the unbearable lightness of rashers eggs and chips

 The May month flapping its glad green leaves like wings, as Thomas Hardy used to say.

Wandered into a cafe in Kildare town with my little dog.

A group of four men and a woman sitting in conversation.

I register them instinctively.

They are of middle years, hardy but not yobs.

The woman recognises my dog and calls to her by name.

She must have met me before.

The men set up a view halloo repeating the dog's name and clicking their tongues at her.

I'm wondering how long it will go on but it's all good natured and there is no sense of threat.

Presently they get tired of calling my dog and return to their discussion.

They are castigating the Catholic church.

I sit there quietly with a rueful expression on my face.

I'm here for a rasher, egg and chips, not for fiery public discourse.

My food arrives and I tuck in.

The woman is saying: "We all owe Gay Byrne a lot. Gay Byrne dragged the Catholic church out of the shadows."

She is talking about a now deceased RTE broadcaster, a peculiarly oleaginous man who presented an interminable low rent chat show for an infinite number of years.

"Bishop Casey had a mistress and was sending her money," continues the woman. "Gay Byrne exposed all that."

The group also reminisce happily about Father Michael Cleary who they claim fathered a child with his housekeeper.

I'm sitting there munching my provender but kind of fascinated by the adjacent chat because the science of discussion has always been of interest to me and I can't help wondering could I ever convince this group of anything.

The ghost of Aristotle appears at my shoulder and whispers: "The finest end of reason is to dispute well."

I always take this to mean that it is necessary to remain civil or we end up just shouting at each other.

"Okay Aristotle," I murmur, "but an equally fine end of reason is to identify the truth and stand for it."

Still I reminded myself that under no circumstances was I going to get into an argument in the cafe.

More as a spiritual exercise than anything else, ruminating through a mouthful of rasher, I began to consider how I might answer their various points if, heaven forbid, I was debating with them. I suppose I'd try answering the Bishop Casey thing just by saying: well, she was really good looking and damn the torpedos. Who among us wouldn't have an affair with that if she hove into view gibbering about gossamer wings and whatnot? And it looks like a setup. A bunch of Americans approach Bishop Casey and say 'Oh this poor stunningly beautiful girl is inconsolable after a relationship break up. She needs somewhere to heal.' And they move her into the house of the Bishop of Kerry. And Bishop Casey, the big countrified goose, thinks its Christmas. You know the Catholic church is a power brokerage. Countries and mafias and other actors routinely seek to subvert it. The Russians would do it for a project. Devil worshippers would do it for a larf. The possibility of a set up regarding Bishop Casey is not insignificant. As regards Father Cleary, I'd probably make much of the fact that those attacking him waited until he was dead. I'd point out that the psychiatrist Ivor Browne who said Father Cleary was his patient, broke his oath of confidentiality to reveal details of their supposedly confidential consultations. For some of us that would completely invalidate Ivor Browne's testimony. It would in a court of law. Moreover the supposed genetic match between the housekeeper's child and Father Cleary was obtained using methods more dubious than the oath breaking psychiatrist's oath breaking accusations. People wishing to vitiate Father Cleary's reputation had deceived an elderly senile relative of his into unknowingly giving a genetic sample from her own body to them. Why on earth would we trust such people? The laboratory claiming a match between the young man and Father Cleary was entirely unsupervised in its testing. And RTE the employers of the great Byrne were later convicted in the libel court in an unrelated case for paying an African teenager to claim another priest, Father Kevin Reynolds, fathered a child with her. Let's just say RTE has previous for framing Catholic priests any which way they can.

But even if, in my wildest dreams, I was going to challenge the people in the cafe, these lines of approach seemed a bit too punchy. I'd prefer some insight that would have a resonance which might actually reach them in the heart and not get me beaten up.

Hmmm.

I have no intention of saying anything to them anyway.

I'm walking out that door with a benign smile and nothing more.

I finished my meal, paid my bill and walked over to the group.

"Isn't it strange," I said smiling, "that for centuries people tried to draw the Irish people away from the Catholic church and they couldn't do it? And you guys left for Gay Byrne and RTE."

The woman and four men were silent.

"Just think," I said, "they shot us, they imprisoned us, they tortured us, they made it illegal to be a Catholic, they made it illegal for us to own land, and they still couldn't terrorise us into abandoning the ancient church. And you guys left for Gay Byrne and RTE and Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times and because Bishop Casey had a fling with a good looking woman."

One of the men looked up sharply.

"I know plenty of priests who had flings," he shot out.

"And I know plenty of priests who died for Ireland," I rapped back not recognising my own voice.

The little group hung their heads.

It was the darndest thing.

"God bless you all," I said and left.

no truth in the rumour

 

There is no truth in the rumour that Millennium Films the outfit behind the movies Olympus Has Fallen, London Has Fallen and Angel Has Fallen, films I always deemed to have Jihadi sympathies due to the gleeful way they depicted terrorist attacks on Western targets, there is absolutely no truth in the rumour, I tells ee, that the same Millennium Films are now producing a picture called Mark Steyn Has Fallen in which commentator Mark Steyn defends fellow commentator Tucker Carlson's click baiting promotion of a teenage pseudo radical with a Hitler fetish advocating genocide of the Jews, and then goes on to support Vladimir Putin's smash and grab on Ukraine, and then goes on to attempt to derail President Trump's liberation of Iran. The rumour of a movie on the matter is categorically false. Mark Steyn is doing all these things in real life.

second blood heelers the mission

 

There is a little known dive bar in a side street near Pennsylvania Avenue improbably close to the pulsing heart of American power in Washington DC.

The place is earthy but discreet.

The world weary clientele knows when to look the other way.

At the bar a striking male figure, knocking back whiskey sours, attracts little attention.

President Donald Trump, for it is he, mutters to himself: "What in heaven possessed God to make a man like Mark Steyn?"

He is referring to an internet commentator who formerly championed Mr Trump but has now turned Turk on him over the Iran war just as he had earlier turned Turk on President Bush in order to facilitate Mr Trump's own accession to the Presidency.

A jaunty Richard Crenna like voice rings out from across the bar.

"God didn't make Mark Steyn. I did."

President Trump looks up to see James Healy played by Richard Crenna, standing behind him.

"You? How did you make him?"

"Well he stole a quite sublime joke referencing Sunset Boulevard from my blog. I mean this was really top class stuff, Trumper. The original had me being told by an acquaintance that my mild mannered critiques of the dysfuncts in Islamic culture had cost me readers, 'You used to be big,' the person says. And I reply: 'I'm still big. It's the internet got small.' Steyn thought that it was so funny that he used it with himself in the Gloria Swanson role. You have to admire his taste. And as if that wasn't enough he then started plagiarising neologisms from my website, to wit the words maunderings and moronification which had gilded my more serious cultural analyses and were considered by some to be the finest additions to the English language in half a century."

"By some?"

"Me n the dogs n the budgie n the parrot like em."

"That hardly amounts to you making him," ventured President Trump delicately.

"Well they were lynchpin moments in his career," answered me peevishly, downing a Furstenberg snakebite.

"Why is he attacking me ?" asked President Trump.

"Could be a whim," sez I. "The internet loves clicks. Could be principle. I thought he was a man of principle. I'm normally right about these things. It could be his judgement has gone a bit off. Sometimes even great Homer nods as they say in the staff room at the Simpsons cartoon. The one thing I wouldn't like would be if someone had got to him. You know he was a man of influence so he was certainly a target for even State actors but also none State actors among the Jihadis and elsewhere. And they're not short of money, resources or spite. Vexatious entities at least twice have tried to destroy him through the courts and that didn't work. Maybe some of them infiltrated someone into his entourage who's been slipping Steyn the occasional amphetemine without his knowledge. His writing goes haywire and Steyn never even suspects he's a junkey. It's a nifty way to destroy a person. And you save money on the assassins bullet.  There's people who do those sorts of things Mr President. I've met them."

"It sounds a bit far fetched to me."

"Things happen to people of influence Mr President. Breitbart is conveniently dead. Jordan Peterson is prey to endless medical issues and is out of the ball game. And Steyn's gone doolally. Either someone's got to him or I was wrong about him being a decent man in the first place. Now which of those is most likely?"

"So what do I do about him?" wondered the Prez wearily.

"Leave him alone," advised James. "He's wandering around Ukraine at the moment trying to undermine their war effort. His internet site has haemhorraged readers since he started trying to come up with  his own neologisms. The closest he got was sodbollocking. I ask you.  Ho hum. Leave him alone. That's my advice. If the Ukrainians don't kill him, you'll find him working at a garage in Montana in a few months time and you can arrest him then quietly with no trouble. The worst thing you could do is confront him. If you confront him, you'd better bring a lot of body bags, I mean legal writs for plagiarism and ear muffs to drown out his endless wearisome iterations of sodbollocking."

kilcullen easter

 

the lambing time

evanescent leaves

provincial poets stitching worn out rhymes

into patchwork quilted semaphores of praise

all of these

mist like matting on muddy fields

old men rejoicing in  campaniles

heart breaking heart mending threnodies

everything that breathes is on its knees

for the coming of the lord

peace

heelers agonistes

 

Sitting on the edge of the bed, racked by pain.

My eyes turn to a photo of a tree hung on the wall.

The photo was taken by an aunt.

Sometimes when I look at it the pain ebbs a bit.

So it is today.

As the pain ebbs I feel an intimation.

My pain is caused by resentment.

"Oh for heavens sake God," I cry aloud, " if that's the case, I won't be able to write anything."

In my heart, I imagine I hear God replying: "Do you want to write anything or do you want to walk?"

obitcheries

 

The actor Chuck Norris has died. He had an appealing manner and easy charisma. He is unique among action movie heroes in that during fifty years of continuously making films, he never made a good one. The closest he came was Lone Wolf McQuade, a nasty piece of work whose opening credits with a wolf filmed in silhouette and a marvellous music score from Francesco De Masi, are laden with a poetic sensibility redolent of great art. The director of that movie was an exploitation veteran styling himself Steve Carver who later unsuccessfully sued Chuck for purportedly using elements of the movie in a TV series called Walker Texas Ranger. The poetic sensibility shouldn't surprise since a lot of the exploitation guys are poets who chose wrong.

considerations regarding the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies in pursuit of their own interests in corporate commercial political academic and health care spheres

 

My concerns about what I deem malfeasance in the corporate conduct of major pharmaceutical companies, are as follows.

1. The mass marketing of drugs styled anti depressants and anti psychotics has been couched in a monumental lie, to wit that the substances in question rectify brain chemistry. My assessment is that these drugs block or accelerate brain function. They rectify nothing. Initial legislation governing the prescription of anti depressants carried the stipulation that they should only be used for several weeks by any patient. This has been quietly ignored and people are on the things for life.

2. I am convinced by current US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy's assertion that the Mumps Measles Rubella vaccines have caused a wave of autism among human populaces across the planet earth.

3. During the 1960s, the distribution of Thalidomide as a cure for morning sickness in pregnant women resulted in severe injuries to unborn children. The pharmaceutical companies have never been made properly accountable for this. I think the appropriate penalty would be closure, not in the Oprah Winfrey tree hugging sense of  moving on emotionally, but in the precise ethical legalistic sense of shutting down permanently those pharmaceutical companies responsible for harming people with Thalidomide.

4. The distribution of abortion pills is an atrocity.

5. The promotion of contraceptive culture has harmed civil society and debased family values. Many contraceptive products for women cause deep vein thrombosis.

6. The vaccines for Covid 19 were made out of aborted babies. This alone should have been enough reason not to use them. The Covid 19 vaccines have been killing and crippling people since government and media colluded to stampede the general public into taking them. Reportage of deaths due to Covid 19 vaccines is being suppressed.

7. Pharmaceutical companies have clientalised Academia through endowments to universities and medical schools.

8. Pharmaceutical companies have clientalised media through advertising.

9. Pharmaceutical companies have clientalised governments using methods that are not entirely clear.

10. The marketing of a drug styled Ozempic to make people thin is a monstrous manipulation of vulnerable people and will do enormous harm.

11. The policy of selling unnecessary medications to vast swathes of the populace in a target group styled by the pharmaceutical companies as "the worried well," is vile.

the flu has flown

 

Coffee with the professional woman in an eatery.

"I'm noticing a lot of people are getting flu, or pleurisy, or coughs, or different things," she said.

"I've noticed it too," I told her. "In fact I'm noticing far more of it than during the supposed Covid 19 pandemic a few years ago."

"What does it mean?" quoth she.

"It means something," I answered cautiously. "It might be the cumulative effect of Covid and flu vaccines distilling new forms of the flu into the general population. Or it may be a detrimental effect of those same vaccines on herd immunity. Or it may be Russian President Putin or Chinese President Xi or both, releasing flu viruses into the Western biosphere."

There came the sound of screeching brakes on the street.

An adjoining diner leapt up with their mobile phone ready to film.

"I'm convinced," I told the professional woman calmly, "that if an atomic bomb fell on Kilcullen right this moment, there would be gulpens at their windows trying to get a good camera angle on the mushroom cloud."