Smug rehash finally ignites

AT the end of 1994, Kevin Myers wrote a column with the headline: “Unmarried mothers.”

It began as an inventory of his most risible columns of the year.

He was surprised, he wrote, using the usual trailer-load of adjectives, that he had not been lynched for remarks he was sure would “lead to certain, self-righteously inflicted disembowelment”.

“Subjects which touch upon the moral-indignation button include AIDS, money for Rwanda, drink and driving, racial differences, trade with dictatorships, itinerants, equality in education, the Irish language, positive discrimination for women and employment - and so on.”

But it was the next paragraph that was the most telling.

“The column which I thought would cause the Left and the sisters to lynch me said that the growing trend amongst teenage girls to have babies as a career option was a truly reprehensible social development.”

The column continues in a remarkably similar vein to the notorious column on Tuesday that caused such widespread offence.

So why did a column written only a decade ago evoke - to Myers’s obvious disappointment - a ripple of protest, whereas its reheated version led to such widespread condemnation and outrage?

In short, it boiled down to Myers’s gratuitous use of the word ‘bastard’. In other words, the problem wasn’t as much with the sentiments expressed as with the provocative weasel word he chose to ratchet up the argument.

You cannot quibble with the sincerity of Myers’s apology once the enormity of it all was brought home to him. But at the same time, his protests that he used the Elizabethan construction of the old French word “bastard” (“son of the saddle pack”) stretched credulity to breaking point.

There are a number of traits that can be found in Myers’s columns, and indeed in those of fellow Irish Times contrarian, Mark Stein.

There is the deliberate identification of the enemy - the “sisters”, the “politically correct”, the “liberals”, the “appeasers”, the “wets”, the “welfarists”. There’s another agenda at play: to put the enemy down.

He introduced the weasel word and then tried to head his detractors off: “Ah. You didn’t like the term bastard? No, I didn’t think you would. In the welfare-land of Euphemesia, what is the correct term for the offspring of unmarried mothers?”

Two things stem from this. If he didn’t think that “bastard” carried any stigma, why was there a need to include it?

And the second - as was acknowledged in his humble-pie apology - was a powerful reminder of how fallible we are as human beings.

You wouldn’t have thought it reading the unbelievably arrogant editorial justifying the running of the column in the first place.

“Irish society has changed hugely in recent decades and at a pace that has been breathtaking. Much of this change is for the good and has been led by The Irish Times.”

The smug certainty that underlies all that is deeply discomfiting. The Irish Times has undoubtedly contributed to Irish society but, in the round, isn’t it an establishmentarian rather than a revolutionary force?

Society is more complex, more divided, more subtle, more nuanced than can ever be encapsulated by such glib self-congratulatory tripe. Or than can be captured by the certainty of views expressed by columnists shouting from either side of the left/right or reactionary /liberal divides.

When you trawl through the stuff written by Myers in the run-up to the Iraq war, much of it was about taking pot-shots at the wets, the liberals and the appeasers who would dare question his omniscience. It is the classic bluffer’s gambit. I defy you to call me. And when you stonewall people like that, it’s amazing how many will back down, because they flounder in the complexity of it all.

What Myers’s column and the subsequent apology provided was an exemplar for human fallibility.

Robert McNamara, who was JFK’s defence secretary, made a stunning observation on the dangers of such messianic tendencies.

“There’s a wonderful phrase, the fog of war. What the fog of war means is that it’s so complex, it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to understand all of the variables.”