look at him in the Dail and you think of days at work when you could not take your eyes off the clock such was your all consuming desire to get out of there and have a few pints on the way home. When it didn’t really matter how half assed you were doing your work as long as you kept out of the boss’s way and got paid every month.

The Obamas of this world belong to a parallel reality, one where real application and ability can produce real results for billions of people. Our reality contains Brian Cowen, midlander, nod’s as good as a wink, one of our own. He’s one of us all right; fuckin’ hopeless. And livin’ for the weekend.

Sure You Can't Have Everything

When Brian Cowen took over as our glorious leader he was touted from all quarters as an intellectual powerhouse. I took this to mean that under his stewardship we would soon see, all over the country, smoke filled bistros and cafes heaving with beret wearing militants chain smoking Gauloise, sipping absinth, talking revolution and discussing the later works of Baudelaire.

And none of this has happened.

What has happened is that Cowen has officially opened several unnecessary stretches of very wide tarmacadam, been photographed in a tractor at the National Ploughing Championships, fucked off to New York for a week to discuss the weather with Angela Merkel's wardrobe consultant and generally come as close to resembling an intellectual powerhouse as Dizzie Rascal has to resembling the next Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Ah well, it’s a good thing he’s so easy on the eye. I’d never forgive him otherwise.

Leading by Example

Irish Minister for Health and Children. I repeat, Minister for Health and Children. It is also worth noting that the Minister for Equality and Law Reform is a convicted murderer and passionate homophobe,the Minister for Integration a confirmed racist and the Minister for Tourism is xenophobic. Oh yeah and the Minister for the Arts thinks Celine Dion is the greatest singer of all time.

The Whether Prophets

Probably the best kind of a job to have would be one with a massive salary, undoubted implied prestige but absolutely no accountability. One where you can say or do pretty much as you please with no associated fear of being called to account or made to explain yourself to anyone. One in which exists numerous perfectly plausible means of rationalizing the most grievous of errors, the most errant of pronouncements. Where the very nature of the thing which you are trying to understand and illuminate unrelentingly provides the excuses you need for your repeated inability to do just that.

And that’s OK, because we all know these things are not an exact science. Welcome to the world of the international economic forecaster. Somebody who might be attached for example to the IMF or the World Bank or the World Economic Forum or Nafta or any one of a long list of mysterious global organizations.

If I was a blocklayer and a person whose house I had got the job of building asked me how many blocks it would require and how long it would take I would find it very hard to defend or justify a response such as “it could be anywhere from five hundred to five thousand and it could take anywhere from a week to three months”.

Typically in any professional realm a certain amount of accurate estimating is required, to the nearest ballpark will do. The international economic forecaster has created a domain for himself where none of that inconvenient need for accuracy applies to anything he does. He has replaced ballpark with galaxy or when really pressurized, time zone. His time is spent monitoring developments and analyzing trends. This is work which can be done in conjunction with looking at internet pornography, staying in bed half the day, attending conferences, chairing superfluous think tanks and skiing. You would have thought that when the words analyst or forecaster appear in your job title that these are areas in which you would excel. And you would be wrong there too. For the international economic forecaster is a law unto himself.

“Initial predictions of a third quarter recovery and an annual growth rate of 1.2% proved to be a little optimistic as crowd trouble at a League Two fixture in Darlington and an outbreak of colic in John Oxx’s yard on the Curragh severely impacted Asian markets forcing analysts to revise their growth forecasts.”
“Gross national product has grown in inverse proportion to many analysts’ preliminary estimates due primarily to the re appearance of Dirty Den on Eastenders and the suspected kidnapping of half of Leo O’ Malley’s dairy herd from his farm in Cloughjordan”

Grand, that explains that then. And thanks. Thanks a bunch. A big bunch or a little bunch, not sure, say nothing till you hear more, or someone puts a microphone to your head.

Break His Legs

So here we are in 2009 mired in the deepest recession since the dinosaurs roamed the earth or Tommy Tiernan was funny, whichever was earlier. Nobody can afford anything. Of course nobody could afford anything during the boom either but it didn’t stop us because we were effectively in a war with all of our neighbours and we had armed ourselves with the latest and greatest in credit card technology, the kind which thankfully didn’t incorporate anything as inconvenient as a spending limit.

The carnage is everywhere. A first time visitor to our country might take a look around vast tracts of our once coveted landscape and be forgiven for thinking that the War of Independence only ended yesterday. It’s all over all right, the people who are in charge of all these things and consequently know what to do have declared an armistice, a ceasefire, a truce even.

And of course it affects virtually everyone so it’s big news, seemingly it’s the only news. Not only is it news in its own right but we are now seeing a trend develop whereby it has to dragged into other, seemingly unrelated news. Every bit of news must contain an element, a touch, a smidge, a taste of recession news.

So a piece came up on the six o’ clock bulletin a few nights ago about the forthcoming Dublin Theatre Festival. Being someone with a keen interest in things of this nature I, quite reasonably I thought at the time, became excited at the prospect of finding out what plays were to be performed and in what locations, what new playwrights we might expect to be showcased and things which generally pertained to the content of the festival. The theatre festival.

How naïve I was. The four minute report consisted exclusively of the correspondent’s dire predictions regarding the glut of tickets which would remain unsold and a very helpful comparison with previous years when, yep you’ve guessed it, all the tickets were sold. I was surprised he managed to get through it without unleashing a pie chart or venn diagram or some such convoluted schematic to give pictorial validation to his verbal synopsis of the despondency which he obviously believed that everyone connected to the event should feel. The director of the festival was given a brief airing wherein he said that he was confident that any unsold tickets would be snapped up between now and the start of the event. His positive outlook was obviously deemed to be off message and his contribution quickly guillotined to allow the reporter roll out yet more frightening statistics as to the financial train wreck the whole thing was going to be.

All of which might have been palatable if it was aired in conjunction with some useful information. But it wasn’t, he never mentioned the name of one fuckin’ play, writer or venue.

The recession is the play, the writer and the venue. It’s the only show in town. And it’s on a long run.

Surreal Away, Just Surreal Away

As far as I was aware surreal was a word that you would reserve for the most exceptional of circumstances. When the evidence before your eyes took on a hallucinatory, ethereal other worldly quality. Evidently I was wrong. Apparently it is a word that is available to be thrown about to characterize the most mundane and trivial of situations. “It was incredible, when I got home the kitchen was spotless, it was very surreal” “I opened my lunch box and found not one but two bags of crisps. It was surreal.” No it was not. It was mildly, microscopically noteworthy. Barely worth mentioning. Consider these on the other hand “I came home to find a colony of giant stag beetles in my living room watching TV and a herd of magenta coloured African elephants playing backgammon in the kitchen” or “I turned on the radio and heard the Ceann Comhairle announce his resignation”. Now that’s what I call surreal.