There have been a number of changes in my life-time that I find near-astonishing. One is the decline of smoking. When I were a lad, you took up smoking to show people you were grown up, sophisticated, a hard man, very Humphrey Bogart. We knew ciggies were bad for us even back then – we called them ‘coffin-nails’ – but we went straight on smoking. Nowadays I have to think a bit before I can identify an acquaintance who smokes.
Likewise with drink-driving. I remember when driving a car while under the influence was the sign of a wild man, a hard chaw, a bit of a divil, a right laugh. “I dunno how I got home!” drivers would tell you and we’d all laugh. Now drink-drivers are seen as the public menace they are.
Thumping children used to be popular too. It meant you didn’t buy the guff that drifted across from the States, where children were fat and whiney and spoiled. We’d compete with each other in tales of how our parents punished us. And Dennis the Menace ended each week getting a right thrashing from his teacher. No more. Physically attacking young people smaller than yourself is seen as the twisted, cowardly thing it is.
And I remember a time – maybe you do too – when Michael McDowell was regarded as a sophisticated economics thinker. A time when Fianna Fail and the Greens were following economic policies that nearly all agreed were bringing and would bring unprecedented levels of wealth to the south. In contrast, Sinn Féin was held up as an example of economic dunderheadedness, personified in their leader Gerry Adams. Remember how Michael McDowell made mincemeat of him in that TV interview and how the term ‘economic illiterate’ was coined? What else could you expect from a bunch of violence-addicted thugs who had no third-level education and couldn’t possibly appreciate the intricacies of the international market. Guess what? In today’s Sunday Independent, Dan O’Brien notes that Sinn Féin are now seen as the party with the soundest economic policy for the southern state. “Astonishing” Dan calls it, and you can almost hear his little teeth grind. I’m tempted to say “Michael McDowell, Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen, Eamon Gilmore – your economics took a helluva beating!” But that wouldn’t be quite right. Your economics gave the Irish people a helluva beating, and one which will continue for the foreseeable future.
Jude :
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Have things really changed? I know I gave up smoking some thirty years ago but as you already know Jude , I had a right old stab at it before I let it go . I struggled along with the odd social cigar or roll-up for years but when the wife abandoned the fags some six years ago , I gave that all up too. She’s had a permanent cough ever since!! There are plenty of taxis now unlike the good old , bad old days , but as you say, we bent plenty of road laws back then and laughed about it!!!
Have things really changed though ? I see a lot of the youngsters still clinging to the fag habit scuttling outside to the “smoking zones” where all the craic’s to be found,; mostly young women too, it seems. It’s no longer macho .Now it’s a feminist gesture. No more world weary Bogart , hanging onto that curling smoke like life itself.Now it’s the lasses worrying about their weight and hoping to suppress their ravening appetites!!!! {Don’t be getting excited , you in the back!!} .
We appear to live in a different world, but turn over any stone and it’s still the same old place. Certainties, like National Institutions and television personalities such as Rolf Harris are found to have feet in the mucky clay..Our law makers and scene -makers are constantly found to be law breakers .
When Denis the Menace’s poor old dad was slippering his errant son every week in the Beano , we could all identify with it but now I fear that the slippering still goes on behind some closed doors but only appears in the news when some psychopath takes it a little too far.
Get the Norwegian football commentator to say it to those twats, would definitely sound better…