U Turn Is The New Forward

While they've been around the reduced motor tax rates for cars with low emissions have encouraged people to buy new cars. This is a fact because the annual savings in many cases are substantial.

So how green is the actual manufacture of the car, how many fewer green cars would have had to be built if this incentive to purchase them had not been created? Think about the fabrication emissions that this skewing of market conditions and the building of these cars in the first place created.

If we're serious about being green why not incentivize people to maintain their perfectly fine older cars and keep them on the road longer, why not try to avoid having to build any more of the bloody things than absolutely necessary? That’s green. A solid first step here would be to scrap the ridiculous registration system that displays the year of the car and creates pressure on the more insecure amongst us to keep changing, regardless of need. That would be green. Crushing older cars, shoving them into landfills then squandering finite resources and filling the skies with toxic shite building replacements, with the blessing of state sponsored incentives and under coercion from the big hitters in the motor industry lobby, definitely isn't.

The current shower will probably change the whole racket because, ironically and confusingly, they're even more misguided than the previous lot. Go figure.

Contextual Healing

And we can see them clearly in our mind’s eye – the historians toiling to construct the appropriate narrative for the past fifteen years of the island story. Fifteen years into which so much has been packed. Fifteen years that, if dramatized, could easily be called The Rise and Fall of Paddy.

But the historians, the academics or the professors would not dare be so flippant when grappling with such weighty matters as sovereignty and self determination. No these lads will labour fruitlessly to formulate suitably leaden and impenetrable language for what has befallen the Republic.

And what I am proposing here is to save everyone a boat load of bother. I propose to be pithy and precise with regard to the lessons thrown up by the contortions of our recent history.

Shout it from the rooftops, teach it in the classrooms, put it on the Twitter - don’t give Paddy any money of his own or create conditions whereby he has access to anyone else’s. And that will be a mighty fine start going forward.

Words

Low, from the 1994 vinyl only album I Could Live In Hope. Recently re released on CD, by the way.

Panic On The Streets Of Portarlington

There was a time I thought I was going to read all the books that interest me. It recently dawned that I read, at best, fifteen in a year. So I’m not going to read all the books that interest me, I’m going to read, at best, about six hundred of them. I will spend the rest of my life reading the books that were published this morning. There are a lot of films I always assumed I would get round to watching. It's always been a given that I would at some point apportion an entire night to Mulholland Drive. Now ten years later it’s touch and go if it will happen at all. And things aren’t looking great for the This Is England box set. I mean when’s that going to happen, I won't have a minute for the next forty years. Jaysus.

Keep The Faithful

What a pitiful sight it is; the party worker, the party supporter hoisting the newly elected TD on his shoulder in the count centre when the results have just been announced. The volunteer party worker elated on behalf of someone else’s entry into the racket. Elation on behalf of someone else’s entry to the promised land of a hundred grand basic plus the same again in allowances for a hundred and fifty half days a year. The poor misguided volunteer soul and his emotional investment in the party man who is going to do the divil and all when he gets to Leinster House. He’s a breath of fresh air, he’ll shake up the old order. Four new wrought iron benches in the local park later and then; flatline. Until the count centre at the next election where the same red faced bottom feeding gombeen does the needful again.

The vicarious glee, post coital reverie; our new TD. Say nothing but there’s half a dozen brand new stainless steel bins heading your way shortly lads. Don’t mention it.

Letting The Side Down

Today throws up another great example. Mick Wallace wants those involved in the politicking racket up there in Dublin 2 to agree to a rearrangement of their six week summer holiday to take in the group stages of Euro 2012. Mick has been vilified from all quarters. The last thing those involved in the racket want is someone breaking ranks, letting the cat out of the sack.

Mick has been there less than a year and in that spell has quite rightly established that it does not matter a damn who turns up and when. And it won't matter next May, June , July or August just like any other May, June, July or August. Mick has recently migrated from the world of contracting where there is a strong tradition of the individual being expected to do something useful in return for being paid. So from where Mick is standing it must have seemed perfectly reasonable to ask for a bit of choreography in this regard.

But what Mick, in his naiveté, is forgetting about is optics. One look at Mick would confirm that he might not be a great lad for the optics. But the shower he’s surrounded by now love the optics, they live for the optics. So Mick was greeted with disdain in his perfectly reasonable request that proper status be afforded to the most important couple of weeks in our modern history.

Mick has been condemned by the commentariat who still have the horn for the daily ritualized bullshit that goes on up there. He has been roundly condemned by his colleagues in the racket who are collectively hell bent on never giving the slightest hint that what they are involved in is essentially grand larceny.

Mick oh Mick, call yourself a parliamentarian? Play the game mate.

Proleland Ukraine

And of course prejudice is everywhere, be it overt or subliminal. Over the last couple of days I haven’t heard a media type speculate on the numbers that will travel to Euro 2012 next summer without hearing the words credit, union and loan shoehorned into the report somewhere. Three words which, by the way, were conspicuously absent a few months ago when the same hacks were pondering the numbers that might make the trip to New Zealand to follow the rugby team.

Surabaya To Iron City Twenty Seven Years Ago

We found Tweedy and headed out to the car. There was a traffic jam on the outskirts of the city and we had to sit on a road outside an abandoned foundry. A thousand broken windows, street lights broken, darkness settling in. Bee sat in the middle of the rear seat in the lotus position. She seemed remarkably well rested after a journey that had spanned time zones, land masses, vast oceanic distances, days and nights, on large and small planes, in summer and winter, from Surabaya to Iron City. Now we sat waiting in the dark for a car to get towed or a drawbridge to close. Bee didn’t think this familiar irony of modern travel was worth a comment. She just sat there listening to Tweedy explain to me why parents needn’t worry about children taking such trips alone. Planes and terminals are the safest of places for the very young and very old. They are looked after, smiled upon, admired for their resourcefulness and pluck. People ask friendly questions, offer them blankets and sweets.

“Every child ought to have the opportunity to travel thousands of miles alone,” Tweedy said, “for the sake of her self-esteem and independence of mind, with clothes and toiletries of her own choosing. The sooner we get them in the air, the better. Like swimming or ice skating. You have to start them young. It’s one of the things I’m proudest to have accomplished with Bee. I sent her to Boston on Eastern when she was nine. I told Granny Browner not to meet her plane. Getting out of airports is every bit as important as the actual flight. Too many parents ignore this phase of a child’s development. Bee is thoroughly bicoastal now. She flew her first jumbo at ten, changed planes at O’Hare, had a near miss in Los Angeles. Two weeks later she took the Concorde to London. Malcolm was waiting with a split of champagne.”

Up ahead the taillights danced, the line began to move.

Barring mechanical failures, turbulent weather and terrorist acts, Tweedy said, an aircraft travelling at the speed of sound may be the last refuge of gracious living and civilized manners known to man.


-Don Delillo
White Noise
1984

Scary

RTE, if reports are to be believed, is poised to cut the salaries of its top stars by up to 30% sparking “fear” of a mass exodus to rival networks. I repeat: fear. Now sit down for a moment and try to cajole your imagination into conjuring up a world wherein Marion Finucane, Pat Kenny, George Lee, Ryan Tubridy, Joe Duffy, Sean O’ Rourke, Charlie Bird and Marty Whelan are the hottest tickets in town. It is in this self same fantastical realm that the “rival networks” (i.e. TV3) are battering down the door to get their hands on Kathryn Thomas and Baz Ashmawy. Fear indeed.

Game Over

If you are still leaning Dunphyward after this piece by Peadar Clancy then, I'm sorry to say, you are a bollocks.

Dial M For Malignant

And last week I was praying silently that Seán Gallagher became President. He was, all of a sudden, recommended highly to me on the television on Monday night by Martin McGuinness. I had been apathetic, I hadn’t paid too much attention but all that changed when the bould Martin tried to guillotine Seán live on air. And in an instant he became the only one for me. You see I bided my time, I was patient, I let the bould Martin do the vetting and research for me. To my mind there is no higher form of recommendation for any position than to have Martin McGuinness trying to deprive you of it. For whomever Martin stored up his vitriol and unleashed it at the eleventh hour decided where my vote went. So thanks Martin for doing the legwork and saving me all that pesky thought and contemplation.

Fianna Fáil; who cares, brown envelopes; who cares, dodgy dealings; who fuckin' cares? He may have been shite at the job, he may have been totally unsuitable, I don’t know and I don’t give a fuck. McGuiness and his ilk tried to derail him and that’s good enough for me. That’s the only endorsement I needed. Hard luck Seánie boy.

Bill The Fascist

The Apprentice is an instrument of the far right. So far on this series we have seen a black woman, an oriental woman and a transvestite sacked and an Indian fella systematically tormented to the point that he had to withdraw from the process. And what’s more, there appears to be little effort being made to disguise this policy. It’s flippin’ brazen and blatant. Wait till you see the redhead disappear next week on some bullshit I need a warrior type pretext. The Nordy after that, then the skanger, then the Culchies followed by the lad with the beard.

The pickings will be quare slim then Bill, in every sense.