Do we really want these frighteningly bad politicians?
TDs in jail, councillors in the dock of public opinion, and Donald Trump held in global contempt — not the best week for politicians at any level.
Film director Charlie Lyne’s documentary Fear Itself looks at why people like to be scared by horror films, but its take could easily be applied to voters who become enthralled by the political horror show unfolding before them.
Mr Trump was supposed to be a passing frenzy, who would peak last July, yet the presidential primaries are just weeks away and he’s still scarily popular.
Trump was funny for a while — well, unless you were black, female, foreign (especially Mexicans, who according to Trump, are prone to be rapists), Muslim, or, of course, had any basic intelligence.
But Trump’s call to ban Muslims (replace with Jews/blacks/Irish, depending on prevailing hysteria at the time) from entering America will have alarming levels of backing, and not just in the US. A poll in Britain found that 61% of UKIP supporters liked the idea, so we can expect it will have a certain level of sympathy in sections of Irish society.
Trump is very good at tapping into base fears and painting lurid pictures with a sinister twist on reality.
Talking about the lure of trashy horror films, Mr Lyne said: “You exist on this split level, where you are aware of it and yet you can’t help yourself.”
His remarks were backed up by Dr Adam Perkins, lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King’s College London, who told the BBC: “We are basically cavemen running around in the modern world. Our brain hasn’t evolved to catch-up with high-definition screens and things, so at some level we still see images of gory scenes and get affected by them as if they were real to some extent, not quite as realistically, but still there.
"The brain has two systems that deal with threat. One is risk assessment system that deals with potential threats and the other is called the fight/flight free systems and that deals with clear threats.
"The risk assessment system mediates anxiety apprehension, and the fight/flight free system mediates terror and these systems flick backwards and forwards very flexibly, depending on the situation.
"A good example is when we are at home, on our own late at night, in bed probably, and you get woken by a suspicious noise, say, broken glass, it may be a squirrel knocking over some milk bottles, or it might be a psychopathic prowler who wants to insert things into your body.
"You don’t know so you haul yourself out of bed, you come downstairs, you’re feeling this apprehension, and you flick on the light switch in the kitchen and there he is in his ski mask with his butcher’s knife.
"At that point your brain also switches, so the apprehension goes and you just have sheer terror.”
Trump wants voters to think the threat is Muslim; but in reality it is him — and the things he wants to insert in his followers’ bodies, or at least their heads, are the most putrid ideas of division and hatred.
But thank God that at least in Ireland we have politicians of the calibre of Hugh McElvaney to lead us on to the righteous path of high principle, by fearlessly exposing the evils of RTÉ.
Selflessly disregarding any damage done to his own reputation in the eyes of mean-spirited, small-minded people, Cllr McElvaney only asked an undercover reporter for £10k to make the investigations show “sexy”.
“I knew it was RTÉ, they’ve trapped me before, and I knew that there was somebody acting the fool with me. So I lured them into their own trap, there’s no problem,” Cllr McElvaney ‘explained’.
The most scary thing is he would probably be re-elected next week if there was an election.
And then there’s Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, the Pinky and (Not So) Perky of stunt protests.
As well as not paying his fine, Wallace will, presumably, not need to pay the fuel bill for his pointless little day-trip to Limerick jail, courtesy of the gardaí and a taxpayer-funded dysfunctional justice system.
But then Wallace is good at not paying things, such as that pesky Vat bill.
Oh, but he bleats, he didn’t pay because he was trying to keep the company afloat.
How laudable, especially as he managed to double the salary he paid himself and his son at the same time.
Wallace knowingly lied to the Revenue by providing under-valued Vat returns for two years when he was managing director of his construction company.
Yet he found the cash to send the salary he paid himself and his son soaring from €148,141 to €290,000 in the year ending August 2008.
Wallace reached a €2.1m settlement with the Revenue on the Vat matter, and says he is voluntarily paying us back some of the money we pay him to be a TD to try and make good the tax dodge.
How very nice of him. Wallace will also be re-elected without a bother at the looming general election.
Dr Perkins believes we like to be scared so we can feel better about life when the bad thing doesn’t happen to us: “I think it is related to what is known as a relief of non-punishment, so an animal learns that when they expect to get punished and they don’t, there is a kind of rebound effect, we have a ‘phew’ moment, and that has been shown in rodents, so I think film makers, being clever people have worked this out for themselves in a less formalised way.”
But our “phew” moment will not arrive until Trump is flushed back to being an inconsequential joke with silly hair, and not a realistic contender for the Republican Party’s nomination to be president of the USA.
Politicians, local and global, are enough to make you turn to drink — well, if Leo Varadkar hadn’t jacked-up the cost with minimum pricing that is.
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