Michael D should be paid by the State just to think and to talk

I’VE been a big fan of Michael D since producing a party political broadcast for the Labour Party more than 20 years ago. Michael D was in it.

He was good in it. He was also delightful to work with and easy to direct. His wife, Sabena, was a good egg, too It must be admitted that the camera crew found it difficult to get him into a two-shot with the then leader of the Labour Party, Michael O’Leary. They clearly loathed each other so committedly that, quite apart from getting them into the same shot, getting the two of them breathing the same air in the same COUNTY at the same time was something of an achievement.

Once the two-shot trauma was over, however, Michael D was so fascinating that ever since, I’ve wanted a special national post created for him. Not the Presidency. It has too much ceremonial twaddle attached to it. Michael D should be paid by the state just to think and talk.

If Michael D were a wine, he’d be described as “a vintage year, visionary and charismatic, full-fruited in flavour, with bitter and twisted undertones.” He talks poetry, song, history, intellectual insight and scholarly reference, with occasional flashes of high-end academic tosh.

Before the Labour Party’s National Executive Council put paid to his presidential hopes, he did a radio interview suggesting the Presidency should be a “consciously intellectual office”.

“It shouldn’t be making as many concessions to a kind of populist consumption of it in terms of appearances,” he added.

I think this means “It’s irrelevant that Mary McAleese is prettier than me.” It might mean something else entirely, of course. That’s the thing with Michael D’s communication. It’s passionate and persuasive, but not necessarily clear.

“The public,” he went on, “are entitled if you like, to a general sense of an open approach to their history and how it is construed. We must be free to have imaginative options and forms of society.”

I’m for that. I’m not deadly sure what it would look like, but I’m for it. On the other hand, it should be remembered that this was on drivetime radio. After a long day at work, not many of his listeners would have had the energy to work out what ‘imaginative options and forms of society’ meant.

Michael D does not subscribe to the advice that, when in Rome, you do as the Romans do. Nor, by inference, to the proposition that, when on drivetime radio, the abstract, conceptual and academic must give way to the concrete. Whether he’s in Rome or Roscommon, in a university lecture hall or a radio studio, he talks the same way and if you don’t understand any of it, you’d better go and look it up.

He did move to the concrete occasionally in the radio interview. Like when he ridiculed the idea of the President as a ‘decorative extension of Government’ and said that if you wanted happy-clappy, you should go to North Korea or Disneyland. (Bit thrown, myself, by the North Korean reference. Hadn’t thought of them as happy-clappy, but Michael D is so globally well-informed, if he says the North Koreans are happy-clappy, they must be.) In the middle of this, he protested about the current absence of debate on fundamental issues like the relationship between society and the economy.

“We spent most of the 70s and 80s asking what we would do with the free time that was going to be available,” he said about his academic colleagues. “Then, in the nineties it was really could you afford to retire at all, would you be disloyal to the economy.”

Now, there’s a great truth. The last ten years have seen the subordination of citizenship and nationhood to the economy. It’s as if the economy is a rare exotic fruit in a glasshouse and any money spent on anything else will take the heat off it so it’ll wilt. Michael D was quite right to knock this. It was where he went thereafter that threw me.

“I’ve been interested in how this version of a disembodied kind of version of the economy separated from the social, and being hegemonical for the social; that’s an interesting debate,” he added.

You could almost see the presenter walking around that ‘hegemonical,’ as if it was a dead dog. A dead PEDIGREE dog: undoubtedly worth more attention than a dead mongrel, but, still, not something the interviewer would want to get close to, let alone grapple with.

It didn’t matter. Michael D was on to a new - and valid - point; the “draining away of the discourse”. Meaning (I think - don’t hold me to this) that instead of discussing issues of life and death, issues of aid, trade and debt, we’re talking about Colin Farrell’s latest drunk, Paris Hilton’s most recent black eye and whether or not it was cruel for a newspaper columnist to say the 16-year-old Blair daughter had legs like treetrunks. (It was cruel. Deadly, pointlessly cruel.) That we live in an era of impoverished public discourse is beyond doubt.

Of course, it could also be observed that, when we lived in an era of rich public discourse, when Michael D and his colleagues were worrying about how to manage the leisure that never arrived, the assumptions on which the discourse was founded were so flawed that, while the discourse gave a transient, if pleasing illusion of illumination, it was objectively no more productive than contemporaneous speculation about the putative fecundity of celebrity lawyers (You can tell I’ve been listening too much to Michael D).

The sad fact is that you can point a nation at the discourse it should be having, but you can’t make it have it. You have to find a way to make your themes more interesting than the tripe currently absorbing column inches and airtime. And, if you’re the Labour Party, coming up to a series of elections, that’s an imperative.

At the moment, Labour Party spokespeople seem easily surprised by quite ordinary questions. Their surprise puts them into a peculiar pattern.

It goes like this.

Put Pat Rabbitte or Liz McManus on radio and ask “What do you think of jelly babies?”

First response will be an intake of breath. (Fianna Fáil do all their breathing before going into the studio and the Greens - at the moment - don’t breathe at all for fear they’ll be accused of inhaling.) Following the intake of breath comes a “Well...”

After the “Well...” comes a deep sigh, filled with implicit reproach.

Then they start a lecture on how it’s only media care about jelly babies, that jelly babies are not an issue the rest of the country has any interest in. But they don’t offer anything better than what’s been dished up to them. Liz (the most poised female TD) gets patronising without purpose and Pat (the wittiest TD) gets mad.

They’re OK when attacking the Government. But if they plan to replace the Government, John Kerry’s campaign exemplifies the problem they must solve.

America now knows what Kerry thinks about Bush.

What America DOESN’T know is why it should replace Bush with Kerry.