Why as a nation of promise-breakers are we so hard on our politicians?
It wasn’t a difficult decision. Anything to do with feet I avoid. Feet should be discontinued. Our legs should have been finished off with castors or those wheels you get on good luggage, that can spin in all directions and withstand baggage handlers possessed of John Deasy’s random venom.
Standing there, earwigging, I registered an unusual pattern.
Nearly half of the people pitching up at the pharmacist’s window were there, not to ask for something for a tickly cough, but to discuss which kind of Nicorette would see them through their New Year resolution to give up the fags.
Some of them wanted turbo-charged patches that would float them past any cravings. Some went for relatively mild patches, on the basis that they could come back to be turbo-charged if they got to the stage where all belonging to them were begging them to go back on the smokes. Pairs of women passed packages of nicotine gum between them to compare and contrast flavours as if they were buying wine for an important party.
You expect to see this in the airport pharmacy, where all other products are basically just back up for the Nicorette that keeps smokers half-sane on long flights. (Long flights like the journey from Cork to Dublin…)
But this wasn’t the airport pharmacy. It was just an ordinary suburban shop whose end-of-year accounts will carry mute testimony to the eagerness of thousands of Irish people to kick a phenomenally sticky addiction.
Thousands of people making promises to themselves and to those who love them.
Many of the promise-makers — perhaps the majority — will have got out of bed this morning, replaced yesterday’s patch and maybe boosted it with a quick gum chew. Some of them, sadly, will have shoved the Nicorette into a drawer where it can’t reproach them for having failed, because they’re back smoking.
They’ll try again, and the statistics indicate that every time you try and fail to quit cigarettes in some weird way contributes to your eventual success.
The smokers who broke their promises will kick themselves, but nobody else will. The dieters who lose a stone in January and then let it creep back on in time for Easter will despise themselves for breaking their promise to stay at a size 14, but nobody else will say “You know, you’re a rotten person for breaking your promise.” Even less likely is the possibility that a nasty acquaintance will say “Not only are you a rotten person for breaking your promise not to eat chips or tiramasu in 2007, but it’s typical of dieters. You’re all the same. You break promises all the time.”
Dieters do break promises all the time, as do those trying to stop smoking. People like me, who make the promise never to use the F word again, break promises all the time. Last year, my New Year resolution on the F word withstood January. I got through the whole month without saying it once. On February 6, though, I had an outbreak so bad, it was stunning.
Heaven knows what went wrong on that day, but whatever it was caused the F word to fountain. People came from miles around to catch the outbreak, knowing they were witnessing something historic. Not many people can get it as frequently into one sentence as I can when I’m on a roll.
Mortifying and disgraceful, it was, although I have to point out in my own defence that as a reliever of stress, the F word is more immediately accessible, cheap and a lot less wussy than having roundy black stones heated and lined up along your spine in a spa.
We tolerate promise-breaking in other people, even really serious promise-breaking, yet when politicians do it, we behave as if they were the only guilty parties.
We warble on about politicians breaking their promises, as if promise-breaking were the definitive political failing, the key reason we know them to be lesser beings than the rest of us.
One of the reasons has to be that most of our own promises are essentially selfish. Most New Year resolutions are self-directed, rather than other-directed.
Giving up cigarettes goes both ways: quit the fags, particularly if you’re a heavy smoker, and you’re likely to improve the environment for those around you, cause those who love you a lot less grief, and a little later on, cost the State less in hospital services.
You losing 20 pounds, on the other hand, doesn’t have that much of a payoff for the rest of us, although it may marginally improve the aesthetics. But even that’s arguable. Without zaftig females to serve as their subjects, some of the greatest artists in history would never have become household names.
Because our own promises are to ourselves, we feel that breaking them is our own business. A weakness, rather than an evil tendency. A blip on the chart of our character, rather than a defining incident that establishes our essential worthlessness.
But — paradoxically — because politicians’ promises are more altruistic, directed to the improvement of the lives of others rather than to, say, the slenderising of their own person, we decide, when they break them, that they’re rotten to the core and what else could you expect from such a bunch of wasters? I duck defensively as I say this, but the reality is that politicians probably break their promises rather less frequently than the rest of us. Few ordinary people can point to a year-on-year solid delivery on New Year resolutions.
By contrast, most politicians — at least those who get into power — can usually point to the delivery of most of what they put in their pre-election manifestos, yet we jump all over them for the bits they failed to deliver. Sometimes we even fire them over it.
But of course, I hear you say. Isn’t that what happens in the real world? In business? To which the answer is: not really. The president of one of the biggest retail corporations in the United States has been making a dog’s breakfast of the corporation for some time, driving down its share value and endangering the employment of every Joe Soap underpaid to serve it.
Media has pointed out, repeatedly, that he has failed to deliver on his promises. His board held on to him in spite of this barrage. Even when — last week — they finally fired him, they gave him $208 million (€160m) as a severance package. What a reward for promise-breaking.
In Irish politics, we have the best of both worlds. We ignore the promises they deliver on, concentrate on the ones they don’t, and characterise them as a shower of liars.
We, who break promises on a daily basis...
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