Moaning Is Halfway To A Solution

national | arts and media | feature Wednesday January 25, 2006 20:02 by Barstool Philosopher

Chomsky, Southside Prats, Primetime And The Irish Times.

Sometime recently, at least in my perception, it has apparently become unacceptable to criticize something without having an fully explored alternative, and even then your alternative must exist within the exact same framework as the object of criticsm, and perferably be as close to it so as to make no difference.

What am I talking about you may ask? Well two recent miniscule media related events have stuck in my mind, perhaps for no other reason than my cantankerous grumpy nature fixating upon them, but nonetheless I feel it’s a mildly important issue which while it may be nothing new, certainly bears a hearing.

The first issue to get my goat was one of the posters which formed part of the recent idiotic advertising campaign by the Irish Times. You may have seen the campaign’s scrawlings around Dublin festooning our walls with its inane message of “We look at life, you live it”, which is funny given that the last time I read the Times it seemed more apparent that they were looking up their own arses rather than at my life. Well one such poster caught my eye one morning on my way to work, It protrays activism as seen through the eyes of the media with a poster being held high saying “Replace capitalism with something nicer” followed below by the Irish Times witty reply “Any suggestions?”. Now I must admit I chuckled momentarily before getting pissed off at yet another portrayal of activists as moaners with no practical solution and therefore worthy of derision.

Now you see I like moaning, and think if everyone moaned when they should we might actually know whats going on. No instead we’re supposed to shut up until we have an alternative. This is patently riduclous, as its through the act of others moaning and grumping about things that we become aware of the problems of our fellow man, that we raise issues and ultimately get more heads than just our own thinking about a solution. Moaning should begin before you have a solution not after. Now of course the irony here is that the obscured activist in the poster probably does have a solution in mind, but as per usual the media entity in question couldn’t be arsed asking them, as a few pics of scruffy people and a suitably derisable byline serves their needs a lot better.

This of course brings me on to my second point, which is that even when you do profer a solution it will not even be heard, nevermind considered, it if takes too much imagination on the part of the listener to see how it could be feasible, or departs to quickly from their cosy little world of whats supposedly practical and what isn’t. What brought this thought to my mind was the recent visit by Chomsky to our miserable little land of gombeen men and war criminals, his subsequent interview on primetime and some annoyingly vacuous comments by a bloke at work on the subject of his visit.

Now you see the bloke at work tells me he has tickets “to the amnesty gig with chommers” who he “just adores loike” and has read lots of chomsky’s books (well the small pamphlet ones at least, he later clarified) and goes on to say in his irritating D4 accent that “whoile loike I agree with him about the whole Iraq thing, he never has an actual alternative you know loike”. At this point as you can imagine I began to stew slowly, bubbling and trying to contain myself from boiling over and strangling the “point of ‘ken” drinker in case his brain damage was contagious. After lowering the heat I tried to explain to him using single syllable words that for one thing Chomsky does offer solutions when pressed and has written and spoken loads on a very simple solution, or way forward at least, which is the process of challenging and dismantling unnecessary power structures, and of opposing systems of domination and oppression. This process I explained is more commonly referred to, even by Chomsky himself as a central defining component of Anarchism. I then went on to explain that while it mightn’t fit in his tiny brain the reason Chomsky, his supposed idol, doesn’t waste his time positing lots of little trivial solutions that just move the pieces around is that his many analyses, which this rugby playing former student of St Fuckwits southside college for young Trustafarians has supposedly read, has lead him to the conclusion, along with many others, thats whats wrong with the world requires something more than reducing the number of troops in Iraq from 100 to 99 or taking actions based on the continually recurring media led frenzy to “do something” about the latest situation that has been whipped up from nowhere and suddenly requires urgent attention. Instead I explained that Chomsky, like all people with at least a modicum of intelligence, has no fear of placing his solutions outside the context of whats normally deemed acceptable or tenable or pragmatic if that’s what basic human decency and morality require.

I told him that the fact that doe-eyed liberally-blinkered spoons like himself and the celebrity-coattail hangers-on that are his ilk, many of whom attended the Chomsky talks, can’t see or accept these solutions is not a sign that Chomsky’s never offered them. Rather it is a sign of his own bias towards the bankrupted values of the society in which he lives and his own subconsious inability to accept anything which would force him to consider that the way they he lives may need to change beyond throwing a few extras euro’s in the amnesty tin.

Needless to say this didn’t go down well with amnesty boy and he said “loike no way is chommers an Anarchist, I mean loike he’s against voilence ‘an all”. I was stunned for a moment by the sudden IQ-lowering vortex that had its epicentre in his presence, but fighting the waves of intellectual entropy I manged to give him a quick “left-wing political currents 101” and informed him that not only was “chommers” an anarchist but that he was taking time out of his schedule to drop in and practically have tea with some of the local anarchist groups while he was here, as he does most places he goes, which is surely a vague indication of where he stands politically and in terms of a “solution”.

But my efforts were apparently useless as he mananged to discount my cogent arguments with a flick of his quiff, and went off to pretend it hadn’t happened so he could enjoy the Chomsky talk in smug self satisfaction of being with the in-crowd while wallowing in his own joy at being politically astute enough to quote Chomsky and compassionate enough to be in amnesty, yet not have to do a fuckin’ thing that would inconvenience his gorgeous little life.

So thinking I’d got that all that over with, I sat down the next day to watch prime time to see what spin our beloved state sponsored media was weaving today, only to be confronted with Chomsky being harangued again, because “some of his detractors say he offers no solutions” as if even if that was true, it was now a crime. I mean when did criticism and analysis in its own right and as an end in it self become wrong.

Problems and their solutions don’t come packaged together, one grows from the other. The same people don’t have to be the realizers of both, and the strength or value of your criticism is not dependent on your ability to also have have quick snappy alternatives that don’t go against the grain. Strangely enough I think moaning first and then having a bit of analysis second and then finally taking the path of least harm is far superior to making hasty quick decisions to take action and then letting the chips fall where they may all over the bodies of dead people.

And with that thought, I turned off the television and went to bed, glad that I’m getting old enough to be a grumpy old bugger and, and with a conviction to moan loudly for as long as I can about everything I know is wrong in the world, without fear of not having trite consumable solutions at hand, but having the moral clarity to know that stepping back and looking for solutions in a broader context before taking action is the only way forward.