Let’s have a cull of elephants in rooms and a closure on closure

I WANT an early doors closure on the elephant in the room.

I’ll open the early doors and do the closure later, but the elephant in the room is a real and present problem, so let’s start with him. Or her. Who the hell knows with an elephant? And who the hell is minded to explore elephant gender in the sitting room. Assuming it’s the sitting room the elephant is in. Nobody ever specifies. For all we know, the elephant is in the smallest room in the house, playing hell with the plumbing and with domestic hygiene.

The other thing that’s not clear is if it’s the same elephant, shifting between rooms, or vastly different elephants taking advantage of the property meltdown to move into any available unoccupied room. Only one thing is clear. Without this bloody elephant, no radio station (except those devoted to music and music alone) could get through any working day. He (or she) gets stuffed into the nearest room whether interviewers are exploring NAMA, the budget or the trade union protests. I even heard a fleeting reference in relation to Portmarnock Golf Club, although the gender of the elephant is obvious, in that case.

This constantly mentioned pachyderm is not, I believe, the elephant the business books talk about, which for some daft reason gets groped by a bunch of blindfolded people. Early on, when this poor elephant appeared in such books, his (or her) privacy was being invaded by blind people, but somewhere along the line it was decided that this insulted people with a visual impairment, as indeed it does. None of my blind friends are elephant-gropers.

The blindfolded folk who felt their way around the elephant never got trodden on by him or her, which suggests to me that they doped the poor creature in advance of groping, and in turn prompts one to ask why the animal rights people haven’t been all over the issue. They’re out there fighting for minks, who are nasty by nature, and not out there fighting against elephant-feeling. Everybody knows elephants are affable.

Undefended, in book after book, the poor elephant got felt by unguided human hands. The big lesson, apparently, was that, shorn of vision, each groper came up with a different description of the elephant. I always had doubts about the utility of the elephant example in day to day business, where, in my experience, you don’t get blindfolded and presented with an elephant that often.

The elephant in the room wasn’t for groping, or for grilling, either. What’s that? You haven’t come across the elephant that gets grilled? Oh, let me explain. The elephant for grilling was used to illustrate the concept that the largest task is manageable if you break it into bits. So the answer to the question “How do you eat an elephant?” was (all together now) “You slice it VERY thinly.” Like most questions on management development courses, this one started from a daft premise nobody was allowed to question, the daft premise, in this case, being that anyone would need or want to eat an elephant. Not even reality TV has presented humans with the urgent requirement to live off elephant flesh.

Neither for groping or grilling, the elephant in the room was – and is – a separate elephant. Now and again, it becomes a pink or purple elephant, perhaps to co-ordinate with the interior design of the room into which, mysteriously, it has got itself. Pink, purple or grey, this elephant crept up on me, shorn of its relevance. I kept hearing people yammering on about the elephant in the room and had to have it explained to me that the elephant in the room represented a topic that everybody was avoiding talking about. The theory being that everyone knew it was there but let on it wasn’t there at all at all.

The problem with this confection is that, quite apart from the impossibility of ignoring an elephant in any normal-sized room, even if it’s drugged, in the bathroom and you’re blindfolded, is that the topic which gets likened to the elephant invariably is a topic that everybody’s talking about every day. All the time. I swear I heard a respectable radio presenter announce the other morning that “Of course, the elephant in the room is NAMA.”

NAMA? Un-talked about? If NAMA is the elephant, the only elephant it can be is the one being felt up from all sides by blindfolded half-wits who have nothing better to do with their time.

The elephant needs to be discontinued. Let’s have a cull of elephants in rooms. And, while we’re at it, let’s get closure on closure, the most idiotic concept in current psychobabble.

“Getting closure” is the popular notion that some future event will eliminate the suffering associated with past trauma. Mostly, these days, “getting closure” comes suspiciously close to simple revenge. Now, there’s a lot to be said for revenge. The old principle that if someone put out your eye, when you caught them and proved they were responsible, you could put out their eye, had a lot going for it.

But, around the time that Vlad the Impaler began to drop in opinion poll ratings, revenge became uncivilised, in public perception. The decision was made that eye-robbers were not directly punishable by the victim, but by a distant entity called the judicial system, set up by society generally.

This of course infringed the rights of committed eye-gougers, but democracy has that kind of effect.

Nonetheless, at the present time, the belief that, say, the imprisonment of a rapist or burglar will “bring closure” to their victims is deeply held, despite the fact that the victims who believed they’d get closure thereby tend to be aggravated all over again when the perpetrator gets out at the end of the sentence.

Victims of any crime are entitled to comfort, support, loving friendship, insurance money, investigation and if possible conviction of the one who did them wrong. Closure – in the sense of getting over the trauma and having a good life thereafter – lies not in external circumstances but in personal decision, and the constant media warble about it re-victimises victims by making a magical promise which can never be delivered upon.

Closure, like the elephant in the room, became media currency in the last five to 10 years. It’s been joined by “green shoots”, which has the doubtful distinction of partially replacing that more Industrial Revolution cliché about the light at the end of the tunnel. But banging away in the background are “Early Doors”. At first, when I heard this phrase, I thought it meant those pubs on the docks where the desperate can get a drink at dawn. Or could, back when I had a brief social life.

The sentences within which the early doors open clearly preclude the possibility of referring to such pubs, but never make it understandable what the speaker is on about.

No – don’t explain, please. Let’s just have closure on the early doors.