First Name Terms

I don't usually blog about soccer or sport, but I was reading about the resignation of Giovanni Trapattoni as manager of the Irish soccer team just now and something about the statement from the Football Association of Ireland struck me as interesting.

This was the passage that struck me:

“This particular World Cup campaign has been disappointing, but Giovanni leaves us with a group of good young players which should form the basis of the squad that the new manager will use for the European Championships in France 2016 when 24 teams qualify.”

Now, why should they use Giovanni there? I would think that a man in his seventies, who has achieved a huge amount of success in the field of football management, deserves a respectful "Mr" in such a context, rather than to have his Christian name bandied about in a formal press release.

Of course, some people see the use of titles as stuffy and stiff, and believe that using a person's first name is much more friendly. I don't agree with this. I agree with Chesterton instead, who wished that the spirit of democracy and fraternity had brought about universal civility rather than the universal incivility of everybody using everybody else's given name so presumptiously. (Or something like that. I can't find the quotation online.)

I liked Trapattoni. Partly because he seemed like a very dignified man, but also (I have to admit) because he is a daily Mass-goer. I sometimes wonder if the latter fact is part of the reason the Irish sports media hated him so much, and blamed him so unreasonably for not turning sow's ears into silk purses.

The Man Beside Me On the Bus This Morning

I like to think of myself as a pretty public-spirited fellow. I do worry about the privatization of society, about the dangers of everybody getting locked into the metallic bubble that is the motor car and the mental bubble that is the MP3 player, or the mobile phone, or the laptop computer. I get irritated when I hear people complain about Jehovah's Witnesses or Hare Krishnas or charity collectors or people with petitions approaching them on the street. I feel annoyed when I hear people moaning about door-to-door canvassers at election time. Is Come Dine With Me really more important than the democratic process?

I've even written to the papers to take issue with other correspondents who moan about their fellow passengers' activities on the bus-- as though putting on make-up, or eating, was a monstrous invasion of your fellow-passenger's privacy.

But I think we are all anti-social to some extent, as I had to admit to myself today.

I take two buses into work. The first stops in Dame Street. Today, I decided (since I had rushed out of the house without breakfast) to buy a baguette in the Londis near the Wax Museum. The dusky-skinned fellow at the sandwich counter seemed in a bad mood. He put chicken on my baguette without asking, and then-- when he was about to wrap it up, and I asked if I could have coleslaw as well-- protested, "That will cost extra, you know". Later on, as I was queuing to pay for it, the entire shop was listening to him declaim: "We need more baguettes! We just need more baguettes, that's all!"

Buying a freshly-cut sandwich on the way to work, and eating it on the bus, is something I've never done before. I felt strangely gleeful about it. I wasn't in any especial hurry. In my carrier bag, I had A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, which I had started to read the evening before and which I was enjoying even more than I expected to. The morning was the kind of bright, fresh morning that is (to my mind) the weather summer has to offer. I was greatly looking forward to my morning treat.

My second-bus arrived almost immediately I reached the bus-stop. There was plenty of room, and I got my second-favourite seat-- the upstairs seat immediately behind the stairwell, with plenty of room to cross your legs in.

What more could a man ask for? I opened my book on the place I had left off, I took out my wrapped baguette, and then-- he sat down beside me.

He was a rather portly man, though not excessively so. He was perhaps ten years older than me, wore a crisp business suit and spectacles, and was particularly well-groomed (though his chin was rather stubbled). There was nothing objectionable about him. Except--except-- he was sitting right beside me, exactly when I wanted to be alone. I couldn't cross my legs (I can't remember if I uncrossed them as he arrived). I felt inhibited from eating my baguette, especially in such close proximity to his nice suit. He'd completely ruined the moment. I could have thumped him.

I decided to wait it out. I was going all the way to the terminus-- probably, he would get off in the city centre somewhere.

But then something even more outrageous, unthinkable, unpardonable happened. The other seats began to empty, so that there were plenty of window seats available, and he didn't get up to take one. What the heck was the matter with this guy?

I sneaked a glimpse at him. He looked a little unsettled. He was glancing around himself a lot, as though unsure where he was going or where he should get off. He gave the impression of hovering a quarter-inch over the seat. And, though he never looked me full in the face, his expression seemed rather nervous and anxious. Or was I just imagining it? After all, he seemed to be a business-man of some kind. Shy and nervous people didn't inhabit the hard world of commerce.

I thought of my teens and early twenties, when I had struggled with crippling shyness and social anxiety. I could remember sitting on buses and watching all the other seats filling up, feeling shattered that the seat beside me (as it seemed to me then) was always the last to be taken. I remembered how the smallest perceived slight or rejection would throw me into a tailspin. It was awful. Maybe this was a fragile soul who would feel much the same way if I moved seats.

And yet-- despite my letter to the paper, despite my outspoken public-spiritedness, despite my memories of my own morbid sensitivity in previous years-- it wasn't too long before I said, "Excuse me", stepped past the man in the suit, and made my way to a window seat at the back of the bus, to cross my legs and enjoy my book and my baguette undisturbed.

Oh hypocrisy of humanity!

Dublin Lock-Out Commemoration Makes Businesses Whinge

They are moaning that they are going to lose a fifth of their profits on one day, when O'Connell Street is closed to traffic for a commemoration of the 1913 Lock Out.

I see a certain poetic justice to that. Boo-hoo for the shopkeepers! Boo-hoo for the motorists! Boo-hoo for the deprived shoppers, not being able to shop in one street for one day-- if they insist on driving, that is.

Fumble in a greasy till, indeed.

The Springs of Socialism

Sometimes I fall into a certain mood in which it is easy to see why someone would be a socialist. By "socialist" I don't just mean a social democrat. I mean a person who thinks that the government should, more or less, take command of all economic activity. I am certainly not a socialist in this sense (or in any other sense), but I do feel a certain sympathy with this way of looking at the world, and I find it hard to understand how somebody would feel no sympathy with it. Never mind that communism has been a disaster wherever it has been tried; I am merely talking about an idea here, not a reality.

I think the appeal of socialism lies in an awareness of the potential of humanity. A human being is the paragon of the animals, the "heir of all the ages" in the words of Tennyson. Even if you are a materialist without any spiritual beliefs, you do at least believe that mankind is matter made self-aware, the universe grown capable of marvelling at itself.

Through the windows of the five senses, the human intellect can, in a sense, become united to all things. It can apprehend history, science, literature, philosophy, mathematics. It can take reality into itself. It can escape from the prison of the self into the boundless country of the actual. In the few years between infancy and death, it can come to some understanding-- how small an understanding, but how immense also!-- of billions of years of cosmic history, and centuries of human civilization, and all the furthest horizons of speculative thought.

How extraordinarily wasteful, then, seem all the activites that drain away this human potential! Human beings pouring their utmost effort into cornering the fizzy drinks market seems, not just ignoble, but a criminal waste of human ingenuity and human attention. Man was born for higher things.

In this mood, it doesn't seem like sinister social engineering for the government and schools and universities to try to root out certain tendencies and instil others. Somebody has to! Somebody has to try to turn people away from gambling, and chat shows, and an obsession with spectator sports, and soap operas, and conspicuous consumption, and all the rubbishy things they spend their precious leisure moments upon. Look at what they're missing! Think of what society could be if all that waste-- all that scrabbling for a living, all that anxiety about medical care and transport and the basic needs of life, all that addiction to stupid activities-- could be cut out, and if people could concentrate on being properly, fully human!

And even if people had to live in smaller apartments, and swap a car for a bus or a bicycle, or even if they had a narrower choice of careers, if they had access to better museums and nature reserves and art galleries and free lectures and safe streets and free hospitals, how could anyone complain about such a sacrifice?

As I say, I have some sympathy with such an attitude, though I don't share it. I understand the perils of paternalism (though a socialist State probably wouldn't call it anything so sexist) and the fact that even the most sincere and talented human beings tend to be untrustworthy when it comes choosing what's best for other people. I know that, though capitalism seems wasteful beyond belief, the planned economy tends to be even more wasteful in practice. I know that our ills are not to be blamed upon an economic system, but upon original sin.

But sometimes, when I pass a billboard for a betting shop, or I see teenagers wearing heavy metal t-shirts, or I flick through the channels on the television and see the utter bilge that is on offer, I momentarily become a redder-than-red Marxist.

(In fairness, I should admit that there are also moments when the openness of our "open society" appears to me, not only as a crucial safeguard against tyranny, but as something sublime and wildly exciting in itself-- when even the very messiness of our uncoordinated, competitive, ideologically-divided, patchwork civilization seems like something inherently good.)

Oh, for Goodness Sake, Grow Up. Grow Up! Grow Up!!

For the last few mornings, I have been gritting my teeth while my bus passes a billboard which advertises a film by the charming title Kick-Ass 2. As I am an avid cinema-goer, I saw the trailer for the first masterpiece in this series. That made me grit my teeth too. There won't be much left of my teeth at this stage.

Can there be any greater indictment of our culture than superhero movies? (Yes, there can-- superhero comics. But forget that for the moment.) It isn't just the sheer volume of these infantile productions that offends. It isn't the fact that they are increasingly taken oh-so-seriously, often treated as profound dramas in their own right.

It isn't even just that every superhero movie is exactly the same. It's exactly the same themes, over and over again-- the conflict between the private individual and the public persona, between personal hopes and dreams and the stern Call of Duty. But even the monotony of the genre is beside the point. The point is that the whole thing is so agonizingly, maddeningly puerile. Men and women dressed up in bright colours and skin-tight outfits, going by ridiculous names like Batman and Daredevil and Cyclops? Fighting villains who are also dressed in bright colours and have ridiculous names like Dr. Octopus and the Penguin? Doesn't anyone see how ludicrous all this is? Doesn't anyone see how debasing it is? Doesn't anyone find something jarring about it?

More than anything else, what nauseates me about the superhero genre is how it is such a pathetic power fantasy. It is as though our culture has no greater aspiration than to have perfect abs and to beat the living daylights out of other people. I'm well aware that the superhero genre tries to balance the power fantasy with a moral about responsibility and duty and the dark underside of having such phenomenal powers. Big deal. A little bit of pseudo-intellectual or pseudo-artistic seasoning hardly takes away from the sheer, inescapable childishness of the basic premise.

It's not just the superhero genre that exasperates me, though. Increasingly, it's popular culture as a whole. I'm sick of it, and I'm especially sick of it when it tries to be serious and thoughtful-- only then is its sheer superficiality most obvious. The Sopranos (which I've never seen) is a wonderfully complex and human drama, you say? Well, why is it about the Mafia? Why not make a drama about an ordinary family? Why do we need guns and violence and fast cars and vast wealth to sugar the pill of serious artistic intent?

More than anything, though, I resent all the popular culture that I've swallowed myself, usually with the sauce of nostalgia. I have a post on this blog analysing Star Trek in depth. Star Trek is trash. The Transformers comic that I read in childhood was trash. So was the Eagle comic. So were the Indiana Jones films that I went to see in the cinema, despite the golden glow of those childhood memories. Sherlock Holmes is trash-- I don't just mean any of the films or the TV series, but the stories themselves, which provided the template for so much detective drivel. Conan Doyle was quite right to disdain them. All the horror films I watched and analysed so avidly for so many years were and are trash. It's all trash. It's all stylized, caricatured, episodic, babyish, day-glo, puerile, developmentally arrested, vulgar, glib trash.

(I make an exception for Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is a great work of serious art.)

I am hereby checking out of the popular culture theme park. Henceforth I plan to read only grown-up books-- mostly poetry, especially long poetry. Nobody reads long poetry anymore, so that is a good sign. Anything that is ignored by our trash culture has to be good. Currently I am reading The Faerie Queene, which I'm finding tough going. But of course I'd find it tough going. I find it tough going because I've been infantalised by thirty-five years of trash culture. Finding it tough going is a very, very good sign.

(Note: There is some interesting discussion in the comments section, below).

The World's End, and the Flies of a Summer's Day

I'm just back from seeing The World's End, the third and final part of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's "Blood and Ice-Cream" trilogy. I enjoyed it, though I didn't think it was nearly as good as the previous film, Hot Fuzz, which is one of my all-time favourites.

The theme of The World's End was a fairly common cinematic theme-- men entering middle age seeking to reconnect with their youth. (Oh, and some stuff about a town's population being replaced by robots.) I find this theme-- recapturing lost youth, not robots posing as humans-- a little too poignant, since I am now half-way through my thirties (midway through life's journey, according to Dante). Sometimes I feel grateful that my childhood and adolescence was pretty uneventful and I don't have very much to get maudlin about-- although nostalgia will always find something.

But I also found myself (after the film) thinking about popular culture, social amnesia, and the sad condition of people who have been uprooted from their heritage, when they hit middle age. The film (like most films and works of entertainment these days, but even more so than most) is chock-full of pop culture references-- mostly marking the way the world has changed since the central characters were young.

It strikes me that ageing is particularly sad, particulaly lonely and desolate, when you have nothing but popular culture to draw on. It's like trying to cling onto a clump of grass. When you mark the passage of historic time by pop songs and TV shows and movies and technology, how can you help feeling ancient by the age of thirty?

Whereas somebody who is rooted in a tradition-- be that a national tradition, a cultural tradition, or (best of all, I think) a religious tradition-- doesn't feel so terribly antiquated, since traditions tend to extend across many generations. A man who is absorbed in some political cause-- trade unionism, for instance-- feels himself to be part of a story that began long before his birth and will continue (he hopes) well after his death. His own biography is only a moment in that story. He is part of something bigger and more enduring. Similarly, a man who feels himself to be part of a cultural tradition-- a man who reads old books, who feels a living connection with previous generations-- need not feel so unmoored when all the rock heroes of his youth start dying off.

I make no apologies for repeatedly quoting Edmund Burke's marvellous phase, "the flies of a summer's day", to describe people cut off from history and tradition. I think one of the worst things that a reliance on pop culture does to us is to make us flies of a summer's day-- but flies who are conscious of their own tragically short moment in the sun.

I Remember the Future Well

Opinion piece in today's Irish Times suggesting that we may be educating kids for jobs that no longer exist and that children should be taught how to learn rather than specific subjects. "Tell them that they will have many jobs, multiple careers."

I remember being taught, in both school and college, that "there's no such thing as a job for life any more" and that I would most likely change my career three times in my working life. I'm now thirty-five and I've been working in the same job since I was twenty-three. Of course, there's no knowing what will happen in the future. And my situation may be atypical. But I can't think about those uneasy assurances I was made in school without wondering how much unreliable information is given to innocent schoolchildren.

(I also remember one of my primary school teachers-- a very good one-- telling us that, in the future, wars would most likely be fought on computers. Looking back, I think I misunderstood what he meant, but I had an image of wars fought entirely on computers, with no physical combat at any point.)

Another thing I dislike about the article is the equating of education and training. The more the labour market seems unpredictable and unstable, the more sense a good solid liberal education makes to me.

And how do you "teach children how to learn", anyway? This is one of those clichés that roll off the tongue so easily, but that don't make much sense on further reflection. I can't think of any way to teach without teaching something specific. And when I remember all the "meta-learning" in my own education-- for instance, learning about historical methods rather than history-- I don't think it really did me any good at all.