Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum

There are some horrible goings on going on. No Question. I read recently of an eminent psychiatrist/therapist, Jay Gartner describing a certain Orange Person in the following terms: ‘What if Hitler had dementia,’ (in the case of this Orange Man frontotemporal dementia – in other words executive functioning, language, emotional processing and behaviour) ‘and access to a nuclear arsenal’, he went on. I agree with Dr Gartner. The Hitler allusion is to do with this individual’s particular pathology, malignant narcissism. You can deny, minimise, argue, allow yourself time away from the awfulness, but its there. Its as bad as bad gets, and he is surrounded by sycophants and enablers and he is poisoning them as he is poisoning everything he touches. This is a truly bad person, capable of anything you can imagine.

Writers, and by this I mean all of us with the gift of language, as I loathe elitism, being of the punk rock genre of writers. So when I say writers, I mean anyone who does me the honor of reading this far, writers don’t just have a duty to call out bad things. Its in our blood, our very beings, the breath that gives us another moment. Ireland is still a democracy, which is more than what I can say about those cowed into silence or institutional racism or sexism or mired in horrific mind-blowingly terrible wars, or paid off artists encouraged to write about cycling to the village on the back of daddy’s bicycle or suitably tragic love affairs. I say: If you see it, as I do, say it out. Call out the creeps that are destroying our world, dividing our countries, making former friends enemies, destroying lives and cities. Welcome our new friends. We all come from elsewhere. some of us are exiles in our own homeland. Once we were those friends seeking homes elsewhere because we too were oppressed and had nothing. How easy a little cash and a roof over our heads make us forget and become like those we once loathed. I was at a concert recently, a band called The Farm. They had a song. I liked the title: Love Knows No Color. Words to live by. So I say: Ignore the pathological megalomania at your peril. This will not simply pass. It will pass when and if we refuse to accept unacceptable behaviour. Remember they come for the writers and the artists first. I mean you and I mean me. Why? Because its in our nature to describe what we see and what we know. Never say nothing. Write. Talk. Create.