Everything Else

Yesterday I wrote this, which was probably the biggest story I’ve done so far in the BBC. Mostly I work on quite low key stuff, so it was interesting to be writing the background to a guilty verdict in a murder trial, with very little time to pause for breath.

The way the law works in journalism makes me feel strange, morally. When someone is on trial, of course everything is neutral and careful (at least in the BBC) and they’re innocent until proven guilty. Then when someone is found guilty, they’re automatically a murderer and a killer.

It’s not that I have no faith in the courts, I hope they get these things right, and they’re obviously meticulous. It’s more how sudden the change is and how there’s this outpouring of “story” as soon as someone’s found guilty. Like everyone is waiting just to wheel out the societal reaction to a gruesome death.

That’s the other thing about working in news, I’ve never felt like such a cog in “society” before. Everything you do feels like breathing out normality, reality, the world as it is currently seen. Everything you write is centred on what people as an amorphous mass believe. It’s a really strange feeling. No matter how much you try and escape it, the more nuance and bias you remove the more things seem biased towards peoples natural preconceptions.

It’s strange how the raw truth can feel tainted by the lack of interpretation you put on it. Maybe I’m just cynical. Watch the TV news tonight (especially a local news bulletin) and then ask yourself this: how many stories start from the point of total ignorance, of total lack of interest or enthusiasm for anything? Every story seems to say “Look at this person, doing something which is odd to me the journalist”.

But everything is odd to the news journalist because the average news journalist is culturally clueless! Just witness how badly they handle stories about “EMOS” or rap music! It’s very frustrating.

All of the above leaves me considering other careers, or trying to do something a little different within my current one. It’s been good to work in news to learn this I guess. It’s early to give up anything totally, but I do think it takes a particular type of person to be a news journalist, one that I’m not.

BOXING hero Ricky Hatton last night called for Britain to stop pulling punches in the fight against street yobs.

Backing The Sun’s campaign to mend Broken Britain, Ricky said the violence can only be stopped by courts, schools and parents getting tougher.

He told us: “Things are terrible on our streets and seem to be getting worse. People are dying left, right and centre.

“It seems you can’t go out for a drink and walk home without someone setting on you.

“I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean stronger sentences for them.”

Ricky, who lives in nearby Hyde, recalled: “Last Sunday I watched the Manchester United and City derby, where the fans behaved impeccably. It was a wonderful day.

“Then a man was beaten up in the street and left badly injured. I found out next day. It put a dark cloud over everything. I feel desperately sorry for him and his family.”

Ricky went on: “We can’t ignore what’s happening any more. Every time you pick up the paper you read about youngsters killing someone, stabbing someone.

“I don’t think a slap on the wrist is enough. You’ve got to make an example of them in the courts.

“But something also has to be done across the board. Parents must be stronger, schools need discipline.

“And we need more police on the streets. If a group of kids is hanging around they should be moved on – but I’m not saying every kid on a street corner is a yob.”

Ricky believes much misbehaviour is caused by boredom due to a lack of anything to do.

He said: “When I was growing up I never saw trouble. But there seemed to be youth clubs everywhere then.”

Ricky, dubbed The Hitman, pledged to work with youngsters when he hangs up his gloves.

He said: “I’m going to become a trainer. Not just professionals, amateurs as well. Gyms are a place where these kids can channel their anger and find older role models.

“Delinquents can turn into gentlemen. There’s so many cases of that in boxing. I’d also like the gym to be a place where kids can go, like the youth clubs when I was a kid.

“I want to put something back into the community and stop the boredom that turns youngsters into yobs.”

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean a seriously good punch in the groin. Then, when they’re down, we mash their head into the pavement and shout “WRONG” in their face.

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean eradicate violence from society.

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean more youth clubs. Plus an occasional knife in the guts for petty thieves wouldn’t hurt.

I think you need to hit yobs harder. By that I mean I’ve no real idea what needs to be done, but more pro-active rhetoric (that’s straight talking you nonce) would be a bloody good start.

PS: “FERAL THUGS”, I think I hear them howling in the night.

Except that a barrel would be more convenient than THREE bins. The days of a barrel were the glory days of waste disposal.

Some of you may already have the new council “food bin”. If you don’t it’s grimly wheeling its way towards you as I write. Enjoy its cleanliness, because in a short time it’s going to stink worse than anything in your entire house.

I know it’s the right thing to do, recycling and sensibly arranging waste, but isn’t it also a nightmare shovelling different bits of rubbish into different bins? And let’s face it this is just the beginning of user generated dumping.

By 2015 or so governments will see that food waste isn’t compact enough. Then you’ll spend hours every day chewing up stale potatoes and chicken caracasses in your garage. Every slow spit will be accompanied by a barely perceptible memory of a life that was once better than this. Meanwhile, as you and your children rend rotten apples into tiny pieces, corporations who make recycling equipment will be engaged in an everlasting war for control of the world. Two bins plus two bins will make five bins.

Despite the fact that this is obviously what is going to happen, there won’t be any significant political action against this third bin, the first step on the staircase of totalitarianism. Even though it’s a staircase that may eventually lead to humans being used as bins.

But no, we don’t protest in Ireland, not us. No sir. If this was France the council offices would be alight already, some people might even have been murdered. But we’re not that noble here. It’s far more likely this issue will rear its head quietly in our popular culture, with a reference in a Damien Dempsey song to the halcyon days of “one bin Ireland”, or a Des Bishop comedy sketch in which he says “I hate having three fucking bins” a few times, impersonating us in his Chief O’Hara Irish accent.

Nobody will listen. You’ll remember you read this after chewing your 8th slice of lurid mouldy bread and vomiting it into your THIRD bin. All the while you’ll be terrified that it was supposed to go into your eighth bin or your eleventh bin, knowing that the penalty for one misplaced spew is instant death.

Then from your food stained, stinking lips you’ll drawl, zombie-like, “it’s a bit more effort but it’s great for the environment”.

Did anyone hear the Prime Minister on RTE Radio 1 today talking about the new Irish football manager?

He must have been on for around 10 minutes. It’s pretty despicable really, you wonder if RTE called him or vice versa. He reeled off match after match from Trappatoni’s heyday and showed a pretty good knowledge of football for a guy who can’t remember much else right now. Still, let’s not be too harsh. Any football fan will tell you that they remember plenty of old games and all the ridiculous details about them, who scored, what the commentator said, what jersey their team were wearing.

I guess it’s just another trait our down-home Taoiseach shares with the common football fan. Just like you or I, he has no memory whatsoever of any football games during which a businessman gave him a giant wad of cash.

So RTE via the Examiner reports that Giovanni Trapattoni is the new Irish football manager. I think the above video says more about why this is good than anything else. Let’s hope his English is as bad as his German. I have ready.

Ryanair have been asked to withdraw the above ad, and Woolworths have decided to stop selling “Lolita” bedroom furniture for young girls. I’d love to meet the person who decided “Lolita” was a clever name for a company selling furniture for young females. And then put him/her on Dragons Den to explain why.

I don’t really know what to make of Obama. Are his speeches the most studied collection of election speak imaginable or is he actually saying something different? Maybe it’s just different election speak.

His most strident idea seems to be that the divides we assume to be eternal are in fact changeable. It seems a really timely stance. This is like post-modern politics, or even post-internet politics. I don’t know how contrived it is, but I can see why this is capturing the imagination right now. It just seems he’s grabbed the essence of the new millennium and bundled it up with more traditional peace and reconcilation stuff.

Ideas are coming together more than ever in the one place, and in a way that’s more easy to digest with the net. Every day you probably read any number of conflicts between left and right, on any number of issues. I think both sides are aware of each others positions more than ever. And like so many of the most successful bloggers or websites, Obama is an aggregator. He collates these ideas and attempts to cut a path between them, to unite them, and I guess ultimately to transcend the two party system he’s in.

Maybe that’s how politicians should always be working, but that sort of attitude has been absent from the US elections in the recent past, and perhaps that’s a big reason why Obama seems to grab the attention so easily. As he says himself “I’m not afraid to say a republican has had an idea.” It seems such a sensible and faultless strategy, to work with all the ideas that are available and find moderacy. His book “The Audacity Of Hope” is full of this stuff.

But ultimately I don’t think it’s possible to please everybody, and this is the problem with Obama’s promises of change. He will alienate people and people will disagree with him furiously. That is certain. And many of them will be republicans and some of them may also be racist, whatever he likes to think.
So, sure, some change is possible, but I felt a fairly strong twinge of sadness watching those speeches, just because of how idealistic they are. It’s a bit like walking out of a great inspirational movie on a Sunday night when you’re going to be doing a boring worthless job the next morning.

I mean, could any president or any society ever live up to the intangible hope that a good speaker like Obama conjures up? I have my doubts.

From Sky News: “McCann Suspect Sketches Released”

It’s really lucky, for the sake of the entire criminal justice system, that nobody whose face isn’t at home in the genre of “artistic impression pictures” has ever committed a crime.

I really think that the day a good looking guy with a big smile on his face abducts a child is the day peoples impressions of what he looked like fail stupendously to resemble him. I mean seriously, nobody’s going to say “Yeah he was a good looking guy with wonderful features. His face was a ray of sunshine! He had sparkling eyes, and a real magnetism, almost like Santa Claus. He was the sort of guy you’d take home to your mother. That is, if he wasn’t a suspected murderer”.

I can’t see it happening any time soon, because of course, only evil looking people ever commit crimes. So be careful if you’ve let yourself slip over the last few years, the uglier you get, the less you belong in society and the sooner you’ll be a serious criminal.

Lol

From Hotpress news: “NADINE COYLE: I DEMANDED AN IRISH FLAG FOR GIRLS ALOUD ALBUM COVER

Derry-born Nadine Coyle is very proud of her Irish roots – so much so that she insisted on an Irish flag being included on the cover of a Girls Aloud album.”

It’s quite heartening to read this. It really goes to show that if you fight for the political causes you believe in anything is possible.

It’s also great to see that Irish popstars like Nadine don’t lose their “Irishness” when they leave the country, or are touched by the hand of fame. The same is hardly true of popstars from most other countries. You have to ask yourself, would an English popstar demand to have the English flag on their album cover? I doubt it, there’s no identity in being born in England, whereas our flag is iconic for all sorts of reasons.

We really have a right to be proud about how much more patriotic we Irish are than other nations. Though to be fair they do have far less to be proud of than we do, so we shouldn’t judge them too harshly for their lack of spirit. If they were Irish they would have had the opportunity to grow up in an environment where the importance of ones birthplace is a constant nagging presence.

As it is, these foreigners are left to covet the state of affairs here, and can probably only dream of being born in a country like Ireland, where everything homegrown is better.