A New Kind of Stupid

The crisis of the present moment is the normalisation of the incredible, the unspeakable and the unthinkable. Unless the world awakens very soon, the unthinkable is about to hit us.

For the past 30 years I have lived in the Borough of Dun Laoghaire, most of that time in a quarryman’s cottage opposite Dalkey Quarry, overlooking Dublin Bay. It is without doubt one of the most beautiful places in south County Dublin, and also, surprisingly, one of the few roads left in the area that have retained a sense of rustic allure. This sense was accompanied by a spirit of neighbourly loyalty and affection, now almost entirely disappeared from areas east of the M50. 

When I first moved to Dublin, having come up from the West, I was for a long time taken aback by the general sense of unfriendliness that pervaded the general south county area. In my first decade in the place, I gradually abandoned my habit of greeting people as I walked around Killiney Hill, since hardly anybody ever replied. When I moved down to live on the seafront in Sandycove a couple of years back, this pattern became noticeably more pronounced. 

There’s been a slight change in this regard in recent months, since Gemma O’Doherty and I lodged our High Court challenge against the lockdown, with the precise objective of alerting the public to the usurpation of the most fundamental rights and freedoms we possess as of right, as citizens and human beings. Since then, especially in those gloriously sunny days of April and May, I found myself being greeted by shouts of ‘Gobsh*te’ and ‘Motherf**ker’ (the nicer salutations) from passers-by, generally lycra-clad saddle-soldiers using the new two-way Olympic-style cycle track that suddenly manifested where the main road used to be. (The road where we live, which used to be one of the main arterial routes in and out of the city, is now reduced to a single lane heading south, with minimal parking and zero set-down space. And I see Castle Street in Dalkey has now fallen as well.)

Every half-decent day now, hundreds of cyclists in lycra working off what is left of their masculine energy pass our window. If I venture out, I have a one in two chance of being yelled at. As we moved from flattening the curve to flattening the economy, their shouts have grown somewhat less frequent, though there is still, to my total lack of surprise, the occasional slow learner. The ‘men’ who abuse me: they are all but always males, or what pass for males —  are not the old-style men-on-bikes, with felt hats, suits and shiny shoes, a folded-up shopping bag on the rear carrier, but these power cyclists that have suddenly erupted into view in the lockdown, who hurtle hither and thither dressed in what the fashion pages call ‘unflattering lycra’ (show me flattering  lycra!) clearly engaged in some profound, evasive fantasy about themselves. 

My cycling confidantes tend to get in as close as possible, accelerating as they do so, before delivering their payloads of expletives. They vary in age, from twenties to fifties, a category of males which, in the absence of underlying comorbidities, have a 99.9997 chance of surviving a SARS-CoV-2 infection. My own chances, if I were to credit a word of it, are significantly inferior. 

It usually happens when I'm alone, though a few incidents have happened when my wife was with me, and once or twice in the company of her small grandchildren. I see it as a symptom of emasculation: men having been completely unmanned by the lockdown, but unable to find an outlet to express their cuckolded frustration. Being confined to their homes on the orders of rainbow-socked fascists, they are unable to support or face their wives and children and so get on their bikes to escape the shame. Espying in the street one of the bare handful of people who have spoken out about the obscenity of what is occurring, they let rip in order to reassure themselves that they are still to be counted among the ranks of men. Their State-sponsored fury is directed at a rare male who continues to fight and therefore risks showing up their cowardice. By attacking me, they hope to steal my bottle for themselves, thus achieving a kind of redemption in their own limited minds. 

It reminds me of the game of conkers: Since I have stood up to government and State, I am the boy with the 100-killer whose score is available to others to take in battle, and hence these charming ‘men’ seek to claim all my credits in a symbolic unloading of ridicule or hatred. The bikes are a surrogate for the keyboards they use at home when they conduct similar attacks via Twitter: a strategic acceleration enables them to escape from any response, and the spandex gear renders them hideously indistinguishable from the next expletor.

Gemma's effect on them is worse, though she is somewhat less recognisable than I am. It is all but unbearable for them that a woman should stand up and do what they are too cowardly to. 

They are the emaskulated. Having forfeited any ability to seem autonomous and dignified in the eyes of their wives and children, they no longer feel  — as men once automatically did once they crossed certain ritualistic boundaries to become fathers, husbands, heads of households, breadwinners, protectors — that they are fulfilling the functions that God or Nature intended. They feel like what they appear to be: losers in lycra. The lockdown has ensured that they have been finally plucked from the bosoms of their families and despatched to plummet headlong into the disintegrating, abscessed heart of the city, cycling furiously along the newly minted cycle lanes that have erupted where once were the roads upon which men and women made their way to a place where they set to work with their hands, hearts and minds. 

I have noticed, by the way, that already some women are beginning to approach me to say they are grateful for what I have tried to do. For men, it will be much harder, as admitting the truth will amount to a further humiliation: They fell for it — frame, chain and saddle. 

In a slightly more tolerable version of the same syndrome, I sometimes get buttonholed along the promenade by elderly gentlemen who passive-aggressively demand to know why we filed our legal challenge. I wouldn’t mind these interventions so much were it not so obvious that they are seeking to rebuke me rather than engage in a sincere conversation. It never seems to occur to them that it might be possible to know more than they have gleaned from watching RTÉ, and they regurgitate this in the manner of a child reciting a nursery rhyme. Just one man that I recall could be deemed polite, though I did one day hear a priestly voice unbraid me with a stern and disappointed ‘Shame on you', though — having lost my sense of aural direction by virtue of recently going completely deaf in one ear (a real virus, as it happens) — I could not identify the source of this correction. 

What we are dealing with here is a new and infinitely more dangerous kind of stupid than anything we have witnessed hitherto. We are literally being imprisoned by the stupidity of others, who refuse to see that they are being lied to from morning till night, who snort in derision at those who seek to alert them, to urge that they turn off their TVs and read one of the thousands of articles that expose the official lies or/and explain why these lies are being purveyed. This stupidity, previously harmless enough, is the shackles that restrain our once free bodies, minds and souls, rendering us and our children and our children’s children amenable to an unimaginable future of serfdom and coercion.

Once upon a time, stupidity was the preserve of the uneducated. In that sense, it came before schooling — it existed where the balm of instruction had not managed to extend. But the new kind of stupid is post-education: It affects those who have their arse pockets stuffed with papers proving their credential and qualifications. Its symptoms are many but the principal among them is the confusion/conflation of intelligence with powers-of-retention, causing honest people to fall into a misplaced demeanour of servility before it. In reality, this pseudo-intelligence majors in obedience to power and susceptibility to propaganda and public relations. It genuflects before science and delights in learning off  jargon with which to bamboozle the commonsensical. I find it interesting that, when I move a mile or two from Dun Laoghaire centre, heading inland towards Sallynoggin and Ballybrack, the people I meet, though noticeably lacking this pseudo-intelligence, are as wide as gates to the trickery of the media and the political class. These people, who have earned their bread by making and mending things, have more smarts in their fingernails than the people I encounter, as a general rule, along the seafront.   

In general, too, I find that shops and cafés in the area are pretty unhelpful in their enforcement of the face coverings laws, which means that anyone who is unwilling to demonstrate his servitude is, in effect, denied the right to buy anything to eat or drink in any of the main shops in Glasthule or Dalkey. I say ‘unhelpful’ here rather than ‘literal’, which is more what I intend, because in reality their behaviour is anything but a literal enforcement of the law. The relevant face covering regulations (they are not laws, and therefore legally unenforceable) —  in Statutory Instrument 296 of 2020 —  allow for exemptions from wearing such face-nappies, but none of the shopkeepers or their staffs have taken the trouble to check this out, and so abuse and unjustly humiliate decent long standing customers who I trust will never darken their doors again. There are a few shops willing to treat people with decency and humanity, but I shall not mention which ones they are in the certain knowledge that in doing so I would all but guarantee them a visit from the Covid Gestapo or some of the local Stasi snitches. I shall, however, continue to support their businesses while shunning for all time the other establishments, once this is over — if it ever ends. 

Readers who have come this far with me may hereinafter understand why I was amused to read the leader in the November edition of the newsletter of the Sandycove and Glasthule Residents’ Association, headed, ‘Is There Anyone Listening’, and bearing the subhead, ‘The Democratic Deficit’. 

It would be difficult to come across a more comical example, of  — what shall we say?: phlegmatism? obtuseness? naivete? — as is detectable in the tone and content of said epistle. 

It is astonishing that, after the eight months we’ve put in, such an article could still be written and published without a hint of irony or a smidgen of detectable smarts. The only part of the article with a grain of quizzical truth in it is the headline: ‘Is there anyone listening?’ The answer is ‘Yes: Big Brother is listening, and so is his ugly sister.’ 

The topic of the editorial is the sudden burst of public works that began with the first lockdown in April: what the author calls ‘cycle-paths’, one-way traffic systems, new footpaths, street furniture etc. The leader informs readers that these were introduced ‘under special pandemic powers in line with central government policy’. The author does not pause there to ponder the following question: What in the name of the dead Nora Barnacle have cycle lanes got to do with a pandemic? Is cycling a cure of Covid? If not that, then what? More crucially: What is the nature and purpose of said government policy?

The author continues in a manner suggesting that the editorial may have been written sometime around the early 1990s, when questions of local government effectiveness were of the kind of high-class problem that concerned us then. 

The ‘democratic deficit’ referred to is the fact that the powers of county councillors are not what they were: ‘Whether you are for or against cycle-ways and the changes to our local area,’ the author proposes, ‘there is a question about the lack of political involvement in the decision-making process.’ 

Sadly, it appears that the day-to-day management of the council’s activities is carried out by an executive council consisting of full-time officials led by the Chief Executive, whereas the powers of councillors ‘are in fact quite minor, obscure and rarely used and a large number of powers that affect our daily lives are not reserved functions but are vested in officials.’ Many would say, the author guesses, ‘that the balance of power should be moved towards the Councillors, but the prospect of such reform seems slim.’ 

No sherbert, Sherlock? 

How shall I put this? It is time people started to open their eyes and look around them. It is time to banish from our minds any sense that the Covid ‘crisis’ is about Covid, about a pandemic, about a virus. The crisis of the present moment is the normalisation of the incredible, the unspeakable and the unthinkable.  Unless we awaken very soon, the unthinkable is about to hit us. To call what is happening now a ‘democratic deficit’ is like saying that Mr Justice Séamus Woulfe has trouble taking a hint. 

The word ‘deficit’ means ‘shortfall’. But what do you call a shortfall that amounts to a total lack? What, for example, would you call the ‘democratic deficit’ of North Korea? 

Anyone who has not yet grasped that we are long past the point of thinking that our problem is a ‘democratic deficit’ must have been in a coma since before Easter. Anyone who thinks that the failure of the government and/or council officials to consult the public before unleashing the cycle lane pandemic visited on our cities and towns in that period needs to take themselves into the office for a bit of a pep talk. 

It is well past time for everyone to wake up, take off their face masks and start smelling coffee. The situation we are facing here, at the back end of the worst year in living memory, is not that our county councillors lack a sufficiency of power. It is that the erosion of our democracy has now reached a critical — which is to say terminal —  stage. Yes, at a basic level of explication, the issue goes back to what in EU parlance is called ‘subsidiarity’ — the principle whereby political decision-making is supposed to take place at the lowest practicable level. Nobody cottoned on for a long time that this was merely an Orwellian-worded trick to open up the question of where decisions might be made, so that the EU overlords could decide what the lowest practicable level was. Surprise, surprise: they decided, almost invariably, that the most practicable level was the highest possible level, which is to say with themselves. Thus did they strip not merely county councils, but also national governments, of meaningful political authority. 

But even that is not our problem now. Our problem now is that we have been subjected in 2020 to a coup d’état and are now being administered by a government-of-occupation. That this administration appears to be headed up by Irish people does nothing to change this: these people have long since been made aware of the conditions by which they continue to serve in any capacity in the governance of Ireland, and are seemingly quite happy to collaborate with selling their own people down the river. 

Secondly, the cycle-lanes are not merely cycle lanes. Like everything else about the Time of Covid, they signal a radical shift in the administration of our culture, economy and society.  They are much less about bikes and lycra than they are about the end of the internal combustion engine, the first stage in the replacement of the motor car, which will not-so-gradually be made more and more expensive, impracticable and prone to public disfavour. Within a decade or so, the motor car will disappear, and with it one of the most glorious of the freedoms that technology has extended to ordinary human beings: the capacity to journey about your own country, driving where you please, without let or hindrance. The Garda checkpoints of the past eight months are simply a training exercise for what is to become an everyday experience — training for us, not the guards. I wonder, too: Has the author of the aforementioned newsletter editorial noticed the tailbacks that are now an all-day, everyday ‘experience’ on roads all around Dun Laoghaire? 

And while we’re about it: Has the author heard of the Great Reset? If not, I suggest he amble along to Alex’s paper shop and ask if they still have the recent edition of Time magazine with that precise topic, in as many words, on the cover. What the journaliars of the national fake news media have for years been calling a ‘conspiracy theory’ is now out in the open.  

Here is the news. There is/was no pandemic. There probably was no specific virus, certainly not one identifiable or isolatable as SARS-CoV-2.  The deaths were mostly either falsified or accelerated in people expected to die in any event in a matter of weeks or months, these being essential to pumping up the fear factor. The ‘cases’ currently being promoted by the journaliars are the result of manipulation-prone PCR tests, which can be ratcheted up or down depending on the requirements of the controllers. 

All this has been deliberately rolled out on a global basis to turn reality inside out on behalf of the corporate elites who now lay claim to owning the world. The downstream consequences are much too complex to do more than give a glimpse of, though the Great Reset is already the topic of several sceptical books — none of which the good people of Glasthule, being loyal to the local fake news media, will have heard of. These books tell of the plans for the deliberate destruction of small businesses, the elimination of private property, the winding down of meaningful education, the introduction via mandatory vaccination of biometric ID, universal basic income and Chinese-style social credit systems, the incorporation of whole swathes of the human population into a digital grid using nano technologies, the forced obsolescence of the useless eaters — all this in tandem with the escalation of existing programmes to roll out ‘voluntary’ euthanasia, the merging of existing religions into a single global church, and much more besides. If this is beginning to sound like Communism, then maybe my summary is not as inadequate as I fear. 

I hope I have sufficiently dismayed the reader to deter any further worries about county councillors losing their powers. What we face — what the world faces unless it wakes up pronto — is a dystopia to make George Orwell seem as though the author of fairy tales for children. This is what Covid has been about. This is why they started on the cycle lanes within days of the first lockdown. This is what the ‘regulations’ are for: a training session for when Ireland becomes an open air concentration camp for all except the elite few.  Maybe some of the good denizens of Glasthule fancy themselves among that number, but I would not bet my shirt on it. 

If anyone thinks this sounds incredible, fantastic, ridiculous, I can only agree with you. But let me, before signing off to go out and meet my ecstatic public, ask you one question: What would you have said if, a year ago, I had suggested that we would soon have politicians or ‘health tsars’ telling us how many people might be permitted to enter our homes and whether we could play board games with each other, and advising that we should leave our grandparents sitting by an open window in December so that they would not catch a cold?