Mitt Romney and that speech

I watched Mitt Romney’s speech last night and was impressed by several things.

1*   The man looks as though he’s been dry-cleaned. I don’t just mean his shirt or his suit or his tie. All of him – face, hair, teeth, eyes – everything. I know the PR people take great care with their candidates – squeeze facial blackheads, trim eyebrows, nasal hair, etc – but this was a top-to-toe job of meticulous perfection. Even his voice sounded dry-cleaned.

2*   He came across as a TV evangelist. Not the type that sweats and roars and paces the stage. The other kind: the reasonable, cheerful, successful ones that imply by their moderation that you too can be reasonable, cheerful and successful if you’ll just accept the Lord Jesus into your life and dip deep in your wallet when the collection plate comes round.

3*    Mitt had to struggle. Yes, his dad was George Romney, Governor of Michigan and a very wealthy man – but Mitt didn’t trade on that fact or that name. Instead he moved away and went out on his own. Sometimes it was hard, sometimes it was less hard, but Mitt had done it his way. Did being a millionaire governor’s son help? Don’t think he told us about that.

4*   His dad and mom were married for over 60 years, and their marriage worked because every day, his dad put a rose on the table for his mom. The only day he didn’t do it was the day he died. Doesn’t that just bust your tear-ducts? And make you feel a right pig for not being a flower-person yourself?

5*   Obama promised to stop “the rise of the oceans and heal the planet”. Mitt just wants to “help you and your family”. Down to earth, you see. Brass tacks. Enough of the environmental garbage already. Give the people jobs, ok?

6*    Obama has “thrown Israel under the bus”.  You heard me. Under. The. Bus. You probably thought Israel was a state heavily armed by the US, in possession of nuclear weapons, busy giving a shockingly hard time to the Palestinians. Uh-uh. They’ve been thrown under the bus. By Obama.

7*    Mitt’s got a great vice-presidential candidate “who’s not ashamed to say how much he loves his mom”. Well how could you resist a man like that? The type that pretend they don’t love their mom, or the type who secretly love them but don’t share the fact with millions of people: what a bunch of wasters. Repressed. Cold. But not Paul. He laid it on the line for all to see: he loves his mom. It must be an Irish thing.

8*    The US is ‘the greatest country in the history of the world”.  Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy? Nah. The home of the hamburger, the hot-dog, the drip-dry shirt. Who could compare? No one. No siree. USA! USA! USA!

9*    “When the world needs someone to do really big stuff, you need an American”.  No Irish, Brits or French need apply. American: that’s what’s called for. Cos they come from the greatest country in the history of the world.

1* If Americans don’t vote for Mitt, they’ll have missed the chance “to save the world from unspeakable darkness”.  Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Obama or Romney. Unspeakable darkness or the man from Michigan.

1* If elected, Mitt will keep the American military “so strong, no nation will ever dare to test it”. OK, let’s hear it one more time, as the convention centre fills with chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

When they simmered down, God was called on to bless the audience and to bless America.  There were balloons, flashing lights and those kind of tiny explosions you get when the champagne starts popping for the winners of the Champions’ League.

Feel like acting superior, rolling your eyes at all this vulgar, ghastly  American overstatement? Don’t. It’s a form of politics coming to a place near you, soon. 

St Patrick's Church + Dungiven = 0, right? Wrong.

Politicians are good at avoiding the issue, sliding away from under a question and raising another issue entirely. Media people know this, which is why good ones are alert to it and haul the politician, sometimes kicking and screaming, back to the question under consideration.

In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve seen two examples of this slipping-away. On sluggerotoole.com, Mick Fealty, whom I generally respect, wrote a piece about a republican band playing in Dungiven, near to a local Protestant church.  His facts, I assume, were accurate, and it’s not with those that I’m taking issue with. What I am taking issue with – actually am kind of outraged by – is his attempt to present some sort of balance-of-insult. That’s to say, you’re talking about the bandsmen who defied the Parades Commission ban and marched boldly past St Patrick’s Catholic church in Belfast; next minute you’re talking about the republican band playing near the Protestant church in Dungiven. The conclusion to be drawn: one side is as bad as the other.

This morning on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh,  Jim Allister was busy using his legal skills to slip away from the questioning of Karen Patterson and draw attention to the republican band in Dungiven. Patterson, to her credit, refused to let him do that, insisting on sticking to the topic of the bands’ defiance of the Parades Commission ban in Belfast.

Does this matter all that much? Doesn’t it make sense to broaden the discussion, so people see that right is not all on one side? The answers are Yes and No respectively. It doesn’t make sense to broaden the discussion, if in fact what you’re doing is slipping away from the issue, not broadening it. And it does matter, a great deal.

The British authorities have been doing the one-side-as-bad-as-the-other thing for decades now, casting themselves in the role of civilized peace-maker among the mad paddies. Worse still, there is a wide middle-class here, unionist/Protestant and nationalist/Catholic,  who like to see themselves as being more civilized, more rational and analytical, than the witless working classes of the Falls and the Shankill. This sense of superiority works only if you can dismiss all sectarian acts, even the Troubles themselves, as the grimy work of the stupid, uneducated masses.  They won’t say this quite as bluntly,  but once you hear the one-side-as-bad-as-the-other argument, you’ll know that the detached middle classes, the Prod in the garden centre and  his/her Catholic equivalent, are busy solving our divisions by allocating equal blame to ‘them’, meaning the unwashed who engage in physical confrontation.

The truth is, one side is  rarely as bad as the other. In this case,  the Loyal Orders are far more guilty of contempt, mockery, sectarianism and defiance of the law than any republican band, in Dungiven or elsewhere.

And if you’re still not convinced, try doing the math, as the Yanks say. How many marches do we have each year from the unionist side and how many from the republican? No, Virginia, one side is NOT as bad as the other. 

Charlie, it looks like you were right

It’s fashionable these days to denounce Charlie Haughey as a hypocrite, a forerunner of the greed that brought the south of Ireland to its knees, probably into a bit of gun-running as well. But whatever you think of Haughey, one phrase of his has stood the test of time. “A failed state” was how he described Northern Ireland, and it looks as though Lisburn City Council, as well as a few others, are intent on proving him right.

Lisburn’s latest brainwave is to grant the freedom of the city to the Orange Order. That’s the fine body of men among whose numbers are counted those who paraded in a circle outside St Patrick’s Church on the Twelfth while playing the Famine Song. And in case we missed the point,  Loyal Order bands recently paraded again in direct defiance of the Parades’ Commission’s ruling that they must not. But then Lisburn has previous, as they say. Didn’t they construct a nice big memorial in the city to the men and women of the UDR who did so much to develop community relations in our divided society?

Add to this the stance of the DUP,  in the person of Jonathan Craig this morning on Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh,  where he refused to criticize these brave law-breakers but instead criticized the PSNI’s representative, who’d said he thought the Parades’ Commission rulings should be observed, at least until something better was in place.

Charlie, thou should'st be living at this hour. Here we are, fourteen years on from the Good Friday Agreement, and the desire among some sections of unionism to stick it to the Croppies burns as brightly as it ever burned in the bosoms of their bigoted forefathers. 

The UUP: Ken leaves and the lift continues to plummet

Been away.  And what do I find when I come back?  The UUP, not content with allowing the DUP to disembowel it at the polls, is now doing what it can to take any of its bowels left and send them through the shredder.

If this had been a movie, there’d have been a darkening shadow and the music would at this point have gone all screechy and ominous. I mean, it’s not every day Ken Magennis resigns. He wasn’t pleased with the leadership qualities that Mike Nesbit has been showing, so he sent him an email calling on him to resign his role as party leader. Nesbit backed a few paces, said he’d restore the whip to the naughty lord, but it was too late. With a contemptuous  grunt, the Fermanagh veteran stomped off into the gathering darkness.

There’s a kind of mass irrationality comes over parties that once were powerful. I suppose the same kind of thing happens when  a lift-cable snaps on the sixty-seventh floor. People who until the plunge started were balanced, dynamic, thoughtful individuals suddenly go totally ape-shit and start clawing the air and each other in a hopeless bid to stop the unstoppable.  It’s as if the UUP is trying to mimic the SDLP’s leadership transition: first Alastair is the heir-presumptive, then Maggie’s men seize top spot for their woman, then their woman turns into a walking disaster area,  then Alastair comes back from the wilderness… Likewise the UUP – under Reg the party ratings plummet, under Big Tom the rate of descent beomes a blur, then Mike looms from nowhere and seizes the ontrols, then Ken indicates he’s a waste of space – Mike, that is, not Ken – then Mike says Ken is a fine UUP man after all, then Ken takes his ball, leaves the lift and goes home. With each move designed to improve things, each party’s pace of descent is increased.

If there’s a purgatory, it’ll contain few UUPers or SDLPers.  They’ve done their suffering here on earth. 

Questions big and small

You learn a lot about a country or state  (yes, Virginia, there is a difference – come to Ireland some time) by checking out their media. The media partly reflect what people want, partly shape what they think people need.

In the UK or Ireland,  you got  TV  interviewers who pride themselves on their terrier-like qualities.  Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight or Vincent Browne on TV3  are examples of this in action.  They’ll tear into a guest,  attempting to nail them on one specific issue or force them to answer a specific question.  What you don’t get is any questioning of the political system behind that issue or question. Prince Harry is caught in flagrante in some far-flung flesh-pot place. The whole fuss is whether  photographs of him and his naked royality are an invasion of privacy. No focus, though, on whether it makes sense for hard-pressed British tax-payers to be forking out so flunkeys and bodyguards be paid  so they can follow this royal prat of dubious heritage while he flies off to indulge his royal lust.

In  the US,  the media bit different.  On the car radio driving from Boston to Lenox, Massachusetts yesterday, I heard a current affairs programme interview  an academic who noted that the average CEO  makes 300 times as much money as the average worker.  That’s what I call getting down to the nitty gritty. Will Obama’s re-election change that? No. Will Romney’s election change that? Yes. By the time he’s through his term of office, it’ll be 600:1. That's the difference.

Last night I switched back and forth between two TV channels. One, C-Span, had Terry O’Neill the President of the Organization for Women Foundation.  She was taking calls from viewers and every single one of them was supportive of her views and of the Obama campaign. Meanwhile, over on Fox News,  somebody was interviewing some former big wheel in the Republican Party and was not so much asking questions as teeing up shots for him so he could send the ball crashing through Obama’s greenhouse. It wasn’t that he was giving the big wheel an easy ride: he was joining him in lambasting all the works and deeds of all Democrats, particularly in Massachusetts.

Is this a good way to interview people?  Most definitely no. There are few things more tedious than to hear two people agreeing with each other on a political issue. It’s cringe-makingly dull and it leaves the issue unexamined. That’s why I like when people disagree with me – it’s more interesting as welll as forcing me to think further, providing the differing view is one of substance and not just a cheap shot.

On the other hand, that CEO earning 300 times what the average worker earns – you don’t get much of that from the British or Irish media.  It’s more Vincent Browne entertaining us by gnawing the ankle of some distressed politician on some within-the-system point.  Maybe we should call a moratorium on all political interviews, if they don’t confront the politician with at least one awkward fact that questions the whole system within which he/she works.

Mind you, I don’t think they’ll ever, in Britain or Ireland, produce a b and b that serves them kind of pancake breakfast I’ve just pigged out on. Never, never, never, never.

Hooray for Todd Akin!

I’m in Boston and I’m itching to write about the different feeling you get from this society. Once, that is, you’ve got through US immigration, which isn’t necessarily easy. But I won’t, or not yet at least. I’d rather talk about  Todd Akin. He’s the  Republican who has put a banana skin under Mitt Romney by suggesting that a raped woman’s body  ‘shuts down’ and (I think this is what he said, it’s not clear) stops the raped woman become pregnant.

Nice one. Anything that keeps Mitt Romney out of the White House is OK with me. But on the broader topic of party and personal attitudes to abortion, there are two points that could use more thought.

One, when you vote for a party or a candidate, you vote for a range of issues – let’s call them A-Z. The chances that you’ll agree with the party or the candidate on every single letter in the alphabet are near to nil. So what most people do is – if they bother to check A-Z in the first place and don’t vote because they like the way the candidate combs  his/her hair –  they put their tick beside the name of the candidate or party that comes nearest to their thinking on the issues that they believe matter most. The problem with anti-abortion/pro-abortion debate in the US (and elsewhere) is that it masks all the other letters in the alphabet.

Two,  I don’t understand the anti-abortion-except-in-cases-of-rape argument. If you believe that the foetus is a human being, then it’s still a human being when it’s the result of a rape. So it’s a bit illogical as well as savagely cruel to respond to the crime of the rapist by killing an innocent, defenceless human being.

Three ( yes I know I said two things but I changed my mind – OK?), I don’t understand the the-foetus-is-not-a-human-being-but-having-an-abortion-is-a-deeply-serious-decision argument. If the foetus is not a human being, having an abortion  isn’t any more serious than cutting your nails or blowing your nose. It's just a cluster of unwanted tissue that you want rid of.  

Answers, please. Keep them  crisp and free of abuse.

Paul Ryan - one of our own, eh?

Paul Ryan.  You don’t get a name much more Irish than that. And by all accounts Ryan could be the kind of guy you’d have a pint with, go to Croke Park with – he’s a young guy proud of his Irish roots. His great-great-grandfather emigrated to America, with hundreds of thousands of others, to avoid the Irish Famine.

Or the Irish Great Hunger, to be more exact. Because it wasn’t just the failure of the potato crop that led to mass starvation.  It was deliberate policy. Charles Trevelyan, the British official in charge of famine relief, decided that “the cankerworm of government dependency” was a bad thing, and so starving people were required to pay for their food rather than be given it. The consequences were drastic – people died in their tens of thousands,  fled abroad on the coffin ships.

So a guy whose ancestors survived all that has to be given respect, right? And we Irish can have a sense of vicarious pride that one of our own, so to say, may be a heart-beat away from the presidency. I mean, he’s one of us, right?

Well he may be one of you but I want no part of him. Remember Trevelyan’s “cankerworm of government dependency”?  Well, it fits right in to Ryan’s thinking.  He’s completely opposed to Obama’s Medicare bill, which would  see to it that Americans were covered if they fell sick.  For Ryan,  it’s a question of "not lulling able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives”.  In other words, no government hand-outs to a lot of able-bodied beggars.

Of course, Americans have been encouraged to think that way, and lots of them do. Ryan is very fond of Ayn Rand, whose novels laud market forces and the strong leader rather than compassion and democracy.  Likewise Sir Randoph Routh, who was in charge of the Irish Relief Commission in the nineteenth century, greeted representatives from Mayo, where people were dying in their thousands, by passing them a copy of Edmund Burke’s ‘Details of Society’  pamphlet.  It explained why it was better to allow the market to distribute food rather than governments.

It is always good to see an Irish person succeed, at home or abroad. And getting so close to the US presidency is no mean feat. But we’d be very stupid if we allowed our nationalist pride to blind us to the kind of man Paul Ryan is.  He would have fitted into British government policy for nineteenth-century Ireland with consummate ease.