It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there . . .
At some indefinite moment in the not too distant past, our forward trajectory by our own lights came to an almost undetectable halt, and after a momentary pause we began to move backwards.
Video Conversation: James Collins IRELAND
I’ve been back on with my fellow sesquipedalian, James Collins, this week, updating our mutual sense of where we are.
I remember a time when Ireland was a free country and its future a blank slate on to which we might have sketched a future that would have been true to us, a time when everyone had a different opinion and you could be on the Late Late of a Friday night and be as famous as Elvis for three weeks afterwards. At some indefinite moment in the not too distant past, our forward trajectory by our own lights came to an almost undetectable halt, and after a momentary pause we began to move backwards. For this it was essential that we be made to misremember the past, and the ensuing amnesia is now so advanced as to display the unmistakable symptoms of a kind of societal Alzheimer’s. Now we live in a country in which lockjaw is virtually ubiquitous and practically every thought comes from the same mouth.
Are we still in Act 2 of our national tragedy, or is this the beginning of Act 3? Are we moving towards a Ceausescu Moment, when the strings of the Piano Wire Concerto will be heard floating over the bogs and drumlins of our once safe and peaceful country? These are the kinds of things we talk about, because almost nobody else appears to be aware of, or thinking of, the nature of the moment that approaches.