06.22.06
Nat West Three
The cuz has had a setback.
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06.21.06
Sleep Paralysis
Sometimes I wonder why I bother with the blog and then you see something like this. Darren Barefoot linked to my night terrror style post. The response he got was amazing….
Here’s my original post (some of my old links are a bit funny, sorry about that Joe – I think connected with my server move).
And here’s the Wikipedia entry. So the crushing weight on the chest is not linked to the husband (and I have had the same sensation when he is at a safe distance).
06.20.06
Indo and Haughey and Dunlop
From their editorial…expresses what I felt but couldn’t articulate when I heard Frank being trotted out last week for anecdotal entertainment
 ”Most ludicrous of all was that of the notorious political poacher-turned-gamekeeper, Frank Dunlop. Mr Dunlop was kind enough to tell the Irish people on Wednesday that the late Mr Haughey “did an immense amount of good for the country”.
I doubt whether Mr Haughey’s other mourners will relish a tribute from Frank Dunlop. A brilliant and uncompromising South African writer, on being complemented by another writer who he despised, said that being complemented from such a source is “like being vomited over in public”. A tribute from Frank Dunlop is of that order. “
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Leaving Cert stuff
I like what Disillusioned Lefty has to say on the Leaving Cert…which he just finished…which explains my shock at how young all those bloggers seemed at that awards thing….
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The ST on Haughey
Just getting round now to reading the ST….very good article on the funeral. They even get a dig at the other Charlie…
“Charlie Bird, RTE’s chief news reporter, managed to get in ahead of other media. He excitedly told reporters that Haughey “looks old, terribly old”. It was as if he had somehow expected to find the octogenarian, who spent his last years battling cancer, MRSA and other ailments, to be the same vibrant leader, riding horses or sailing his yacht, that had appeared in collections of retrospective photographs in newspapers over the previous few days.”
They also point out how Charlie was actively influencing the hacks in his last years…cleverly picking on some of his greatest enemies…
“Friends have said Haughey was greatly distressed by his poor public standing, and began to take a hand in his own rehabilitation. He briefed sympathetic journalists about his hidden hand in history — claiming in particular that it was he who kick-started the peace process. While telling the Moriarty tribunal that his memory was deficient, he was simultaneously enunciating his many achievements in the arts to a magazine in 2003…..
The media was also much kinder than might have been supposed. Vincent Browne, editor of Village magazine, once had an adversarial relationship with Haughey and would aggressively interrupt Fianna Fail press conferences with questions about the source of his wealth. On Thursday he published a sometimes-moving, sometimes-maudlin account of their final meetings, which included hugs.
“Often I thought how privileged I was to have such access to perhaps the most interesting personality of Irish history in a century or more,” Browne wrote. “And over the years I got very fond of him.”
In The Irish Times, Miriam Lord went further. “He was wonderful to know,” she said. “I was mad about him.”
One of her colleagues, Frank McDonald, was another journalistic titan to give a cutesy rendition of his final meetings with The Boss, involving copious champagne and compliments. ”
Â
06.19.06
Where is Meath?
Just tried to book tickets on movies.com for the Savoy cinema. You have to register first. But MEATH isn’t on their county list. ???????????
Sponsors gone mad at World Cup
The No Logo world gone mad. Read the other stuff at the bottom of this article..
Waters on Haughey
Ah John. You’ve lost the run of yourself now.
“His fingerprints are all over the transformation of Ireland, but the explanation is too complex and amazing for easy acceptance. Before he came, we were poor: now we grow rich. Before he came, there were hovels, now a housing boom. Before he came, there were dirt tracks, now motorways and flyovers. Before he came, we were afraid to speak in whispers; now we proclaim our worth to the world. Charles Haughey was the Fat Chieftain who promised to make his people as plump as himself.
He delivered. Left to get on with things, he might have delivered 20 years earlier.”
Eh, remember John. He had the chance when Taoiseach in 79 and 82 and blew it. And castigated the coalition government when they were trying (and failing) to make the necessary cutbacks to repair the damage done by FF. In the end he “delivered” so that he could stay in power on the backs of FG support.
As for attributing this sort of lofty motivation…
“Haughey was a subversive – his enemies were right about that. He sought to subvert the delusions of post-colonial Ireland, to manipulate the iconography of wealth and power so as to deliver himself and us to our potential. The enemies were right, too, when they called him a thief. He stole Ireland back from the elite who had stolen it for themselves – by aping their pretences and self-importance and exposing the inadequacy of their charades; by creating a new drama of elitism: spectacular, attainable and democratic. Haughey’s legacy is the story he told us about ourselves, the way he told it and the way it recreated life’s textures and tones. He showed us a way we might live, by living it himself. That this emerged as another illusion was part of its value. Think loaves and fishes. His life was manifesto and lived-installation, a representation of the possible. Everything about him – his history, house, fortune, disgrace – became codes by which we discovered ourselves. He supplied the narrative for an otherwise inscrutable journey.
Being perhaps unable to achieve release from the cocoon of post-colonial illogic, you will “point out” that he was himself the prime beneficiary of his own dramatisation. This was unavoidable and therefore morally unexceptionable. There was no other way of demonstrating the possibilities. In the story he dramatised, the iconography of pretence lay side by side with the facts: famine, enforced ignorance, squalor and the bloody hangovers of history. Haughey did not turn away from the facts, but neither did he confront them in a way that would have permitted him to be patronised as honourable failure.
He sought to lead us from the swamp of history, not with a rhetoric of egalitarianism but a programme of action and a drama of attainment.
He refused to settle for less than his own due, so refusing on behalf of the dispossessed; the men of no property; the women of less property; and the citizens who wouldn’t have minded their telephones being tapped if, back in the grey and wireless reality of early-1980s Ireland, they’d had telephones worth tapping. To the people of flawed pedigree, Charles Haughey said: anything is possible, poverty is not natural, and you do not have to accept your place. This exercise in subversion was successful, except that, by virtue of its methodology, it left many of the governing delusions intact, allowing the deluded not simply to forget what it had been like but to deny the meaning of what had happened and what we had become.”
What rubbish. He just wanted a lifestyle and expected others to pay for it. Maybe he thought he was copying the colonisers but the “everyone else is doing it” justification is hardly moral.
The evils of school
Billy posted this link to a pretty amazing (IMHO) article on the evils of school on the earlier school post. I think it’s a bit OTT but some great ideas in it. On the OTT side the author claims the following:
“…the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic functions…..
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.”
I’d be inclined to think that these are side-effects rather than the function of schooling but still…..
I like this:
“There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era – marketing.”
and finally
“Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day.”
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