Photo Minute: The world we live in

The thoughts of H L Mencken for today

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that man has descended from him

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Puritanism and fanatism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

H L Mencken (1880-1956)

Gore Vidal's thoughts for today

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American President.

I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.

When I say 'president,' I still mean Roosevelt - wisely, I think.

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life, a right action is the consideration for the welfare of others

Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

Radical change the only way to achieve stability for all

Even an existential crisis has not disturbed the distribution of privilege or caused failed institutions and practices to be swept away

The Government knows that, unlike Willie Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman’, it is not well-liked. It is supported, broadly, by a large chunk of the population. But there’s very little affection for it. Photograph: Keystone Features/Getty Images

Everybody knows well in advance the way the general election is to be framed. It will be a simple choice: stability or chaos. As a slogan, it has its merits. It is a grown-up version of Hilaire Belloc’s rhyme Jim, in which the eponymous brat, in spite of endless warnings, lets go of his nurse’s hand at the zoo and is promptly eaten by a lion. “His father who was self-controlled/ Bade all the children round attend/ To James’s miserable end./ And always keep ahold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse.”

The Government knows that, unlike Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, it is not well liked. It is supported, broadly, by a large chunk of the population. But there’s very little affection for it. This is partly, of course, because its term has been necessarily dour, but partly, too, because Enda Kenny’s schtick has a pretty short shelf life. I’m not suggesting affection for our leaders is inarguably a good thing – Bertie Ahern was very well liked and look where that got us. But in the absence of genuine popularity you have to try something else.

When you attach big words such as stability and chaos to it, that something else sounds rather grand. It has an epic, existential ring to it. But it just means: “You might not like us but wait till you see the other shower.”

The Government’s appeal is a bit like the funeral of a horrible old git at which the need for someone to say something nice about the dead man is met with stony silence until someone finally steps forward with the eulogy: “His brother was worse.” Given that Fine Gael’s brother party is Fianna Fáil, it has the virtue of truth.

But it is a particularly gloomy way of framing the Irish future. We all know chaos is no fun, yet stability isn’t exactly a laugh a minute either. Firstly, the State is not really a stable system – it is just a permanent state of crisis management, a perpetual-motion fire engine always rushing from blaze to blaze. It’s not that we don’t have chaos, just that when chaos is chronic everybody gets used to it.

In the past three weeks alone we’ve had authoritative statements that three of the biggest parts of the State machinery are chronically dysfunctional. Tony O’Brien, who runs the Health Service Executive, told the Sunday Business Post at the weekend the HSE is on “death row”, has no coherent vision and cannot make decisions for the medium term, never mind the long term.

Poorly organised

Last week’s gobsmacking report of the Garda Inspectorate paints a picture of a police force so poorly organised that it is a miracle any criminals get caught at all.

And the recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development finds that the Oireachtas  is the worst-functioning parliament in the developed world when it comes to the most basic job of scrutinising the budget. That’s just the current crop of failures: we could, of course, reap a much richer harvest.

Secondly, for large sections of society stability is a distant dream. The most immediate form of stability in anyone’s life is a home, and it is just not available to growing numbers of people. Huge increases in child poverty, deeply rooted long-term unemployment and an inability to rely on necessary public services make for chaotic lives. I don’t think there is any real appreciation in most of the political and media worlds of the degree to which working-class communities feel alienated from the mainstream, or of what that implies for our democracy.

Thirdly, we are part of a bigger world in which stability is not an option. To name just four problems, think of climate change, of the refugee crisis, of the parlous state of the European Union and of the immense destructiveness of growing inequality. Each of these on its own demands radical change: cultural, political and economic. Taken together they suggest we have to think of stability in a radically new way: the world can be stabilised only if it utterly transforms itself.

So it’s not good enough to warn us that we have to hold on to Enda’s clammy hand or else get snapped up in the jaws of chaos.

Distribution of privilege

In some respects we’ve had far too much stability: even an existential crisis has not disturbed the distribution of privilege or caused failed institutions and practices to be swept away. We’ve also had far too much chaos inflicted on the lives of those who most need a capable and rational State.

And these two outcomes have been inextricably linked: a stability that consists in protecting the haves means chaos for the have-nots. Chaos and stability look less like alternate possibilities than like Siamese twins.

What we need to hear in an election campaign is not a souped-up version of a nursery rhyme morality tale. It is an adult proposition about how inevitable and radical change will be handled fairly, rationally and decently.

What really matters is not the stability of our institutions and systems but the security of citizens’ lives.

Fintan ó Toole

Photo Minute: Get off my head

George S Patton mentors Conor McGregor

Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That's the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

Better to fight for something than live for nothing.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard dies for his.


All comments by George S Patton

Photo Minute: Original colour photos of Ireland in 1927

By Clinton Adams for National Geographic 1927