Let's all go to the lobby

So the day has finally arrived and its back off to hospital for me. I'm scheduled for surgery at stupid o'clock in the morning tomorrow, so I'm heading in beforehand this afternoon for a rake of tests and scans.

The plan is to a) remove a whole load of dead tissue from my pancreas, b) remove all the pooled liquid from my abdomen that my pancreas has been secreting (I'm taking out about 150ml a day at the moment, and apparently this is a drop in the ocean), c) create a new connection between my pancreas and my stomach and d) remove my gall-bladder ("sure we might as well do it since I'm in there anyway" said my consultant, "it'll only take ten minutes"). Its a long operation, not particularly risky, but complicated enough ("well it's not as complicated as a kidney transplant, but near enough" were the further reassuring words from my consultant). All of this and they still have no idea what caused it all in the first place.

Recovery time in hospital will be between two and four weeks depending on complications, all of which means that Booming Back is going to go dark again for the next month. If you really need to get your Unkie Dave fix you might catch me on twitter at @unkiedave if that's your cup of tea. It's not really my warm beverage of choice, but a snide remark of 140 characters is a lot easier to type on a phone than a blog post.

See you all in a month.

Hail to the Chief

From a strange land among the hills, the tall man
Came; who was a cobbler and a rebel at the start
Till he saw power ahead and keenly fought
To seize it; crushed out his comrades then.
His brittle eyes could well outstare the eagle
And the young followed him with cheers and praise
Until, at last, all that they knew - his nights, his days,
His deeds and face were parcel of a fable.

Now in the neat white house that is his home
He rules the flowers and birds just like a king,
And, Napoleon by the sundial, sees his fame
Spread though the garden to the heap of dung;
“All that I do is history,” he loudly cries
Seeing in his shadow his romantic size.

Ruthven Todd, ‘Dictator’, 1938

In January of 2009 I travelled 4,500 miles to Washington DC to join the million strong crowds witnessing the son of a Kenyan farmer assume the highest political office in the US. Today I will not even travel a kilometer and a half to College Green to see him.

I still hope he gets re-elected, the alternative is far too grim, but two years of failed opportunities and misjudged compromises, a revolving door in his administration for the very lobbyists and Wall Street executives he campaigned against during the election, three armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa that make a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize he was too hastily awarded, and a Guantanamo that still remains open despite its closure being the first act signed into law by Obama shortly after his inauguration, have all taken the sheen off what was once seen as a genuine opportunity for change in the US.

Going to see President Obama in 2009 was like seeing U2 in 1992. Seeing him in 2011 is like seeing U2 in 2011. All you want him to do is play his greatest hits (Hope, Change etc), but all you get is No Line on the Horizon and a slightly ill feeling everytime Bono starts talking.

The Idea of Obama is more powerful than the Reality of Obama has ever been.

Fine in practice but will it work in theory?

Very sad today to wake up to the news that Dr Garret FitzGerald has passed away. Growing up in the 80's in a Blueshirt house, Garret The Good loomed large over my politically formative years and although my own path took me well away from his own centrist philosophies it is impossible not to rank him as perhaps our best Taoiseach, not our most effective, most charismatic or the greatest communicator, but certainly blessed with two qualities so sorely lacking in most of the others, intelligence and integrity.

Indeed maybe it is better to see him as the platonic ideal of a Taoiseach, as opposed to measuring his actual accomplishments as Taoiseach, for watching highlights of the Queen's Speech last night on the news with the rogues gallery of Biffo, Bertie and even poor Albert Reynolds lining up to shake her hand, you realise what a giant Garret was standing head and shoulders above the scoundrels and incompetents that followed him.

The ideal political representative should be smarter and more capable than those who elect them, and act in an utterly selfless manner for the betterment of the citizenry, otherwise we would all be better off choosing names out of a hat Athenian style. Garret was that rare politician who, almost uniquely, lived up to that ideal.

He will be missed.

Guess who's coming to dinner?

"Fellow-workers, stand by the dignity of your class. All these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors, all these are but signs of disease in any social state - diseases which a royal visit brings to a head and spews in all its nastiness before our horrified eyes. But as the recognition of the disease is the first stage towards its cure, so that we may rid our social state of its political and social diseases, we must recognise the elements of corruption. Hence, in bringing them all together and exposing their unity, even a royal visit may help us to understand and understanding, help us to know how to destroy the royal, aristocratic and capitalistic classes who live upon our labour. Their workshops, their lands, their mills, their factories, their ships, their railways must be voted into our hands who alone use them, public ownership must take the place of capitalist ownership, social democracy replace political and social inequality, the sovereignty of labour must supersede and destroy the sovereignty of birth and the monarchy of capitalism."
-from 'Visit of King George V', James Connolly, 1910

A fantastically timely quote via Irish Left Review yesterday that cheered up my RSS Reader no end, so much so that I couldn't help but appropriate it today.

"So Unkie Dave", I hear you ask, "how are you enjoying Bizzie Lizzy's visit to our fair shores?".

Well now, the answer must surely be self-evident if you have even a passing familiarity with this blog, for I believe I have said on numerous occasions that if we are to have an organised State (and I am not entirely convinced that we must), then control of that State must lie in the hands of the public, not in the grasp of an elite. In other words, a Republic.

"Ah, so you're a republican?"

Possibly.

"Like the lads in the Celtic jerseys throwing fireworks at the Gardai yesterday?"

No, they're Republicans, who show their devotion to the belief of a mythical 32-county Irish Republic by wearing British football kits, reading The Sun and buying cheep beer from Tesco. Completely different.

"Ah, then you're one of those lads in the tricorns with the teabags who love their country and protect it from socialists by giving guns to fetuses?"

Um, no, again they're Republicans, who actually fight to preserve the world's largest Plutocracy. Different country, think Monty Burns with less compassion.

"Excellent. So what kind of Republican are you?"

Um, a republican, possibly. Small "r". I believe in the idea of a republic, just not the idea of the Republic that I actually find myself living in, which isn't really a republic given that fact that political power still rests in the hands of a small minority of dynastic families, passed down from generation to generation, with the majority of wealth concentrated in the hands of a small few who seem to be both above the taxation system and the law in general, an aristocracy in all but name. The sight of any citizen of any nation bowing down before an unelected dynastic autocrat is obscene, and to see it occur in this time of national austerity with the citizenry of this nation paying €30 million for the privilege of doing so goes beyond obscenity into the criminal.

"So, this whole Pancreatitis thing hasn't really taken the edge of your bile production?"

Not at all, if anything it has kicked it into overdrive.

"I see. So if you feel so strongly about this, then why aren't you out on the streets protesting the visit like you spend so many hours on this blog telling the rest of us to do?"

Ah now, you see I'm always banging on about taking to the streets to protest about our own political masters. Heading out to protest about someone else's master seems, well, a bit rude, seeing as how they're a guest and all. I mean we have a long tradition of hospitality here in Ireland and we wouldn't want to tarnish that image abroad. Think of the effect on the economy.

"Really, is that it? Seems a bit weak if you ask me."

Ok, you got me. I don't care about the economy, I just wouldn't want anyone to mistakingly think I'm a Republican, I mean I don't even own a Celtic jersey.

Ood do you think you are?

As I've mentioned before, the good doctors at the hospital sent me home with a tube emerging from my abdomen, attached to a rather-too-large drainage bag (ewwwwwwww. Yes, it skeeves me out to think about it as well). The bag comes with a velcro band so you can attach it around your waist like a belt, but being rather lazy I find myself walking around the apartment carrying the bag in my hand (double-plus ewwwwwwww), leading The Very Understanding Girlfriend to comment on more than one occasion on my new found resemblance to an Ood.

Nice.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Ood, a fictional alien race from the new incarnation of Dr Who, a helpful illustration can be found above. The photo is of a display at the Dr Who Experience in Cardiff, which The Very Understanding Girlfriend and I, finding ourselves in Cardiff with an hour or two to spare on our way back from Glastonbury last year, had occasion to visit. Disappointingly it was somewhat smaller on the inside than the outside, but apart from that it ticked all the boxes one would normally associate with a roadside attraction on a forgotten stretch of a US highway, like a drive-through tree or the world's tallest chair made from roadkill: It broke up a monotonous journey, allowed for a toilet break and momentarily distracted from the rather dismal surroundings.

Oh, and it had Ood.

What struck me about the exhibition though was how much Cardiff, and Wales in general, had rather surprisingly embedded itself into modern UK Sci-Fi, not just through Dr Who and its spinoff Torchwood, but most recently with the third series of Being Human. In fact theses last two aren't just filmed in Wales, they make the fact that they are set in Wales the cornerstone of most episodes. Wales is a character in the storyline just as much as any of the actors. Before the relaunch of Dr Who I don't think anyone could have conceived of Wales as a Sci-Fi location, the thought of sinister aliens shuffling down its streets would have stretched the bounds of belief even by genre standards.

And its not just Wales that has undergone something of a transformation in the minds of genre writers, for Scotland too in recent years has produced some of the UK's finest Sci-Fi, from Iain M. Banks to Ken MacLeod, and Edinburgh and Glasgow feature larger than life not just in the writings of native Scots but in transplantees drawn north of the border like Charlie Stross. They hijack the city-as-character theme normally used to great effect in crime novels, using it to create a familiar and believable environment to operate in, with just enough difference to keep the reader on their toes.

As I watched the latest episode of Game of Thrones, shot in Northern Ireland, and saw ads for Camelot, shot here in the Republic, the thought occurred to me that while we serve as a great backdrop for the production of many fantasy films and shows, and have attracted to our shores our fair share of US fantasy writers in search of tax-breaks and inspiration, unlike Wales or Scotland we have a distinct lack of native genre writers, and a more noticeable lack of sci-fi set here in Ireland.

Its not that we have a lack of writers who have worked in speculative fiction, Jonathan Swift and Bram Stoker were both Dubliners, but neither set their most outlandish works in Ireland. The altogether more contemporary John Connolly brings a healthy dose of the supernatural into his crime novels, but again all of his works are set in the US, mostly in Maine. He has said on more than occasion that being an Irish writer doesn't mean you have to write about Ireland, he sees himself as a writer who just happens to be Irish.

It could be that since we pride ourselves on our literary heritage (and by "pride" I mean "brag about it to anyone foolish enough to stop and listen"), we are weighed down by generations of "Great Writers" who have eulogised the country and the city to such an extent that it is now almost taboo to write about it in anything less than an epic historical fashion. Even Roddy Doyle has created his own mythologised City on the backs of the working class Northsiders, running barefoot to the dole-office without breaking a single twig in the urban forest. Perhaps Ireland is too grand a thing to be allowed into the hands of a genre-writer, or are would-be authors dissuaded by the ghosts of Great Writers standing over their shoulders casting scorn on any attempts to write something other than the Great Irish Novel with suitable amounts of rain, fathers and sons who cannot talk to each other, grinding poverty and the repetitive tugging of forelocks at our forbears?

All of these thoughts have distracted me well from my ongoing illness which continues to show no sign of improvement. Major surgery is on the immediate horizon and another extended stay in hospital will follow. The upside of this will (hopefully) be a gradual return to full health over the next six months, and fewer opportunities for The Very Understanding Girlfriend to compare me to Ood and other oddities.

Which would be nice.

Links
Photos from the Dr Who Exhibition