Splintered Sunrise

I should, I suppose, have covered the PSF Ard Fheis, but I didn’t follow it as closely as I should have. This is entirely because Gerryspeak does my head in. Props to the Dublin organisation, though, for their valiant attempt to reinstate the old tax policy. This shows a grasp of the realities of southern politics that many Nornies still haven’t got their heads around.

So what of our New Dispensation up here? What there hasn’t been so far is any worthwhile legislation, or indeed many executive decisions. Everything is under review. And, with the honourable exceptions of Margaret Ritchie and Michelle Gildernew, few ministers seem in a hurry to do anything. This was raised in the Assembly back in October by the estimable Naomi Long (Alliance, East Belfast) and provoked a most un-PC response from Papa Doc.

It’s all the more puzzling when you consider that on the big socio-economic issues, everybody at Stormont agrees with everybody else. In fact, all the big rows have been about cultural symbolism.

Take the attendance of culture minister Edwin Poots (DUP) at the Pobal conference. It was said that this was a great step forward, that it was the first time anyone from the DUP had attended an Irish-language event. The latter is true, and it does mark some modest progress from the days when Sammy the Streaker and his cronies at City Hall were banging on about Gaeilge being a “foreign language”. But there’s a way to go yet, as demonstrated by Pootsie’s speech. I’m paraphrasing of course, but I think I have the gist:

Yo! I’m here. I’m doing my job as culture minister and reaching out to all sections of the community.

Now you guys think you’re getting a Language Act. Well, you can whistle for it.

And what’s all this about bilingual signage? I don’t think so.

What’s more, you Gaeilgeoirí keep letting Sinn Féin/IRA lead you by the nose. You need to correct that in the future.

Sin é.

Well, no, to be totally fair, there was a bit more to it than that. Pootsie did do a bit of soft-soaping about the shared heritage of our community. And he also had a pop at the Provos for launching an Irish-language campaigning group named after martyred IRA volunteer Caoimhín Mac Brádaigh. In the minister’s view, this tended to associate an Ghaeilge with “terrorism” and made things more difficult for friends of the language like himself.

We may well say the minister is being disingenuous, and there’s a fair possibility that might be true. But he’s also hit on something, in that republican politics in the North these days consists in very large part of cultural symbolism, combined with invoking the names of republican heroes. At this rate, the Provos will have more commemorations than the Orange Order.

So it was with PSF’s International Women’s Day initiative, which was to hold a celebration of the life of martyred volunteer Máiréad Farrell. A perfectly worthy thing to do – Máiréad was a serious republican woman who deserves to be commemorated. But then there was the idea of holding the event at Stormont, instead of (say) a West Belfast venue. This drove the unionists apeshit, which may have been the point. As it happens, the Assembly business committee wouldn’t let them use the Long Gallery. And so Nelson McCausland (DUP) got to go on the wireless and crow about how the Shinners had been forced to hold the commemoration in a poky wee party office.

This, I suppose, is what passes for politics in the North these days. Where’s the beef, indeed?

Rud eile: On a related note, I can’t help but notice all the tributes to Brendan Hughes that have been appearing in the Andytown News. It’s all the more striking in that the Dark had been an unperson for the last lot of years. But now, I guess, it’s okay to praise him now that he’s safely dead and unable to answer back. Lord help us, these guys will probably even have something nice to say about John McAnulty when he goes.

So I’ve been wanting for a while to write about this “raunch culture” debate, but, having recently covered the lad mag circulation crisis and the culture of sexual hypocrisy on the left, now seems as good a time as any. This is something that you associate on the left with our old friends in the SWP, and can be seen as a revival of their campaign against “New Laddism” in the late 1990s. Their championing of Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs (a real curate’s egg of a book – there are sharp insights alongside half-developed ideas and some outright silliness) provides the official logic for the current line. I direct readers to this excellent treatment by Anne McShane, but there is more to this than meets the eye. The SWP, of course, are not straightforward puritans, as you might gather from the swinging lifestyle of many of their leading cadre, and their ultra-libertarian defence of Tommy Sheridan. Nor are they simply adapting to their conservative Muslim allies – there is a bit of that, but they still attack Catholic moral teaching with what can only be described as gay abandon.

The root, I think, is to be found in the organisation’s uneasy relationship to popular culture. This is encapsulated as well as anywhere in a 1996 Pat Stack column in Socialist Review. Unfortunately, it’s not one of Pat’s better articles, and tends to make him sound like both a humourless git and a puritan, neither of which he is. But Pat does cover the main bugbears of the New Laddism period: Loaded, Men Behaving Badly, Fantasy Football etc. Over to Pat:

The new lad is apparently harmless. Unlike the traditional ‘working class lad’, the new lad is not violent, nor is he racist. He is an educated, middle class, witty character who is only reclaiming parts of harmless masculinity from the horrors of feminism and the terrible wimpishness of the ‘new man’ era.

The new lad is, according to his defenders, only reaffirming the fact that men like a pint, like their sport, and find women sexually attractive. The new lad is still ‘alternative’ when it comes to comedy, but is free of the sexual prudishness of the original alternative comedy scene.

In fact, Pat’s description sounds a bit like, well, your average straight man. There is an interesting idea here struggling to get out about the embrace of faux blokishness by a layer of middle-class youth, but Pat quickly leaves that aside to bang on about the political virtue of the alternative comedy scene in banishing demons like Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, who thought that minorities were fair game for comedy. New Laddism, apparently, was rolling back these gains.

Now, I’m not sure about this. We don’t often like to admit today that Terry and June regularly got three or four times the audience of The Young Ones, but I’ll go along with the idea that the alternative comedy scene was massively influential in terms of comedic fashion. Where I take issue with Pat is that he’s assuming a list of taboo subjects and arguing in favour of a good, progressive comedy that takes aim at the right targets. I find that profoundly problematic. It seems to erase the context and nuance that a lot of humour depends on – for instance, an ethnic joke from Sanjeev Bhaskar or Jackie Mason will be rather different than one from Bernard Manning or Jim Davidson. Besides, only very strange people will listen to a comedy routine while preoccupied about whether it is PC to laugh at this or that joke. To someone who didn’t know the SWP in the flesh but only from its press, the long-running debate on the letters pages about Ali G would simply have appeared insane.

Then we have the dreaded “irony”. Often this was amped up to “postmodern irony”, but since Alex Callinicos doesn’t know what postmodernism is, and most comrades never got past page four of his little book, we can assume PoMo in this context to be an all-purpose intellectual swearword. The line was that New Laddism was all about “using postmodern irony to rehabilitate sexism”. This was deployed particularly in relation to the SWP’s official Most Evil Show On TV, Men Behaving Badly. If you watched the show, you might have noticed the traditional sitcom device (you find this also in Till Death Us Do Part, Love Thy Neighbour and Home Improvement, to name a few) of showing the men as idiots and the women as the sensible characters. How could a show portraying sexist men as idiots be endorsing sexism? You see, comrade, this is merely a cunning use of postmodern irony. Portraying the men as idiots is just a sly ruse to allow them to talk about Kylie’s arse.

Maybe this is just me, but I find this a paranoid mode of thought. I’m reasonably sure that, when Loaded was launched in 1994, it had a business plan rather than an intellectual manifesto. And I’ll lay money that, when Frank Skinner writes his routines, he does not say to himself, “Hmm, what bit of patriarchal ideology can I sneak in under the guise of postmodern irony?”

I think, and I’ll stick my neck out here, that there is a certain amount of class-biased thinking involved. As Des Fennell likes to point out, the working class is more concerned with how things are and the middle class with how things appear. An anecdote from Mark Steel’s autobiography springs to mind. The young Mark has heard middle-class comrades talking about “sexism” and, while he knows what racism is and why it’s bad, he isn’t sure about this sexism. A comrade explains that pinups and Page Three girls are sexist, to which Mark’s response is “Thank God I wasn’t a socialist when I was fourteen.”

Women face plenty of material obstacles in society. The absolute worst feature of the Dworkin-MacKinnon school of feminism was its idealist assumption that the major obstacle women faced was “sexist” imagery, extremely broadly defined, and this was the logic in Dworkin looking to the Reagan administration to “liberate” women from porn at the same time as it was gutting equality legislation, slashing social programmes and restricting abortion. Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, which is a good deal better, nevertheless has a strong streak of this idealist thinking.

But this sits rather well with a milieu saturated in middle-class PC thought, where it is considered sexist for men to find women physically attractive (I suspect too much reading of Jane Austen is a factor here) and where working-class women who wear revealing clothes are damned as suffering from alienation and false consciousness. Consider Judith Orr’s interview with Levy in SR. Some of the most interesting comments are to be found in Judith’s editorialising, as in “the sexual freedoms the women’s movement won have been swallowed up by capitalism, commodified and sold back to young women as boob jobs and push-up bras”.

Well, commodity fetishism is basic ABC Marxism. But the sneering tone is the key here. I suspect the push-up bra has become a symbol of evil because it’s a garment you associate with the slappers on the estates. At its crudest level, this becomes the argument – which I actually heard at an SWP public meeting a year or two back – that capitalism is forcing women to have boob jobs. No it isn’t. Yes, cosmetic surgery is a profit-making enterprise, but women have boob jobs because they want bigger breasts. That can be explained with reference to psychology, media images of women or what have you, but the capitalist system does not require women to be lugging around big plastic breasts.

It’s all quite delicious, isn’t it? Of course you need to stand by “the sexual freedoms the women’s movement won”, or it might begin to cramp your own lifestyle, but the deity forbid that anyone might express these. You have an opposition to legal censorship combined with horror at what the plebs are reading and watching. Nudity in art-house cinema is perfectly fine, but Michelle Marsh in her undies on the cover of Nuts is the death of civilisation. What we end up with is a sort of systematic doublethink, perfectly mirroring the Orwellian template in that its skilled practitioners don’t even notice the inconsistencies.

And so we return to one of the perennial moral panics of our age, the video game, with the news that Norn Iron has inspired its very own shoot-em-up. The Masked Gunman is apparently a Grand Theft Auto-style game that allows players to assume the role of a loyalist or republican godfather, and build a paramilitary empire by engaging in extortion, pimping, drug-dealing and bumping off one’s enemies. This had Nolan’s listeners in paroxysms of fury this morning, on the grounds that it glamourises violence. The creator responds by arguing that only other paramilitaries are killed, not civilians.

This marks one departure from gritty realism. Another objection might be that, while the activities described are a fair description of how armed loyalism functions, the Provos have been making most of their money through “legitimate” business ventures for decades now. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for a thrilling gaming experience.

I wonder if Johnny Adair, now reinventing himself as Norn Iron’s answer to Chopper Read, is going to put in a claim for royalties. And it’s curious that the bookshops are coming down with Johnny’s heavily fictionalised autobiography - which really does glamourise the life of a semi-fascist thug - but the great Ulster public seem pretty much unexercised about the matter. Nor do they seem to worried about the massive subsidies being directed to armed loyalism by the British government.

No, I’m not doing the Scottish elections. Frank’s piece on Cedar Lounge pretty much says what I wanted to say, and there’s very little I could add to it. For some background, these two articles from the Irish Socialist Network and Socialist Democracy, representing the more thoughtful end of Irish leftism, may be of interest.

But there have been a few amusing snippets over the last day or two, starting with this story from the Beeb about the Ulster Scots hotline that took zero calls in three years. This boondoggle derives directly from the parity of esteem provisions of the GFA, which stipulates that promotion of Ulster Scots, on a par with Gaeilge, will build confidence amongst the Prods. Actually, most Prods find the thing a bit of an embarrassment. Even OUP peer Lord Laird (or should that be Laird Laird?), former Heid-Yin of the Ulster-Scotch Heirskip Cooncil, reckons the thing is a waste of money. Although, unsurprisingly, he still begrudges any public cash being spent on Irish. [Update: As has been helpfully pointed out in the comments below, this story was first broken by the Belfast Telegraph, having got the facts under FOIA. As we believe in giving credit where it's due, have a look at the original story here.]

A tiny article appears in a sidebar in the Irish News on the introduction of yet more repressive legislation, the purpose of which is obscure since we’re supposed to be at peace now. This latest measure, which applies only to the North, allows the peelers to seize computers belonging to journalists who won’t divulge their sources. One might refer to it as the Ed Moloney Order. Normalisation, forsooth!

Irate small businesspeople from Protestant areas phoning Talk Back, wondering if the UVF’s historic statement means they can get away with not ponying up next week’s protection money.

Finally, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack O’Bama turns out to have Irish heritage, as is traditional for prospective US presidents, seemingly being a Kearney from Offaly. I could have sworn his family was from Kenya, but there you go.

The title, as anyone from Ballymena could tell you, is the negative of “Scots wha hae”.

Hello and welcome to the all-new Splintered Sunrise on WordPress. I’ll carry over the links as quickly as possible, and maybe tinker about with the layouts a bit. Things might be slightly scrappy for a wee while, so please bear with me till I master the new format.

Our subject for the day is culture. I found myself musing on this a little after listening to Talk Back on Radio Ulster, but I’ll come to that in a second. Close observers of the North will be aware that Big Ian has nominated Edwin Poots, leader of Lisburn council, to be minister of culture in the new Executive. That would be the same Lisburn council that made a big stink about allowing the civic reception room to be used for civil partnerships as well as straight weddings, so there’s perhaps an indication of how likely the new minister is to smile on sponsorship for Gay Pride this year. Shadowing him will be the chair of the Assembly culture committee, Sinn Féin Nua’s Barry McElduff, a loyal and articulate Gerryite apparatchik who has never shown much indication of being well versed in the arts.

Maybe these two will surprise us, but I have a sneaking feeling that local columnist Newton Emerson is onto something. Newt has been having a bit of a chortle about how the minister’s reports to the committee will be the modern equivalent of the Socratic dialogues. Which reminds me of a story that’s nearly too good to be true but actually did happen. Right at the start of the Troubles the RUC carried out a raid on the Falls Road, and one of the incriminating items they seized was a copy of Plato’s Republic. This on the grounds that they had been ordered to confiscate any republican literature they found.

On Monday Dunseith did a feature on the future of the Long Kesh site, and proposals to put up an H-Block museum. The Provos’ Paul Butler went on and fulminated on behalf of the museum proposal, while Jeffrey Boy Donaldson fulminated for the DUP on how this would glorify terrorism.

Tuesday saw a variation on this theme, when Drew Nelson of the Orange Order popped up to demand an apology from Gerry Adams for the torching of Orange halls in rural areas. That is, Grizzly should personally apologise to the Orange Order for every hall burning in the past 30 years. Bro Nelson was on shaky ground and he knew it, starting out with the accusation that the Provos had done the burnings as a matter of policy, then retreating to the proposition that Provo agitation against Orange marches had created the atmosphere that made the burnings possible. One thing he absolutely wouldn’t entertain was the idea that the Orange might have borne some responsibility for the hostility towards them from Catholics. Nonetheless, Bro Nelson was determined to get his apology from Grizzly. PSF Assembly member John O’Dowd was brought on to argue against Nelson, and did so quite trenchantly.

This seems to be the pattern now. There was a lot of hot air during the election campaign about socio-economic issues coming to the fore. Actually, there is next to no difference between the parties on socio-economic issues – or there appears to be very little, as none of the four big parties has taken issue with the Programme for Government, or even seen fit to demand its publication. Instead we get furious arguments about the above issues, or the Acht Gaeilge, or how many days of the year the Union Jack gets flown above government buildings.

For unionism, this is par for the course. Unionists have long been famed for their inability to let a minor symbolic issue pass them by. To take one recent example, in Ballymena the borough’s lone PSF councillor Monica Digney failed to stand when the mayor entered the council chamber. The prudent DUP group then decided to spend ratepayers’ money on a judicial review to determine whether councillors were legally obliged to stand on the mayor’s entrance.

When it comes to the Provos, I am slightly more cynical. Many of their demands, for example around the Irish language, are entirely supportable in and of themselves, and I’m not questioning for a moment the sincerity of people who are seriously involved around those campaigns. But I have a nagging feeling that a stepping up of the sound and fury around cultural issues serves the very useful purpose of covering their lack of radicalism elsewhere. When the big issues aren’t controversial, one tends to find controversy springing up over what in other times would count as smaller issues.