Paddy's Day Rant

Helllllllllllllisssssshhhhhhhhhh. Went out for a coffee around noon, nowhere was open except Carroll’s gift-shops, the paddy-whackery was out in force and Joe Duffy’s voice-doppelganger was doing his best to drive us all to the drink. Templebar, Dublin's historic city centre / tourist hellhole and my neighborhood was swimming with disillusioned, purposeless consumers. Got stuck on the Dublin castle side of Dame Street and couldn’t get home until now! The parade looked crap from where I was squished and squinting at it against my will, the word EJECT etched on my eyeballs. Suddenly a tear came to my eye, I had no idea what emotion I was registering; frustration, irritation closing in on full-on, agro agoraphobia, yes indeed but something else, for a moment I thought I might have been moved by the whole spectacle and I was right, I felt deeply, passionately ashamed of our aggressive, impudent little nation of rabid breeders today. We have copulated our mandate into the global framework attracting mostly respect and even envy for our cheery but all too determined and able stereotype. An all-round, national meltdown later and everyone still flocks to celebrate Ireland – visiting US Diaspora and EU skeptics closed ranks with island dwellers, like sheep, not a one displayed any ability to think or feel for themselves, anyone in touch with their natural instincts would have been moving away from not leaning into the foray. We couldn’t organize a successful piss-up in a pub! Don’t get me wrong I can hear them now, post-parade, native and non-national alike joining in the Irish tradition of getting legless, rolloxed, battered, fluttered, lamped, trashed, bolloxed, and on and on. We have made a virtue of, a veritable art of alcoholism but there was so little design in today’s seemingly, inevitable madness. The parade was ugly and pathetic. Headed by a few spotty army cadets who couldn’t march in synch and dragged their grumpy, teenage combats with no pride, they passed by to a well-deserved, weak applause, then a few dirty flags held at varying, lazy degrees by short-assed nobodies wobbled past, then a couple of healthy horses with a pair of very unhealthy looking Gardi bouncing about in an undignified, un-horsemanly manner clambered past followed by a beautiful, empty, Victorian horse-drawn carriage ………….. Might this last pointless spectacle have been the catalyst of my shame attack? St. Patrick was a Welsh proselytizing, born-again Christian who helped do away with our Celtic, pagan roots. St. Patrick’s day is therefore a celebration of Ireland’s true colonial past, the usurping of a spiritually rich culture for that of a hollow, brainwashing cult of hypocracy and violence. Granted the church eventually came to educate our masses, thanks to them we have had information beaten and force-fed into us and it served our economic, IT revolution well for a time. Our education system remains entangled with a one-track minded, monotheistic belief system and institution that refutes the definition of true education – a freethinking, questioning journey with no finite end. And so in these times of pausing to gauge that journey’s direction we tell our children to concentrate on maths and science, the stuff of proof and plenty. Where some learn to question life through philosophy, we continue to teach religion as fact. We have lost all our true Celtic spirit, our relationship with the land and our bodies has been at best disrespectful ever since Christianity got under our soil and our skin. We no longer question ourselves or our environment, we no longer align ourselves with the light, we are no longer a freethinking, sensual, beautiful people. We have not been for a long time. We do not deserve our international popularity, we don’t even like ourselves, we have descended into a sardonic and visionless people. What kind of a successful democracy chooses to empower the corrupt over and over again? We continue to abuse each other physically, sexually, emotionally and spiritually under the auspices of religion, state and family. Clerical abuse, doctrinal abuse, state abuse, familial abuse, subliminal abuse abounds. Our media has become a public, suicide-pact mission. Our corpus corpori are no longer our own, far from temples they are cesspit receptacles for booze, processed food and the appendages of anyone who wishes to abuse their power in a state that seems to grant impunity for anyone who wants it enough, corporation, institution or individual. Our people, our land, once sacred and respected by us, later defiled and blood soaked cannot even be called our own any longer, our banks and our government own us and our domain, we do not know who we are. We build motorways within a hair’s breath of our most ancient, beautiful and cultural inheritance, we did that a long time ago. We build remarkably ugly homes - fluorescent gable-ended, falcon-flanked and gated, shoebox units and curb hugging monstrosities. The British at least gave us architecture yet all around our country our cities are falling down with rotting, potentially beautiful buildings, instead we have thrown up glass and steel proving what pretentious, philistines we really are. We agri-cultivate where we can stand it, pointless pride swamped by a wider reality bearing down upon our collective subconsciousness, globalization’s gobbling us up. We pay for the privilege to strike and kill each other, we are one, united in our greed, aggression and refusal to look at ourselves in the cold light of day. We govern and create our society on a daily basis without any respect for past, present or future generations. The saints and scholars are dead and gone, over-protected and overpaid, with O’Leary in the grave. Hurricane Paddy registered a big, fat zero craic on the Celtic Richter scale today. All we can do is await Halloween and pray that our pagan souls will make a seismic shift and shuffle off the mortal apathy and ignorance we’ve cloaked ourselves in for so long. Let’s hope such spirits can lead our frenzied potential out of this godforsaken wilderness! Rant over, earplugs to the fore.