That financial crisis…it’s all in your head… courtesy of the journalists. Oh yes.

You know, it’s perhaps difficult to say this, but really, John Waters is simply getting odder and odder. Some feat for a man whose treading of the outer limits is already – ahem – noteworthy. What’s curious about him these days is the sort of hand-wringing overt political and social conservatism wrapped in a touchey feeley language that seems lifted, and this may not be coincidental, from self-help and suchlike.

For how otherwise to explain the sheer weirdness of his latest offering? Under the heading: Media professionals’ odd mix of sour grapes, guilt and egalitarianism threatens to affect our chances of recovery he writes… No, wait. I can’t let that pass. The economic ‘recovery’ is threatened by ‘media professionals’?
One presumes that he doesn’t actually read the newspapers, you know, not just the Irish Times, but the high selling ones like the Independent and Sunday Independent. For who, seriously, could contend that ‘media professionals’ are suffused with egalitarianism.

Anyhow, continue Waters… enlighten us as to the situation at hand…

EVERY SO often, a journalist peels him- or herself off from the pack and goes into PR, “consultancy” or the law, and immediately seems to become unfathomably richer. This syndrome is one of the great puzzles confronting modern journalists, who, on encountering former colleagues sporting off-season suntans or impossibly shiny shoes, are moved to wonder where it all went wrong for themselves. It is rarely helpful that the defectors are never the most outstanding scribes, but rather the kind who just made the first team and rarely put the ball in the net.

Now check this out…

Because many journalists are well-known, people assume they are extravagantly well-paid, but this is not generally the case. In fact, journalism has, income-wise, remained among the middle-ranking occupations. Most journalists are paid reasonably well, but, apart from a few at the top end of the broadcast sector, not obscenely so.

Middle ranking he says? So, well above the average industrial wage, and well above the median industrial wage too I’ll hazard. But, he’s a warning about how this ‘middle-ranking’ occupation, and by the way, for the record I’m not in a middle ranking bracket myself, so presumably my guilt, sour-grapes and envy are such that we could be making bitter bitter wine.

People are attracted to journalism because they want to write, or exert influence in what appears to be a glamorous profession. Only later do some desire to get rich, and – too late – realise they’re in the wrong job. (I do not exclude myself from these judgments, except to the extent that, feeling blessed to have blagged my way into journalism at all, I still fear being discovered and ejected. I long ago accepted that there is nothing else anyone would pay me to do.) “The media” was not, generally speaking, one of those sectors in which it became possible to get rich during the boom years. For one thing, the Tiger years coincided with a period of increasing pressure from “new” media; for another, pay structures in media are – apart again from the upper reaches of the broadcast industry – tied into standard “partnership” norms.

It would be nice if he were to reference some data on this. it really would. What does he mean by ‘partnership’ norms? He does not explain. But, note that he uses the mealy-mouthed ‘some desire to get rich’. How many? Is it a large cohort or a small one?

For not unrelated reasons, journalism boasts a disproportionate number of what are called socialists. This is in part because many of the current big-name Irish journalists emerged out of the left-liberal revolution of the 1960s, but it may also be related to the unhappiness of many journalists on discovering that their payslips do not reflect their alleged influence or their public profiles.

But if that’s the case who are the big-name journalists who are clearly socialist. By my reckoning of commentators it’s a handful now compared to even a decade and a half ago. And really, most were liberal rather than left. No shame in that. But liberal, as we know and have seen, has a tendency to be able to pitch right when the time is right. And then he continues…

Demands for redistribution are nowadays more likely to come from journalists than other professionals, including politicians. This arises from an odd mixture of egalitarianism, guilt and sour grapes. Interestingly, the better remunerated the journalist, the more likely he or she is to be incessantly demanding that other people be paid less or taxed more.

It’s remarkable that John Waters, of all people, given his views in the past, should be so sneering of the concept of redistribution. It’s perhaps equally remarkable that he should link that into ‘egalitarianism, guilt and sour grapes’. He is one of our more vocal exponents of Christianity, a religion that has at its heart to its credit tilted towards the former ‘egalitarianism’ while – it is true – having no end of guilt and sour-grapes. So perhaps it’s not such an odd mixture at all.
Given that by his own reckoning there are relatively few ‘better remunerated’ journalists he must indeed be talking about a small cohort indeed. So these ‘demands’ for redistribution must be, logically, few in number.

Then he continues…

A frequent refrain of journalism in the past two years has been that Ireland “surrendered to materialism” in the Tiger years, lost the “run” of herself and became obsessed with getting rich.

I’d have thought the leading exponent of that school was Breda O’Brien, on the very page he writes on. And she is hardly of the left. Indeed, this ‘materialism’ trope has, should he care to look at the back issues of the Irish Times mostly been expressed by… hmmm… him! And not in the last two years but across a career on those pages.

Which makes his next statement even more curious…

But even a cursory inventory of the average newspaper of recent times renders it difficult to avoid the conclusion that obsession with money has actually grown since the economy collapsed. About 60 per cent of news stories and perhaps 80 per cent of opinion columns these days are about banks, bankers, growth, deflation, budgets, taxation or some other money-related topic. The overall content might be summarised as betraying an obsession with other people’s money, which perfectly defines our present disposition.

Or it might be that an economic collapse is – and I am hesitant about putting forward such a blindingly fecking obvious theory – all about matters financial and monetary, that that would entail quite a reasonable obsession with, not ‘other peoples’ money, but our own. And that Waters betrays an absolute detachment from reality in his inability to understand that this isn’t some abstract concept but is a very real impact, that perhaps he on his middle-raking income has some security from, on ordinary peoples jobs, wages and lives.

Oh yeah, and by the by a little evidence that it’s 60% of news stories and 80% of news columns would be of some use.

The chief symptoms of our collective response to the meltdown of 2008 have been rage, guilt, envy and occasional demands for retribution and redistribution, all of which are readily traceable to the sentiments and attitudes of the journalistic profession. Once again, we seem to be moving towards lengthy public inquiries – arising mainly from the demands of journalists – which promise to swell further the bank balances of lawyers and PR consultants, thereby ensuring that journalists become even more disgruntled.

This is just bizarre. It really is. So ‘our’ response, to the near collapse of the economy are all due to the meeja. If it weren’t so reductionist, and solipsistic reduction at that, it would be laughable. Actually, no, it is laughable. That he think inquiries are simply down to the ‘demands’ of journalists is equally laughable. His sense of the demos is clearly askew.

And this affects in a profound way the national response to present economic circumstances. For one thing, all this niggling and lamentation tends to make people unhappy, guilty, fearful and annoyed, so that the continuing obsession with the forensics of prosperity is now threatening to affect our chances of recovery, which, as any first-year economics student knows, will depend on the nurturing of optimism and confidence.

His logic being if only people didn’t complain they would be happy. Is there a more reactionary prescription? And optimism and confidence, and recovery, depend on ensuring that within obvious constraints that these circumstances never happen again. But, look here at yet more reaction evident in his thinking.

Moreover, the present discussion has created the impression that the problems have all been to do with greed and rogue bankers, when really the core problem relates to the engorgement of the State over recent decades. This is not merely an economic problem, but also a social, psychological and existential one, causing enormously increased pressures on citizens who are required to keep the monster alive. This situation was brought about largely at the insistence of some of the very commentators now leading the clamour for heads on spikes.

Is he entirely serious? The ‘engorgement’ of the State is the problem? That is why the ECB treads carefully around the monies being poured into NAMA asserting that they’re essentially off the books, monies whose volume is such that it dwarfs our annual deficit? He doesn’t bother to explain what he means, but even during the boom, and the figures bear this out, this state continued its business with a smaller than average civil and public service and public services than the EU norm. So we must conclude he either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, hence his tilt towards ‘social psychological and existential one’ which means near nothing, and his reference to ‘enormously increased pressures on citizens who are required to keep the monster alive’ which is risible in the overtly and expressly ‘low tax model’ economy that we have and have had and that the Commission on Taxation took as its starting point.

And who are these commentators? Well he doesn’t bother to say. Explanations being so… unnecessary when one is talking complete nonsense.

Perhaps, then, it is time to consider the extent to which our collective response to the collapse of the economy has been defined by attitudes that are neither representative nor productive, but arise mainly from the prejudices of the messengers.
In as far as you can sum up the “national” response to this crisis, you would have to conclude that, by and large, it corresponds to the outlook of the journalistic profession. It is hard to imagine that – if journalists were better paid, or if the national conversation were led instead by, say, priests – the current rage-and-blame phase would have lasted as long as it has.

His apparent inability to accept that people can arrive at opinions about matters without mediation by journalists or politicians and that these opinions can diverge quite strikingly from his own thoughts is now palpable. Or, to put it another way, he just doesn’t seem to get that other people have beliefs and thoughts of their own and aren’t just empty vessels or actors who must dance to his, or anyone else’s tune. That they can look at their own circumstances and see how they have been impacted upon negatively and draw their own conclusions and draw up their own ‘demands’.
This is a smug, complacent and self-centred article given the actual pain and fear of those who have lost jobs, seen wages cut, found it impossible to meet mortgage repayments, had repossessions of their property, seen community programmes cut, seen health and education provision cut, seen semi-state agencies such as the Council on Bioethics abolished, seen the state move towards protecting the financial sector while seemingly indifferent to the plight of ordinary people…
Abysmal.