Ireland - or rather the Irish state -
has almost magically created an elite so financially and
existentially comfortable that the rest of us might as well be living
in another country, even if we share the physical island. It would
behove this elite simply to keep its mouth shut; we don't want the
peasants revolting! Instead, they continue hectoring about
“monetizing the culture”, 'innovation' and so on while not
allowing the rest of us any access to the resources in media and
indeed state-supported universities that they so jealously guard.
“Monetizing the culture” is
precisely what artists do; given the theft of their property through
mechanisms like IMRO, they do so at risks that re far greater than
anything in other comparable European cultures. What “monetizing
the culture” in fact meant was a request for the state to provide
infrastructure, both physical and moral, so that already extremely
wealthy individuals could accelerate their stealing from the rest of
us, this time through the arts.
There is no “we” of equals in
Ireland any more; yet there is a diabolical tendency for the elite to
demand further unpaid effort from the serfs. A quintessential example
is O'Toole's recent jeremiad against theater from his well-paid
sinecure at the mysteriously-owned Irish times/Pravda;
At a guess, this was a “kick the dog'
response to his being outed as clueless at the meeting he himself
refers to toward the start of the article. In any case, one of the
targets of O'Toole's critique replied furiously;
As it happens, we are about to debate
the issue at UC Berkeley;
However, that is not the point of this
post. Since O'Toole has opened the door by attacking some producers
in society in the name of “we”, effectively accusing them of
wasting taxpayers' money, is it not time to ask whether we need
O'Toole himself? Or the universities, and their spin-offs like SFI,
given their reluctance to open themselves to accountability in any
sense? Since the web afford the opportunity to dispense with perhaps
15k public “servants” in tertiary education and at least ten
times that overall, why don't “we” just do it?
