The Catholic Church And The Lack Of Irony

"On a quiet Sunday I rented a Chevrolet in Beverly Hills and drove around that mysterious city. The [billboard] signs seemed to have escaped form my head. The irony of being trapped inside the media maze I had described in 'The Atrocity Exhibition' wasn't lost on me."
- JG Ballard's annotated "The Atrocity Exhibition"

By Charley Brady

Let me get right into this: I was listening today to a guy who is facing what he said would be the worst Christmas in his memory for himself, his wife and his children.

It's not the first time that I've listened to this from people but because I know him to have always been a hard-working family man it struck me as to how representative he is of guys in their fifties who find that they are now falling behind on their mortgage payments, electricity payments and all of the rest of it.

He has been self employed for the last thirty years and so, according to the sick logic of this country he is seen as one of the better off and has no recall to unemployment payments that may take months to come through, if ever.

He's not the type to break down in front of you but it was with a quiet despair that was tinged with utter hatred of our government that he said: "When I get back onto my feet again I'll try as much as possible to do everything on a cash only basis. I would never, if I can get away with it, pay a cent in tax to these ***** ever again.

Christ, look at the way that they're living and look at the way that we're living. "D'ye think that I'm proud that I can't give my family the Christmas that they deserve? I feel like half a f****** man because of this."

Back in the days when I was a virgin and believed that the world was a decent place that treated you well if you lived by the rules, paid your taxes and tried to be kind to little doe-eyed puppy dogs I would have been annoyed at someone openly saying that he wasn't going to give a damned penny to the government if he could possibly get away with it.

These were the days when I believed that there were lemonade springs and blue birds sang on the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

As I say, I was young and as soon as I was old enough to shave the little bit of fuzz off my pathetic would-be beard I had it copped that the world wasn't such a lovey- dovey place and that most of us lived under the kind of government rat-bags that we would never associate with even under cover of darkness when it was as black as a witch's ass at Midnight in the environs of Hell itself.

I have heard so many sentiments coming from people who are purely hurt in the last month and I doubt that his will be the last.

I think, though, that this is the one that will stick with me, simply because he doesn't damned well deserve it.

I'll come back to this later.

I always try to find humour in something, no matter how hard that can be sometimes, so I give thanks to the Catholic Church for giving me a couple of knee-slappers this week.

Say what you want about the Muslims - and let's be honest, I say plenty about them - but admit it: they don't have a sense of humour so we can lay that one to rest, I hope.

Scientology? Is that even a religion? They crack me up with the idea that we were all invaded by Thetans or some "Star Trek" sounding thing in the distant past and that now we have to "clear" ourselves. Good on them. Makes as much sense as a dude walking on water.

But Herr Pope Benedict and his cronies: now there are a bunch of guys who have no sense of irony at all and yet unconsciously continue to be a barrel of laughs.

Last week Bennie pontificated (get it? No, just my bad sense of humour I guess) about how he was really awfully concerned about poverty: "Opulence and waste are no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming even greater proportions."

OPULENCE? Did he really come out with that drivel?

Try selling a couple of your very expensive frocks, Pontiff - hey, put them up on ebay, you'll make a mint.

OPULENCE? This from the richest city-state in the world?

Try selling some of your useless works of art - well, you can't eat them, can you - dating back to the Middle Ages and far before that. You'll make enough to feed Africa. They're just things, aren't they? Or are they worth more than people's lives to you lot?

I guess so.

To be honest, when I first heard about this irony-free posturing I thought that I was listening to either Bono or Geldof. As it turned out, no such luck.

I don't think that either of them can speak German, although who knows since Bono can do anything and "celebrated" the fall of the Berlin Wall by building another wall around him.

I believe it was two foot tall just in case anyone could see Him behind it.

Irony free zone number two: The Vatican is just a little annoyed at the success of the "Twilight " series of books.

I don't know much about them except that they apparently are centred on the love that a mortal woman has for a good-looking vampire bloke and vice versa.

I rang my mate Damien Foley in Dublin to see if he could shed any light on this and he tells me that not only does his daughter Cassandra have every book on her shelf but that she was in the queue to see the first showing of "New Moon", the second film to be based on the series.

Now here's my question: why does a religion that is based on a daily ceremony where a man in a frock drinks wine that has been miraculously turned into the literal blood of his saviour feel that it is bad for people to read about vampires?

Afterwards, the same guy hands out pieces of unleavened bread to believers who - through the mystery of transubstantiation - believe that they are eating the flesh of the Christ. Literally eating their own God!

Am I missing something here? You are telling teenagers that they are on the slippery slope to Eternal Damnation while at the same time you yourselves are indulging in ritual vampirism and ritual cannibalism.

You really do write the rules out as you go along, don't you?

There are two things that I have always found hilarious. One is any kind of religious nonsense and the other is the hippy-dippy way of thinking that surfaced in the sixties.

Cat Stevens played in Ireland this week.

Now I was a kid at the time but even then I found something deeply suspect about a bunch of phoneys yakking on about peace and love; never practising it, of course and braying about how we should wear flowers in our hair while grooving around San Francisco.

I recall hearing my mother talking in those hushed tones that are supposed to keep the young ones from hearing but in reality only make a kid's ears sprout out like antennae. She was talking to Mrs. Beatty, our next-door neighbour about the Charles Manson killings in 1969.

Even then I knew that this was the end of the Summer of Love rubbish. It was confirmed when I read a couple of years later about the amount of unborn foetuses found dumped in Haight-Ashbury.

I was young, thick and stupid, but not that young, thick and stupid that I would believe in a world where peace and love prevailed.

It wasn't until I heard Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground that I realised that there were guys out there actually singing the songs of the street.

But back to Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens: I hope that the above will tell you that I'm not exactly a peace, love and whatever hippy rubbish you're having yourself kind of person, but please let me tell you that this was and is a fella that I could listen to all night.

I just love his songs like "Moonshadow", "Morning Has Broken" or "Father and Son".

If that makes me a corny old git then so be it. I'm not apologising.

He did not deserve the Irish welcome he got this week.

He sang what everybody agreed was a great set of his early songs to kick off, but then he made the horrible mistake (in Ireland) of including a thirty-minute mini-musical based around his early work in the middle of the concert before returning himself.

At this point of course he got an Irish welcome from the ageing hippy, middle class jackasses who wanted to stay in their time warp. I think that my favourite shout from the minority of drunken clowns was: "Play 'Peace Train', you f****** bastard."

There was a lot of love in the room that night.

Peace and love, my unreconstructed ass. I always knew that the vegetarian, sandal-wearing dipsticks talked the talk but were boiling with inner resentment.

Jeez, he's going to play new stuff? That's out of order!

To the Artist Formerly Known As Cat Stevens all I can offer is an apology and ask you to remember that these dopes were a minority that shouldn't even have been let out of the Ward for a minute, even under supervision.

I suppose it's just as well that he didn't sing his set after the Ireland- France game. With the amount of loop-the-loops that went crazy after that I doubt that he would have survived without being tarred and feathered.

Maybe the dinosaurs could turn their anger to other things... oh, let's just say for the sake of argument our new report on child abuse by priests in the Dublin Archdiocese.

It's already been delayed and many parts of it are being heavily censored. You know, for legal reasons. Those good old legal reasons.

I'll be back to this next week but in the meantime I am beyond anger with these creatures. One priest has actually admitted to using a crucifix to sexually abuse a young girl, another to assaulting a child while she was making her confession. There's more, so much more, but in the meantime there are calls, which I would heartily go along with, for the Cardinal Desmond Connell to be removed.

And he's only one of four that we now know of who covered up for paedophiles.

I'm sorry that I'm finding this too late for this week's column and, truth to tell, more than a little numb at reading some of the details. Journalists may be considered little better than the scum of the earth at times but we have hearts too.

As to my angry friend who opened this column, I thought that I would save what sent him off until the last paragraph. Yet it seems so insignificant to me now.

It was I suppose the straw that broke the back but it was with Mary "Cut-Backs " Harney and her one-day trip to our masters in Brussels where she could have had a local driver but of course that wasn't good enough. So instead she had a car driven to meet her at a cost of over €1,000 to John and Jane Q. Sucker.

She's reprehensible and I can understand why my friend feels that he will never again pay a penny in tax.

To be honest, though, after trawling through the leaked Commission documents - and let's face it, we probably wont get them by waiting on our corrupt Church who are to busy worrying about fictional vampires to deal with real life rapists - I just can't even take that greedy woman too seriously.

But I do hope to see you all again next week. I am forever appreciative of those of you who take the time to email and whether you like me or not doesn't matter. I promise you this: I will always, as much as is humanly possible, write the truth as I see it.

I hope that whatever God you believe in looks out for you.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net