Those with money and power always come out the winners

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

The success of RTÉ’s Toy Show was mainly measured by the amount of money it collected for charities.

Of course it is great news that charities  benefited from the programme. But the more I heard about the millions that had been collected the more I found myself asking has everything  to do with money. I suppose you can add power to that. Is it the monied and powerful who are the controllers of our lives. Should it be that way? Are there other possibilities?

The day after the Toy Show Notre-Dame cathedral was reopened in Paris. I watched the ceremony on BBC NEWS television. It is remarkable that such a job could have been done in little over five years. 

As French president Emmanuel Macron said, it was a sign of what can be done when people work together for a great cause. President Macron during his opening speech never mentioned once how much it cost. He did thank all those around the world who had pledged financial support. 

Side by side with the magnificence of the work done and the otherworldly atmosphere in the newly restored cathedral it could not have been done without money, lots of money. 

In attendance was the US president-elect Donald Trump, who is a convicted felon. If I were found guilty in the Irish courts of a crime, even the slightest misdemeanour, I would not be granted a visa to enter the US. And to make the situation even more laughable, it is Donald Trump who would insist that I should be expelled if I had managed to get there illegally.

When I saw kings, queens and presidents of the world smile, laugh, shake his hand in Notre Dame on Saturday and treat him in such an obsequious manner, again I began to think what money and power can do.

How does it fit in with the Christian message? I’m currently reading Derek Scally’s ‘The Best Catholics in the World’. 

At the beginning of the book he relates how the then archbishop of Dublin placed great interest in collecting money for the parish church in Dublin’s Edenmore. Scally recalls the methods the archdiocese used in collecting money, money from people who had very little to spare. 

The Archdiocese of Dublin engaged and paid a US-based professional fundraising outfit but gave the impression to the people that the local fundraising campaign was grassroots.

Money does make the world go round, anyone who says otherwise is talking nonsense. At least that’s how it works on this planet.

The Russian revolution tried to change it, alas it didn’t work. More irony, probably some of the wealthiest people in the world are to be found in the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, which still flies the Red Flag.

As always, I’ve no answers but I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s lines in Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’.

Is it simply the way of the world? It would seem so.

A significant day in the history of the Red Army

On this day, December, 16, 1942 the Red Army launched Operation Little Saturn in the last weeks of the battle at Stalingrad.

It was an attempt to break through the German Army on the River Don. In the initial stages the Soviet attack failed. The German Army was made up mainly of Italians and were outnumbered nine to one. Three days later, December 19 the Red Army broke through.

Less than two months later, February 1943 Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army surrendered to Georgy Zhukov on the River Volga. Paulus was the first ever German field marshal to surrender.

Archbishop Farrell on commencement of 34th Dáil

Below is Archbishop Dermot Farrell’s words on the beginning of the new Dáil.

"On Wednesday next, December 18, the 34th Dáil Éireann will assemble, and our country’s elected representatives will begin to seek ways to realise their vision of a shared future for all who dwell in our land. 

We know that it may take some weeks before the shape and focus of a new government becomes clear, but at this moment it is appropriate to give thanks for the blessings of living in a society where differences are addressed through public debate, and power transfers peacefully on the basis of the rule of law.

Politics—for all that we say about it—is, in the end, ‘a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good’, to cite Pope Francis. While wise political leadership and good government is necessary in every age, our age, with increasing political polarisation across the globe, with greater inequality between—and within—rich and poor nations, and with the deepening climate crisis, is in profound need of wise and prudent governments. Therefore, it is right that should pray for the members of Dáil Éireann, as our TDs begin to exercise their political office.

Even if our land is experiencing a time to unprecedented revenue flows, our expectations of politics and government must be tempered with realism. That said, we can expect from our politicians a commitment to the highest standards of public life, a sincere commitment to serving the common good and a prioritisation of the needs of the most vulnerable. 

Further, and especially at the beginning of a period of government, we need to draw attention to those long-term, strategic projects, vital for the flourishing of our land, and for the wellbeing of all who live here. 

Few of these are “vote-getters”—water, transport infrastructure, sustainable healthcare, the security of our nation, the ‘green transition.’ Even if they are not always to the fore of political debate, that does not render them any less vital for everyone in our country. 

Gan amhras, tagann na Teachtaí Dála go dtí Teach Laighean chun fadhbanna a gcomhludair áitiúla a rêiteach ach guímid go mbeidh leas an phobail i gcoitinne an tosaíocht is mó acu.

For our own part as Christians and as citizens, this is also a moment to reflect on our own responsibilities to support what is right and assert what is good. 

Active citizens in a flourishing civil society are no less important than the institutions of government in securing the well-being of the people.

As we prepare for Christmas, the celebration of our Saviour’s birth, we take heart from the hope his birth heralds (see Eph 1:8), and the confidence of our God in “what his hand has made.” (see Isa 66:2) Each day we pray the Our Father; we pray each day for the coming of God’s Kingdom, a way of living in which ‘justice shall flourish and peace till the moon fails’ (Psalm 71(72):7). 

May we pray then that our civic institutions may be open to God’s Holy Spirit in their service of justice and peace."

The meaningless currency of a sudden viral sensation

Mark O’Connell’s column in The Irish Times yesterday. The heading tells the story. The preaching of the Gospel in such a world is certainly challenging.

Does it make sense using an outdated vocabulary to explain the Good News today?  

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The ongoing trajectory of Haliey Welch’s fame seems to offer, in its very triviality, the prospect of a deep insight into our present culture. You may (or may not) know Welch by the title conferred upon her by viral fame: as “the Hawk Tuah girl.”

Last June, Welch was on a night out in Nashville, Tennessee, when she and a friend came across a YouTuber interviewing people on the street. They asked to be interviewed. To one of the YouTuber’s mildly spicy questions – “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” – Welch gave the response that ensured her ascent to the viral pantheon. “Aw you gotta give him that hawk tuah! and spit on that thang, you get me?”

Her deep Tennessee twang, and her air of lascivious glee, invested the moment with a charming authenticity, even joyfulness, that makes it, even now, fun to watch. Welch was clearly several drinks deep into the evening and enjoying the reaction of her listeners, who were equally celebratory and scandalised; as a spectacle, it was remarkably free of calculation and cynicism, animated by nothing more than Welch’s irrepressible energy, and her own simple joy in getting a reaction.

The clip went viral for the reason such things so often do: because it was funny, and because it felt real enough to pierce, in a fleeting and incidental fashion, the endless banality of online content.

Extremely famous

It also made Welch very famous. (I am anticipating, at this point, a certain amount of objection to this latter claim, but I would hope that we can all by now acknowledge that you or I having no idea who a person is does not preclude that person being extremely famous. The distinction between “mainstream celebrity” and “internet celebrity” is now as conceptually void as that between the internet and what used to be called “real life”.)

In the months that followed, Welch succeeded in parlaying her memefication, in ways that felt both familiar and jarringly contemporary. She started an Instagram account, quickly gathering millions of followers; shortly thereafter, she started a podcast, called Talk Tuah– still, at time of writing, a going concern – in which she hosts a roster of guests, most of whose names you’d probably struggle to put faces to, but who are, nonetheless, also very famous. (The podcast is part of the Betr Media network, presided over by Jake Paul, the PT Barnum of the influencer era.)

Her most recent attempt to (quite literally) capitalise on her sudden fame, however, has proven problematic.

Last week, Welch launched a cryptocurrency called $HAWK, no doubt on the advice of the growing agglomeration of hangers-on and suckers-up surrounding her. $HAWK was the latest in a line of so-called “meme coins”: crypto-tokens representing viral moments, a market which has expanded since Donald Trump’s election win gave rise to anticipation of a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment in the US.

Even among some of the more bullish devotees of cryptocurrency, meme coins are seen as basically worthless monetary tchotchkes – “little more than frothy assets representing the market’s over-exuberance”, as a recent Financial Timesreport put it.

Pump-and-dump scheme

Within minutes of its launch, $HAWK’s market cap reached just under half a billion dollars, before almost immediately plummeting by more than 90 per cent of its total value. This led to allegations of the whole thing being a pump-and-dump scheme; in such scams, an unscrupulous actor artificially hypes up a worthless stock to create a buying frenzy, selling their own position at a large profit and tanking the asset in the process: see, for instance, the Enron scandal of 2001, or more recently, much of the entire history of cryptocurrencies.

The YouTuber Steven Findeisen, aka Coffeezilla, who specialises in investigating crypto scams, claimed that the launch was aimed at giving insiders an advantage. “Unfortunately with situations like this,” he said, “they’re not targeting crypto bros, they’re mostly targeting actual fans who have never been involved in the crypto space before.” One such fan claimed to have put $35,000 – their entire life savings – into Welch’s meme coin, before seeing it shrivel, within minutes, to $2,000.

Welch has denied allegations that her team sold any of the tokens they owned.

One reading of this would position Welch as a classic villain: an opportunist who saw a chance to get rich off her fans by scamming them, and grabbed it with both hands.

I’m inclined to see it in less morally stark terms. This is a woman who, last June, was working in a factory that produced mattress springs and who, suddenly and absurdly, stumbled into a very modern and very intense variety of fame. You could hardly blame her for trying to make some quick money, and maybe even some kind of lasting career, out of her ridiculous situation.

Careers in entertainment have been built on less, and sustained on less charisma. Become a social media influencer? Why not. Start a podcast? Sure, whatever works. Get that bag, as we now say. And if getting that bag involves minting a pseudo-currency tethered to t he dubious value of her own virality, then so be it.

Unmediated capitalist fever-dream

You can see how, having been presented with the idea by whatever avaricious crypto-booster had her ear, she might have been inclined to sign off on it. Don’t hate the player, as we also now say, hate the game.

But let’s not pretend that the game is not deserving of contempt. If the ride-or-die crypto-libertarians get the kind of unregulated market they want, this is, at scale, what it will look like: an unmediated capitalist fever-dream in a collapsing labyrinth of scams and swindles.

There is, in this sense, something strangely illuminating about the brief arc of Haliey Welch’s career and its culmination in the launch of a worthless crypto-token based on her own fame.

Our society is so heavily marketised and commodified, our culture so radically atomised, that it feels deliriously appropriate that everyone should now have the ability to issue their own personal currency.

This, perhaps, is where unregulated capitalism and radical individualism were always going to wind up. Endless meaningless currencies, briefly hyped and quickly dumped, imprinted with the dubious sovereignty of the self.

‘Events, my dear boy, events’ - Harold Macmillan

Apologies for no blog post from Thursday until today. This was due to a number of reasons. It has been many years since there has been such a break.

This blog began in June 2007 with occasional posts, hence the name. Slowly it developed into a daily posting.

The ways of the world are strange, indeed the ways of many people, institutions and organisations are  strange. We can easily be distracted and caught up in disparate events. 

Harold Macmillan was once asked what the most troubling problem of his Prime Ministership was. ‘Events, my dear boy, events,’ was his reply.

Derek Scally’s 'The Best Catholics in the World' is an excellent book. First published in 2021.

The book throws light on the Irish psyche and is most respectfully written. His book is about events.

Scally is The Irish Times correspondent in Berlin and has lived in the German capital for many years.

Staying silent and not taking action tells its own story

 Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

 - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The pencils, Hutch, a clueless voter, all part of democracy

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

I’ve been thinking about elections and democracies these last days. With all its failings democracy is the best system that’s been tried.

If you want to get an idea what it would be like to live in a totalitarian Ireland I recommend you read Paul Lynch’s ‘Prophet Song’. He won last year’s Booker Prize for his novel. It tells a frightening story of what it would be like to live in a dictatorship. 

Our system of proportional representation seems to me the perfect fit to get so many opinions represented in parliament. It’s certainly far superior to the UK system of first past the post.

But why did so many people not vote in this election? The turn out was below 60 per cent, which is worrying.

The day after the election I got chatting to a woman in her 40s. Subject matter turned to the election and she told me for whom she voted and I subsequently told her where my votes went.

When I asked her why she voted for that particular party she said she believed all politicians were corrupt and she wanted change. But she did not say that her candidates of choice were not corrupt. She was not able to mention one single policy of the party for which she voted. What does that say about democracy?

Why did the media give Gerry Hutch so much publicity? Marie Sherlock, who snatched the last seat from him, has been a hard working Senator and the media gave her little or no coverage. It was all the worst aspects of media soundbites. 

And then I had a discussion with a young man I greatly admire and like. He was or, indeed, still is convinced that pencils are supplied at the polling stations allowing wrongdoing to take place so that our votes can be tampered. To prove to him that is not so I voted with a biro and told him so. I’m still not sure he accepts my argument. What does that say about democracy?

And something else has me puzzled. I think it’s fair to say that most sensible people are now aware that climate change is a reality, the planet is in difficulty, and we can’t carry on pretending nothing is happening. 

The Green Party had the environment top of their agenda during the last five years and they certainly played their part in making us all aware of the importance of changing our ways. On a personal note, I have benefited greatly from their policies on public transport. What happens? They have one TD in the new Dáil. Why?

I thought commentator David Quinn’s comment that he was glad to see the ‘Greens decimated’ was most ungracious, nasty too. Nor did it make any sense.

Politics sure is a funny old game.  Congratulations to all who were elected and good fortune to those sitting in the 34th Dáil. 

May we have a decent honest government that will serve all the people and look out in a special way for the less advantaged.

Why is a PhD on the politics of smell causing outrage?

Mark O’Connell’s Saturday’s column in The Irish Times is a great read of who and what appears in the world of social media. Well worth a read. 

If you want to understand the monopoly position that X now occupies within the booming grievance economy of the online right, you would do well to observe the reaction to a post by a young academic named Ally Louks, who was recently awarded a PhD in English literature by Cambridge University.

 “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” posted Louks, along with a photograph of herself proudly holding a bound copy of her thesis. The title of the thesis, visible in gold lettering above the Cambridge Crest, is Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. Louks’s follow-up post, a screen-grab of her thesis abstract, made clear that it explored racial implications of the language of smell in English literature of the postwar period.

A normal person, seeing this post, might react in any number of ways – perhaps “Fair play to that young lady, that’s quite an achievement”, or “That’s certainly a niche subject, but then again such is the nature of PhD theses” – before immediately scrolling on and forgetting about all about the newly minted Dr Louks and her delight in her intellectual achievement.

But X has never been a place for normal people; it has become even less so since being reshaped by Elon Musk, over the past couple of years, in his own damp and pallid image. The response to Louks is genuinely startling, even within the context of the toxic sludge of bile and stupidity in which users of the site have been stewing for some time. The fact she has borne it with composure and even humour, refusing to perform victimhood, seems only to have inflamed the rage of her abusers.

“Too bad you’re not holding a baby,” reads one fairly typical reply, “we need those more than we need a dissertation on racist smells.” “This woman is why everything is falling apart . . . She got a PhD for this, and from the looks of her, she probably believes that this entitles her to an extremely high-status lifestyle,” reads another. 

These are among the more measured reactions. Louks later posted a screenshot of one email she had received, saying she had reported it to the police. It began with “You are the dumbest f***ing bitch I have ever seen on the internet” and concluded with an explicit threat of gang rape.

What is it about Louks and her PhD thesis that has driven young, mostly right-wing men to such feral extremes of rage and despair? Well, the most obvious factor here is her being a young woman, which is a risky position to be in on the internet at the best of times. In the light of the inferno of misogyny that has engulfed her, the image of Louks holding her bound thesis appears symbolically overdetermined: smiling with pride and relief, cradling in her arms the fruit not of maternal but of intellectual labour.

Pre-feminist kitsch

The “too bad you’re not holding a baby” comment comes from an account associated with the “Tradwife” subculture, a movement characterised by an iconography of pre-feminist kitsch: happy and obedient wives in aprons, embracing traditional gender roles within single-income nuclear families. Inside the online dream-space of this patriarchal revanchism, the idea of a woman spending her years of fertile marriageability in pursuit of intellectual self-determination is always going to excite a fury of libidinal intensity.

And in this regard there is, furthermore, the topic of the thesis itself. Its title, and the language of its abstract, is heavily inflected with the language of social justice – with terms such as intersectionality and “misogynoir” – and was therefore bound to prick the many ears nowadays finely attuned to frequencies of anti-wokeness. For such people, Louks’s thesis is evidence of a tendency for everything to be viewed through a lens of racist oppression. Anti-woke sentiment exists along a broad ideological spectrum, from left to right: some are wary of the tendency to reduce the reality to a panoply of interlocking grievances, others are simply reactionaries who don’t want to hear about empires being bad or racial prejudices being built into societal structures.

But beneath the chaotic clamour surrounding Louks’s thesis can be heard, too, the steady thrum of crude anti-intellectualism. A great many of the responses to her post are along the lines of “Why are public funds being frittered away on things I myself would never read, and which serve no discernible social function?” Such reactions badly misunderstand the point of a PhD. A doctoral thesis, in English literature as with any academic discipline, is supposed to be extremely narrow in its focus; it is intended to be read by only a tiny handful of experts in a given area, who will assess the author’s contribution to that field of knowledge. You spend four years digging very deep into a small corner of your chosen field of research, and in the process you become a scholar.

Closer to barbarism

A society in which such activities are under suspicion – in which the work of academics in the humanities is denigrated for its failure to conform to market imperatives – is a society that is one step closer to barbarism. I can understand why most people would not be interested in reading Louks’s PhD thesis (just as no one outside of my narrow sub-discipline is particularly interested in reading mine), but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where people are not given the time and space to pursue such work, and in which the understanding of its value is lost.

But there is something else going on here, too, a primal performance of communal hatred and contempt. The people attacking Ally Louks online are not, in the end, really attacking Louks herself, so much as a pasteboard figure hastily erected in her image, and intended to stand for everything wrong with the world: woke academia, feminists, leftist-elite intellectuals, and so forth.

In his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred, the French philosopher René Girard advanced an eccentric but influential theory about sacrificial violence, based on an observation of ancient and classical mythology and culture: in periods where societal cohesion is threatened by conflict, he writes, humans collectively channel their aggressions and frustrations towards an individual, or a clearly defined group, on whom the crisis can be blamed, and who can be punished, killed or banished.

This sacrificial violence has a kind of restorative function: in projecting all its bad qualities – all its internal conflicts and contradictions – on to a scapegoat, the group can impose a societal cohesion. Oedipus is expelled and peace restored to Thebes. The innocent is slaughtered and the gods are appeased.

We do not need to look too hard to find more contemporary examples of this phenomenon. Some of those election posters, after all, were still up yesterday. And so too are those replies to Dr Louks’s post about her PhD.

No sign of the Russians in the Syrian skies or on the ground

As the rebels liberate Syria, the question must be, where are the Russians.

Just as in Afghanistan, where the US an allies where brushed aside like a whiff of smoke so now in Syria, no sign of the Russians, who supported  Assad.

Bashar al-Assad reported to have fled Syria as rebels say they have captured Damascus.

From The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/08/bashar-al-assad-reported-to-have-fled-syria-as-rebels-say-they-have-captured-damascus?CMP=share_btn_url

Notre Dame a symbol of people working together

Interesting piece by Lara Marlowe in The Irish Times yesterday.

Notre Dame cathedral will reopen today, five years and eight months after it was nearly destroyed by fire. About 30 foreign heads of state and government will listen to President Emmanuel Macron’s speech in front of the gothic monument.

Pope Francis declined Macron’s invitation because, said Mgr Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, “The star of the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris is Notre Dame de Paris”. Francis “did not want to attract attention to himself on this occasion”.

US president-elect Donald Trump had no such compunction and announced on Truth Social that he would attend “the re-opening of the Magnificent and Historic Notre Dame Cathedral”. On the night of the fire, Trump suggested that France use “flying water tankers” to extinguish the blaze. The French pointed out that do so “could lead to the collapse of the entire structure of the cathedral”.

Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Chinese pianist Lang Lang, French-American cellist Yo Yo Ma and South African Soprano Pretty Yende are among the stars who will perform in a celebratory concert on Saturday. On Sunday morning, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich will bang his crozier on the cathedral’s shuttered doors, enter the pristine, sparkling sanctuary and perform the first public Mass since April 2019.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, Macron promised to rebuild the cathedral “more beautiful than before” within five years. He fulfilled his rash promise. Critics now accuse him of wanting to bask in the reflected glory of the restored monument.

The restoration of Notre Dame, like last summer’s Paris Olympics, was possible because Macron circumvented French bureaucracy. “Macron has been in power since 2017,” noted the right-wing commentator Pascal Praud. “If one can reproach him for anything, it’s for not giving a kick in the ant hill and turning France into a gigantic construction site like Notre Dame.”

During his seventh post-fire visit to the site at the end of November, Macron called the cathedral’s rebirth “a metaphor for the life of the nation”. He thanked the nearly 2,000 stonemasons, roofers, stained-glass artists, painters, electricians, rope technicians and other artisans, saying: “The inferno of Notre Dame was a national wound, and you have healed it.” The “jolt of hope” created by the cathedral’s reopening would, he predicted, equal the shock of its near destruction.

But if there is an appropriate metaphor for the life of the nation, it is closer to the night of the fire. The contrast between the beauty of the cathedral and the condition of France is stark, amid a fiscal crisis worse than that of Greece, Italy or Spain. Deficit spending and a colossal, €3.2 trillion debt have made a mockery of euro-zone guidelines. Annual interest on the country’s debt has reached €60 billion, equivalent to the defence budget.

The political crisis is equally grave. On Wednesday night, Michel Barnier became the shortest-serving prime minister of the Fifth Republic when his government fell after only three months in office. Only one other government has fallen to a no-confidence motion, in 1962. Macron cannot dissolve the National Assembly again until June 2025. That left him only two options, said Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally: to appoint a new government, which would risk falling in turn for the same reasons, or to resign.

So Macron will hobnob with foreign leaders at Notre Dame today, much as Louis XVI tinkered with his clock collection on the day the Bastille was taken. The far left and far right politicians who brought down Barnier’s government were really clamouring for Macron’s head. Philippe Olivier, an adviser to Le Pen, described Macron as “a fallen republican monarch who advances with his shirt open and a rope around his neck towards the next dissolution [of the National Assembly]”.

Winning an early presidential election could keep Le Pen out of prison, like Trump in the US. The verdict in her trial on charges of embezzling European Union funds will be delivered next March 31st. If guilty, Le Pen risks a fine, prison and ineligibility for public office for five years.

Macron dismissed calls for his resignation as “political science fiction”. His original sin is to have dissolved parliament last June 9th, in the wake of EU elections which were won by Le Pen’s National Rally. Since the July election, the far left and far right constitute the biggest blocks in an assembly where no one has a majority.

Macron compounded the damage by waiting two months to appoint Barnier while France revelled in the planetary show of the Paris Olympics. The far left, which led the July 7th poll, demanded the prime minister’s office for one of their own. Macron instead chose Barnier, a member of the conservative party Les Républicains, which came in last in the election. Barnier’s political legitimacy was contested from the outset, and he became the hostage of Le Pen, who could threaten a no-confidence vote at any moment.

France’s worst problem is disunity. The reconstruction of Notre Dame showed how much the French can achieve when they work together. Macron’s greatest failing has been his inability to persuade them to do so.