Hello again,
And happy belated St Paddy’s. Every Irish pub in London was too busy on Friday, and full of English people or those with a Cork granny and a plummy home counties accent (English people). I’m starting to think it’s become too trendy to be Irish or identify with Irishness since Brexit happened and the news of our anti-imperialist history spread to those millennials who used to regard us mostly as bumpkins who need to be spoken to incredibly loudly and slowly.
Still, I haven’t been asked if they use euros in Belfast for a while and that used to happen almost weekly. So there’s ups and downs to our secret getting out. I remember last year, on the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, I saw an English girly at a party and she announced that we didn’t get on because she has a Southern Irish granny and I’m from the North. As in, she seemed to think the history of Ireland was a sort of war between the North and the South.
I was stunned, almost into silence. Almost, but I did compose myself enough to tell her that was one of the thickest things I’d ever heard in my life. I didn’t spell out that this kind of bizarre, blithe ignorance would be why we don’t get on. But I think it was implied from the context. Maybe she went and read a Wikipedia page on the Troubles the next day, who knows.
My sense is she probably didn’t and instead retold the story saying I was scary, really mean, and the like. And that she was only making a joke and so on. I know how these types of interactions will be reframed when I participate in them in a forthright way. And that, in some ways, the easier course of action would be to laugh politely and let it go. But I also know it’s undignified for me to engage with this kind of thing on terms I don’t agree with, to essentially pander to people like this. And I simply can’t bring myself to do it; spinelessness is a quality I truly detest. Pride is a sin and all that, but you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day. I’m from Belfast but at heart I’m a Derry woman, like my mum and my grandma.
There’s a bigger thing here though that I’m interested in, which is to do with the way mainstream progressive/liberal politics function among people in their 20s and 30s currently.
There are certain topics which it is generally understood you have to be well versed in, and hold a certain position on. Because to not do so would be problematic. But there is often an inconsistency of approach, in which I detect an absence of an underlying framework through which these topics are understood (and, really, an absence of genuine understanding). I’ve written about this before as it applies to influencers. But it’s not only them.
Something will appear on an infographic (say that “Marsha P Johnson threw the first brick at stonewall”) and a certain kind of person understands that they must know and retain this surface level fact and perhaps use it to school others. (Jason Okundaye expanded on this idea here.) But there is no incentive for this person to try to relate this information into a wider schema of politics or ideals, or to draw parallels between this event and, say, other protest movements (or even to find out if it’s true).
The problem with this chaotic, tick-box way of relating to social and political issues is, I think, that we can be fooled into thinking we live in more progressive times than we really do. And I don’t mean this in terms of the issues which it is arbitrarily deemed fine, or even a point of pride, to be ignorant or backwards on. Or not only in terms of these at least. What I really mean is that this manner of carrying on makes me uneasy because I doubt the sincerity of any of it; inconsistency always reads as insincerity to me.
Slogans travel well and their uptake is easy to police, in a superficial way. But slogans and mantras can become popular without really spreading or advancing the ideas which underpin them. (I would, for instance, be interested to know what every millennial who says they want socialism thinks about the idea of a 100% inheritance tax.)
I suppose it comes down to the question of: If you only think something because you have a vague sense you’ll get in trouble for not thinking it, is that a conviction you genuinely hold? I don’t believe so.
Till next time xxxxx
I had a piece on The Guardian this week about the expected rivalry between me and another Belfast debut novelist.
And here are some pre-order links for Lazy City if you are minded to order, for the UK and the US. Pre-orders tell shops that people are interested in and excited about the book which helps the book a lot.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
I loved this on “The Happiness-Industrial Complex” by Justin E. H. Smith in Liberties. It’s very interesting but I also just loved the feeling and energy of his writing.
And this new story by Mary Gaitskill. Obviously!!
"(I would, for instance, be interested to know what every millennial who says they want socialism thinks about the idea of a 100% inheritance tax.)"
ahahahaha this made me nearly spit out my champagne!
loved this.