Looking for the wrong type of speech from a political leader

WHERE I work, we figured we’d do well out of having to change the clocks to summertime this weekend.

Robbie, one of the guys in the office, is not good with sudden sleep deficits, so it was odds on that, having had an hour’s sleep nicked from him yesterday, he’d be slightly late this morning. We had worked out to within two minutes the point at which the phone would ring. When it came, the person who caught the call said “Oh, Robbie, hang on till I put you on speaker,” which allowed all of us to chime in with him as he said “I just thought I’d pick up some coffee – any orders?”

That’s what he always does, to assuage his guilt over minor lates: buys us all coffee. The truly exploitative among us stick him for a muffin as well, but even the beverages order gets complicated. Her in the Corner wants hot chocolate. Him in the Middle wants a vente skinny cappuccino with three extra shots. Him in the Middle is so permanently wired on caffeine, I suspect if someone switched the office coffee maker to decaf on the sly for a single day, it would take us a week and a megaphone to wake him.

Robbie writes down the details of every order and arrives in with three papier-mache trays down one arm, four cardboard beakers sitting unsteadily in each. That in itself is an achievement, since he comes in over the back wall. It’s fortunate he plays football several evenings a week, because getting himself, twelve coffees, a bag of sugar highs and a briefcase over quite a high wall without ruining the new shoes, shattering a femur or spilling an Americano requires some co-ordination. Especially when you’re being watched out the back window by all of your colleagues.

The thing about today’s coffee order that it was certain, long before the phone call, that nobody was going to ask Robbie to bring an order of leadership with him. We don’t need leadership. Like most people lucky enough to have jobs, we know what we have to do and we get on with doing it without motivational speeches from anyone. At the end of our working day, we don’t head home (Robbie climbing back over the wall) turn on the television and hope – as many media commentators seem to hope – that Brian Cowen’s face will be filling the screen.

I can’t get my head around that repeated call for Brian Cowen to do a state of the nation broadcast. You hear commentators calling on him to come out and be inspirational. Now, I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that those commentators have lost their marbles, but they’ve sure as hell mislaid a couple of them. Think about it. Yesterday’s opinion poll in the Sunday Business Post said that while roughly seven out of ten of people believed, just three months ago, that Brian Cowen was a safe pair of hands, only about two out of ten continue to believe it. Suggesting that a man so roundly rejected by the public should come out and do a televised motivational speech to the nation is like breaking someone’s legs with a baseball bat and then entering them in Come Dancing. The end result may have curiosity value, but it’s not going to send the Irish public out the following morning with a song in their heart and a spring in their step. Or vice versa.

Yet, every time an opinion poll lowers the Taoiseach deeper into a hole, some headbanger announces that the solution to his troubles is to go on the telly and tell it like it is. If you point out that, with collapses like that of Murray O Laoire architects last week, most of us kind of know already how it is without anybody telling us, they say things like “But we need hope. We need him to show leadership.”

It sounds good, but has nothing to do with reality. Most of us know the truth: we’re going to be working a lot harder for a lot longer for a lot less. Tossing powdered hope on the top of that mixture isn’t going to improve the taste much.

ON Cowen’s behalf, and a truly great trainer turned him into a stunning performer, and if he made the speech of a lifetime, awash in hope, and it was televised instead of tonight’s Frontline, the minute it was over, media would speculate about who wrote the speech and who trained him, thereby making the entire outing look spurious. The fast responders on the political websites, within minutes, would paint Cowen as an Obama wannabe, because these days, Barack Obama is the only human being associated in the public mind with rhetoric, so if anybody says anything vividly memorable, they’re accused of “trying to do an Obama”. Next, on the phone in programmes, you’d have callers saying their hearts didn’t lift like helium balloons as a result of hearing the Taoiseach because they were in the dole queue or on a hospital trolley at the time.

The truly tragic aspect of all of this is the impoverished perception of leadership revealed by calls for Brian Cowen to do a state of the nation address. That impoverished perception of leadership portrays us all as pessimistic peasants, waiting for Massa from the Big House to come tell us to tote that barge, lift that bale and sing a spiritual song, rather than moaning about passports or pension levies or negative equity. It also portrays us as being so emotionally passive that we can be moved from despair to happy-clappy by one rousing lash of positive rhetoric.

The idiotic fixation on the positive has achieved an amazing hold on the minds of politicians of all parties, perhaps because, for so long, Fine Gael were making truthfully negative statements about the property bubble and got no thanks for it, but were regarded as party poopers for raining on our parade, even though the parade was grinding to a halt. Whatever the reason, everybody is now scared to say anything negative because a belief has taken root that only by relentless positivity can public opinion be turned towards the future. This ignores the fact that some of the most motivational orations in history were unremittingly negative, whether you look at Churchill’s “we will fight them on the beaches” speech or General Patton’s one where he promised his soldiers that they could expect, in the immediate future, to be marching through the squishy intestines of their dead colleagues.

Now, if Brian Cowen were to deliver a squishy intestines speech, it would certainly have the virtue of truth, the attraction of surprise, and a pleasing vividness of imagery.

It would also, necessarily, address a diminishing audience: there’s not much point in doing a “Once more into the breech, dear friends,” when half the friends have deserted, and several of those remaining are taking sneaky glances around to locate the emergency exit. Under cover of anonymity.