Tuesday, February 10, 2009
MUCH as I don’t want to admit it, I don’t always play golf brilliantly.
I start every round in high expectation — today is going to be the day, today will be the moment when it all finally comes together.
But there are days when hope has gone by the third green, days when just nothing seems to work. On those days my dreams of finally qualifying for the senior tour — of being the Harrington of the over-60s — fade once more into the middle distance.
But you keep plugging away, don’t you. No matter what sport you love, there’s always one moment that keeps you coming back. In my case it might be one perfect shot with a fairway wood, after about 90 shots that scuttled along the ground or sprayed in every direction except the right one.
Where I play golf we have a term for that one perfect shot. Were it not for its vulgarity, you might call it a golfing technical term. We call the one great shot an "a.f.t".
The letters "a.f.t." stand for "about effing time." And I have to admit, when I heard the first reports that the Taoiseach had made a powerful and inspiring speech to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, my reaction was to mutter "a.f.t".
For months now, the entire Government has seemed unable to communicate anything coherent or sensible, let alone inspirational.
As the banking and financial crisis has unfolded, the Government has been running to catch up and its responses, if anything, have tended to undermine confidence further.
The strange thing about that is that it has been obvious for weeks there is a need for huge solidarity across the community. We are not going to get out of the mess we’re in without pulling together.
The first thing that means is that people who can make sacrifices have to be prepared to do so. But they should be asked to do so for a purpose — to protect jobs, to keep work going, to protect others who are more vulnerable.
In other words, we have been crying out for weeks for someone to tell us what we instinctively know already — that we have to work together to get out of this mess. That’s what being a citizen of a republic means, after all. It means you have a right to be heard and a responsibility to make a contribution.
When we call for leadership, what we really mean is that we want someone we have elected, someone who is answerable to us, to demonstrate a sense of where we can go together. What really amazed me, in the immediate aftermath of the speech by the Taoiseach, was the media consensus that seemed to develop that the speech he delivered was precisely what the country has needed.
Excerpts from the speech were played on radio, accompanied by hushed and reverent tones as if Comrade Stalin or Uncle Mao had just spoken.
I heard political commentators, who really should know better, saying that this speech was a defining moment in Brian Cowen’s career.
Eoghan Harris, on the Late Late Show, described the speech as the moment when Cowen had forced us all to choose between fighting or dying.
Give me a break. I’ve actually met people who were there when the Taoiseach spoke. And yes, they were impressed. Mostly they were impressed because they had come to believe the Taoiseach had forgotten how to make a good speech, that he had become so much a prisoner of civil service scripts that it was really refreshing to hear him speak from the heart.
But I have yet to meet anyone outside of the political classes who would say this was a defining moment or that it had changed their view of the world. It was, people said, vintage Brian Cowen.
Not new Brian Cowen or different Brian Cowen. Just the Brian Cowen who used to be able to stand outside a church gate or warm up the árd fheis audience for the party leader’s speech, and give it lackery. (Do you remember "if in doubt leave them out"? Now there was a speech.)
It slowly dawned on me the reason that speech has been greeted as being of historic proportions — editorials in every single national newspaper, for goodness sake – is that the want is in us. We want to be led. We’re feeling insecure, anxious, afraid. We want a strong man to tell us what’s what. We want a general to tell us that now is the time to fight or die.
I hope none of that is true. Way back in 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt delivered himself of some thoughts about what it means to be the citizen of a republic. Recalling Lincoln’s definition of a republic as government of, for and by the people, he said that in other forms of government, the quality of the leader was all-important. In a republic, though, it is the citizen who matters.
"The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed," he said. "The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation." And he went on, later in that speech, to talk about oratory.
"It is highly desirable," said Roosevelt, "that a leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to put false values on things, it merely makes him power for mischief… and unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good commonsense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives."
ROOSEVELT concluded: "Indeed it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand… To admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic."
I won’t tell what Roosevelt had to say about journalism (it wasn’t very kind), or about men of money (even less kind — it was one of Roosevelt’s fundamental beliefs, as he put it in that speech, that property belongs to man, and not man to property). The bottom line for Roosevelt was this. It’s what we do — we, the citizens of the republic — that really matters. And we should be inspired, if at all, by deeds rather than words.
The real hope now is that the Taoiseach has found a voice, and it is a voice that seems to echo the values of a republic. Over the coming months, every citizen will have a chance to judge whether the "oratory does represent genuine conviction". Some fundamentally important values are under threat in our current crisis. Speeches alone won’t help us defeat that threat.
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