Go, in the name of God, go!
Should I Stay or Should I Go? (All Channels)
ON the face of it, the job is just too big. When you consider all the ways in which the political class and those who report on it have connected in this dance of mutual self-destruction, it is hard to imagine a way out of it.
And it may be too late anyway, because all across the western world the people have rightly perceived that this is not just a “self-serving elite”, it is not even a very good self-serving elite.
No, it is a poor elite, one which has functioned for generations on about five cliches, on trivia masquerading as profundity, on the endless celebration of mediocrity.
But for those of us who have heroically resisted these tendencies, it would not be right to just give up and merely to watch the conflagration of which we warned. It is not enough simply to declare that Trump is what happens when the system bores itself to death.
Because there is one thing that can be done — it is not much of a thing, but it is something, and anyway if it can’t be done, we may forget about the rest.
On Claire Byrne Live last week, to accompany a series of images culled from the life and times of Enda Kenny, they played Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, by The Clash. They always play Should I Stay Or
Should I Go? — whenever any man or woman has some kind of political decision to make as to whether they should, as it were, “stay”, or “go”, they play that one. And they don’t just play it on Claire Byrne Live, or on RTE in general. They play it on the BBC, and on ITV, and on Channel 4.
They don’t just play it on TV programmes, they play it on the radio programmes. They play it, and they play it, and they play it.
And I’m wondering how this works… I’m wondering if there is ever a moment when a researcher or a director or a presenter or whoever runs that game, just pauses and says: “You know what? We’ll play something else this time.”
Assuming that there is not a law against it, that this convention has not hardened into actual legislation, perhaps it is conceivable that at some point in the next hundred years, some singular soul will be putting together a “package” along these lines, and at the moment when The Clash is routinely inserted, he or she will say: “No”.
I mean, I would empathise to some extent, if this particular piece of music was one of only four pieces of music that exist in the whole world, that they were working with slim resources here. But there’s a lot of music in the world. Ah, there’s an awful lot of it.
And we are leaving aside completely the fact that when The Clash wrote that song, they intended it to evoke the anxiety of a person who may or not be about to experience a night of magnificent sex. At no point did the image of Enda Kenny or of the Fine Gael party as a whole, or of any member of any parliament enter the equation.
But let’s be realistic here, let’s not shoot for the moon. We have seen the worst police scandal in the history of Ireland, transformed into the comforting banalities of a Fine Gael leadership contest. But we wouldn’t really expect much more than that anyway, given all that we know.
So let us ask for just this one thing, and nothing else. Let us imagine that in a television editing suite or just kicking around a few notions in the canteen, a voice emerges to say something like this: “my friends, I am going to make a suggestion now, which touches on the very foundations of what we do. I am proposing that we do the piece about whether the politician should stay or go, but that we don’t use Should I Stay Or Should I Go?”
Ah, I know it’s not easy. I mean what is being proposed here, is not just that they stop doing one thing, but that they start doing something else.
And why would they do that, when everything is going so well? WATCH BACK Visit the RTE Player at rte.ie/player