Hating liberals

There seems to be two dominant political persuasions on Facebook.  One is liberal; the other is “very liberal”.  I take liberal to mean liberal, but very liberal, generally followed as it is by an exclamation mark, seems to be more of a sexual innuendo, a saucy seaside postcard rather than political ideology. To each their own.  Last week, David Norris spoke to Waterford City Council in the hope that the august body would support him in his bid to become President; they may or may not but the warmth of the reception he received – despite the heat he’s drawn in the press in the last few weeks – testifies to the elevated place this committed liberal has in Irish public life.  Its political critics labeled Liberalism a dinosaur in the 20^th Century, no longer relevant in the era a mass politics and total state mobilization.  The demise of the ethos in Britain was marked by George Dangerfield’s seminal 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England, a book that proved to be almost as a big a gift to sub-editors as the film Sex, Lies and Videotape.  Liberalism’s problem was that it wasn’t tribal.  The Right had the flag and patriotism, the Left class resentment, but Liberals? They just had reasonableness, a belief in education and middle-class guilt. And yet, liberalism (with a small L) is all triumphant in the early 21^st Century. As the Right dropped its interest in things like military dictatorship and corporal punishment for naughty boys, what was the liberal clarion call of Free Trade became the cornerstone of the Right’s economic viewpoint, one increasingly accepted on the Left.  Meanwhile the Left, finding the idea of a centrally directed economy a little bit completely unworkable, and with even the state’s control of public services increasingly eroded found itself turning to liberalism of the individual kind.  It’s a lot easier to decriminalize homosexuality than to nationalize the banks (the banks, sorry, bad example). And indeed the Left’s efforts in areas like gay rights and secularization have helped create this political oxymoron the “liberal-left”.  Socialists of the old school would be horrified by the hybrid, having regarded liberals as dangerous compromisers in the good old days of revolutionary politics.  There it is though, liberalism if not Liberal Parties won in the end.  So why is there so much vitriol directed at liberals?  Why did Matt Stone of South Park once say “I hate conservatives, but I really f**king hate liberals”.  How did the word come to be a term of abuse? Why is it that, if journalistic impartiality allowed me to put a political affiliation on Facebook, liberal is the last one I’d choose even though I probably am, like every one else, a bloody predictable boring bloody liberal?  Dreaded political correctness has an obvious culpability: yes the N-word is wrong, but banning Christmas?!!! That makes me so angry!!! So angry that I haven’t even noticed Christmas hasn’t actually been banned.  I remain convinced that most “Political Correctness gone mad” stories are fabricated but the strictures put on expression by political correctness can be tiresome, the assumption for example that someone who says “non-national” instead of “foreign-national” is in some way a covert racist is just old-fashioned condescension, not liberalism.  There’s more to it than that though.  There’s modern parents.  Child-centred parenting is a sixties liberal innovation.  Before Doctor Spock children knew their place, which was somewhere up a chimney.  I think Doctor Spock’s take on bringing up children is spot on to be honest, but the tendency he created has led to annoyingly self-righteous parents, self-righteous parents who may only exist in our imagination but who in that imagination give us a right going over for letting our kids watch telly, eat chocolate and conform to gender stereotypes. There’s more to it than that too though. Why do we hate liberals? I mentioned that the Liberal parties in the past were stranded without a tribal base.  The tribes of the Left and the Right may have adopted liberal values, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.  Many former socialists feel a sense of shame, or worse, humiliation, that the old policies have been abandoned.  It’s not a coincidence to me that right-wing anti-liberal commentators like Eoghan Harris and Peter Hitchens are former Trotskyites. Conservatives meanwhile know they need to be right-on and tolerant but resent the liberal orthodoxy that commands them to do it, and indignantly interpret that as some form dictatorship.  Much of the prejudice and bile that was once directed from the Right towards racial minorities is now used to describe racially neutral groups like the poor, single mothers and single fathers, who some on the Right like to say act as a drag on the liberal free market.  Tribes always have their prejudices and bigotries, for example I’ve enjoyed a lifelong hatred of modern jazz.  My musical tastes have branched from rock to include country, reggae, classical, electro-pop, folk, hip-hop even world music (only joking, I don't listen to world music).  This of course seems like an expression of liberal open-mindedness but it’s only possible by religious devotion to a disdain for jazz – it’s okay to listen to anything as long as I know it’s not jazz, because I hate jazz. These prejudices, some harmless like hating jazz or loving a football team, some ugly like sectarianism and racism can often be the cornerstone of a person’s self- identity. And an important cornerstone for anyone who doesn’t have much in the way of money, a nice house, and (sophisticated) foreign holidays. Liberalism can be a robust, crusading ideology but it feels too often like the voice of someone who knows better because they’ve never known any worse, the voice of someone who’s a nice person largely because they lead a nice life.  I think that’s why people hate liberals, and why liberals hate liberals.

End of Optimism

There’s a game we used to play during the World Cup in the days before saturation football coverage made every player drearily familiar.  We would look at the foreign players and try to decide where in the city they would most likely be from if they had been born in Waterford.  Some players might have the look of a neighbor in Central Avenue, some might have a Ballybeg head, some Larchville or Arbour Road (it tended to be very Saint Paul’s centric).  I particularly liked the hypothesis my brothers came up with in relation to Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi, that they looked like two partially employed flat mates staying in a run-down Shortcourse house full of empty cans and the odd lack who would go to their mother’s house every Sunday to get fed and have their overworked underpants washed.  Gheorghe Hagi was one of the greatest players of his generation, but when I think of him, I think of that.  When Ratko Mladic appeared at the War Crimes Tribunal last week in a borrowed suit and hair too small for his head, I thought he looked like an old guy on his way out of a bookies on Mayor’s Walk, with a rolled up copy of The Star under his arm. Such is the banality of evil.  He didn’t look like that in 1995.  Then he was leaner and, underneath his Serbian Šajkača cap, was the world’s most famous mass murderer.  The footage of him speaking to the refugees in Srebrenica is almost obscene – what is it he’s thinking? He’s bending down listening to these people, furrowing his brow in concentration, his eyes meeting theirs with apparent honesty and all he can be thinking, surely, is: “we are going to kill you, all of you, and the cameras bearing witness to this conversation will not save you”.  It’s still chilling sixteen years later.  Mladic was a dark spectre for all of Europe in the 1990’s but by pure random chance the benign, decent liberal democracy that fate singled out to be particularly humiliated by him was the one I happened to be living in at the time, the Netherlands.  The day I arrived in Amsterdam, Ireland was on the front page of every newspaper in Europe: the IRA had just declared a ceasefire.  The centuries old Irish conflict was about to be resolved and every newspaper editor in Europe thought that was front page news.  As an Irishman, the interest was gratifying, although that soon wore off with months of people asking me what was happening in the peace process – I was ecstatically happy to be living in Amsterdam and didn’t care about the peace process, but when I said that to my European friends they always seemed disapproving.  The English were much more understanding.  There was optimism that the problem could be fixed however, it was an optimistic time.  Just five years before people power had overthrown communist dictatorship and there was already plenty of East Europeans living in Amsterdam, most of them taking to life in Western democracy as if they had been born to it. The transition seemed to suggest no more dislocation from forty years of communism than someone missing the starter at a dinner party.  The problems of the world were falling like nine pins.  Nelson Mandela, for years just a photograph over the left hand shoulder of a newsreader, emerged from prison a far more impressive leader than anyone had a right to hope for, and led South Africa out of Apartheid.  It was an optimistic time.  With the end of the Cold War, the CIA decided to lift its boot off the neck of South American democracy – somewhat – and people were free to vote for politicians who didn’t necessarily have the approval of the United Fruit Company or the Pope.  It was an optimistic time.  Iraq invaded Kuwait and the world acted in what seemed to be – if you ignored the oil-shaped elephant in the room – the first example of the kind of collective security that the UN was designed to deliver.  It was an optimistic time.  Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands!  Optimism? Anything was possible!  Historian Francis Fukuyama declared that history was over, that it was clear everyone in the world wanted to live in free market liberal democracies and, at varying paces, it was to this goal every nation on the planet was embarked.  Of course there would be difficulties along the way.  The break-up of Yugoslavia appeared unnecessarily messy, but it was sure to sort itself out, and Europe would be there to show the bright path forward for the emerging democracies to join our civilized club. But Yugoslavia didn't sort itself out, the siege of Sarajevo dragged on and on, the killing became relentless.  It was then we were introduced to the double act of Mladic and Karadžić.  Mladic was a very different kind of general to Rommel and Patton.  His goal was to skirt around the people who actually had weapons (sometimes known as "soldiers"), find the civilians and kill as many as he could until someone stopped him.  The horrible realization – thrilling though to Mladic – was that Europe couldn’t stop him; it didn’t have the will or the means.  Fukuyama was wrong; history, in all its cruelty, was back.  By 1995 I was living in the Netherlands when, in one of the final acts of the war, Mladic decided to swoop on one last group of Bosniak civilians before a peace deal was struck.  It was the Dutch army who had conveniently gathered the victims in Srebrenica; it was the Dutch who had to see their conscript soldiers brushed aside by this self-confident Evil so it could carry out genocide.  It could have been any of us, Irish, Finnish, Spanish, it just happened to be the Dutch.  The revelations surrounding the muddle which put this Dutch battalion in such an awful situation led to the collapse of Wim Kok’s government in 2002 and I’m not sure Dutch politics and the Netherlands have been the same since.  Could Holland’s recent falling out of love with its liberal traditions be traced back to the day these traditions were trampled on by Mladic?  In the years after Srebrenica, it was clearly a matter of national shame in the Netherlands, this wonderful country whose soldiers should never have had to face this Evil alone.  What I found sometimes, if in the company of Dutch and Serbs, and some alcohol had flowed, the Dutch could round on the Serbs: “What’s wrong with you?” “Why are you people so murderous?” “Why did you do this?”  Sometimes I would chip in an explain the atrocities meted out to Serbs during the war (Mladic’s father died trying to bump off a fascist Croatian leader in 1945) but that doesn’t really explain it; after all, these people had lived happily together for generations after the war and still love to dish out twelve’s to each other come the Eurovision.  It was comforting to think that there was just something monstrous about the Serbs that put them beyond the liberal democratic Pale, in the same way some people liked to view Arabs or Muslims after 9/11.  It’s nonsense.  In Amsterdam I worked with people from Peshawar which is Taliban Central and they were normal, hard-working, decent and fond of fart jokes, just like me.  Indeed it was 9/11 that for many people marks the end of post-Berlin Wall optimism but for me that happened with Mladic.  I’m back on Mayors Walk thinking about Mladic coming out of that bookies and it’s not a fantasy to imagine that a fella like him could be from Waterford.  He could, he could be from anywhere, that’s what made him so frightening.

R&H Hall

The people of Ferrybank are upset by a new proposal to site some sort of waste transfer facility on the North Wharfs.  I’m not sure what waste transfer is.  There are two chief objections to this proposal, the first being that it might smell.  Surely, you may think, it couldn’t be that bad, but Ferrybank has a history of bad smells emanating from the meat processing industry that was traditionally banished to the north side of Waterford city.  The smell from some of the meat plants was legendary, a rotten combination of wet dog, dirty nappy, vomit and what I imagined to be burst, decomposing intestines.  That’s in the past now but people in Ferrybank are entitled to be sensitive about odours.  The other concern is the effect such a facility will have on the city centre because the North Wharf, isolated and barren though it is, is a city centre location and this waste transfer facility (still don’t know what that is) will be visible from Waterford’s shopping and tourist districts.  The city council has said the facility (?), if it gets permission, won’t create these problems, so we’ll see.  But all the comment on the issue got me thinking about our North Wharfs, which are routinely described here as an urban blight, an embarrassment in urgent need of redevelopment.  Now I don’t deny that Waterford could make better use of the north side of its river and if by some miracle a private sector investor (Donald Trump is at a loose end at the moment) comes in with a plan rip everything out of the North Wharfs and put in whatever combination of conference centre/hotel/casino/gym/equestrian centre/wax museum they think appropriate, that can only be considered a good thing and I’m all for it.  It’s just that…I kind of like North Wharfs as they are.  And I particularly like the R&H Hall Flour Mills, probably the biggest building in Waterford City Centre, and, for many, the ugliest. I can’t really dispute that it’s ugly, but it’s the kind of ugliness that fascinates rather than repels.  Every time I walk past its decayed vastness, the tiny broken windows on the plain imposingly grey walls, the grain silos packed together like an October display of Soviet nuclear missiles, its sheer emptiness, I’m transfixed.  Get closer and you see that the site is served by an abandoned rail track and the only thing more evocative and cinematic than a rail track is surely an abandoned rail track.  Industrial decay isn’t pretty but I can look at it for hours, to the point that once while taking a train across the Pennines from Manchester to Leeds I remember being disappointed by the absence of slag heaps, disused factories and abandoned smokestacks (there were some, just not enough).  Yet we don’t have a habit of celebrating our industrial heritage in Ireland; we’re the land of saints and scholars, rebels and poets and farming.  Not industry and business.  In our imagination we appear to have skipped the Industrial revolution and gone straight from subsistence farming to IT, financial services and web design.  But dotted around the country we do have some imposing monuments to an industrial past (the cotton mill in Portlaw employed more than one and half thousand people at the time of the famine).  These were not usually buildings designed for prettiness.  The stately 18^th century Georgian mansions and town houses that we always think of as our built heritage were designed with one eye to the past and the other to posterity, based on Palladian Roman models they were built to reflect the imagined values of an older age, to herald not change but stability.  The later Victorian age was marked by an intellectual backlash against itself, as the dominant Romantic trend in intellectual life reacted in horror to industrialisation.  The reaction against functional industrial buildings included a rejection of the classical forms of the Georgians, considered by Victorian intellectuals to be part of a Godless complacency that informed this modern uglification of cities.  John Ruskin was the great champion of this dual rejection of both modern and classical forms, with an imagined medieval gothic aesthetic considered a more natural and pure form of architecture.  Now in Waterford we have a few fine examples of that manifesto, the Presentation Convent – now the Waterford Health Park – designed by Augustus Pugin (Pugin and Ruskin had similiar attitudes to architecture but like good intellectuals detested each other, Ruskin in particular demonstrating a pettiness that would make an eight year old proud).  It would be an act of insanity to claim that the R&H Hall building is as impressive as the Presentation Convent – it isn’t – but bear with me.  The capitalists of Ruskin’s age didn’t care too much for the  views of bearded Oxbridge aesthetes and while some functional buildings may have been designed with a nod to beauty, most were, and are, functional.  However when a building is built with posterity in mind, like our Georgian and Gothic masterpieces, it has a monumental quality which changes little with or without human activity.  The industrial decay of a highly functional building like R&H Hall immediately suggests the passage of time, forgotten lives, or, in a word, stories.  It’s cinematic.  One day it will be torn down, hopefully to make way for something better but until that day I’ll continue to enjoy its monumental ugliness which contrasts nicely with our Georgian thoroughfares and Gothic towers.  After all, every great beauty needs a blemish.  Until it finds a better use, our North Wharfs are to me a gritty reminder of an industrial and maritime heritage we should be proud of.