Not a Good Day for Ireland

Well, it looks like Fianna Fail have done it again. There's no point in complaining any more. If this is what the Irish people want, I throw up my hands, after washing them, of course. This is democracy in action and if our future is blighted, at least it will only be due to more of the same. Having said that, I hardly imagine Rabbitte's Labour Party of instigating a Stalinist regime. Broad stroke politics, for good or ill, have disappeared. And for the most part, so have ideals.

That's the way of democracy in the West, I suppose, and probably something we have learnt, presuming people can learn at all, from the Twentieth Century. Then we had a century of ideological fervour, and so politicians of sociopathological criminality. If ideas take too much hold on the political imagination, politicians risk sliding into an unreal world of fictions. Now, and for the last few decades, we have a more 'moderate' approach. Ideology has taken a back seat to self-interest, in turn leading to governments guided by their own self interest. In contrast to earlier pathological criminality, we now have self-interested crime. Where before a Hitler or Stalin wiped out nations for insane ideas, now we have a Bush or Blair wreaking havoc for profit. That is the mindset that characterises, albeit it on a supremely petty level, Bertie Ahern and his party. (Witness the Minister for Finance without a bank account.)

The anomaly in the above, of course, is Blair who gives a very persuasive appearance of actually believing in his actions. He may well be a minor throwback to ideological politics, he's certainly a Tory, but every time I think of Blair I recall an event from way back in 1997, either just before or just after Labour's famous victory. I was working on a kid's online adventure game at the time, and the project team had drafted in a public relations guru from Britain. I was still a little struck by the Blair promise at the time, so we got talking about him. Indeed, our guru had worked with him. So was he the idealistic angel he appeared, I asked. She wouldn't buy a used car off the man, was her reply. Hhhmmm. As I say maybe he's sincerely an idiot. Maybe he just seems so.

Even I will admit that given the choice between sociopathic crime and self-interested crime, the latter is preferable. At least, it is understandable. Given a real choice, however, I would opt for a political landscape free of crime altogether. I suppose that really is just too idealistic.