John Waters: The Left's New Satirist

national | worker & community struggles and protests | opinion/analysis Wednesday May 03, 2006 00:02 by Annie Shipsea

Sympathy wanted for the plight of the 'wealth-creators'

I’ve reflected hard on John Water’s latest ‘The Chorus’ column for Village (27 May – 3rd May) and concluded, on balance, that the guy has a gift for satire unparalleled in Ireland. ‘Why redistribution can help the wealthy’ (what a hoot!) is a piece that pretends to work its way, via a series of hilariously OTT caricatures and studiedly faux-academic analyses, to Waters’ windingly funny conclusion to his column:

“A radically different vision [of wealth redistribution] may be located behind the pious front of conventional Christianity. In one of his lengthy interviews with the author Peter Seewald, published in 1997 as ‘Salt of the Earth’ the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger used a striking image of the paradox of human prosperity. He referred to the nearby vineyards of Frascati, whose vines bear fruit only if they are pruned once a year. ‘If the courage to prune is lacking’ he said, ‘only leaves still grow’. He was, naturally, speaking about matters much wider than prosperity – about human desire, the quest for happiness, and the pursuit of material security. Because we are ‘built for love’, observed the man who would become pope, the refusal to help others is the very ruination of man, for it is ‘precisely his submitting himself to a claim and allowing himself to be pruned that enables him to mature and bear fruit’. I cannot imagine the Tanaiste saying such a thing, but I have decided it is what she secretly meant.”

A lot of people would have great difficulty imagining the Tanaiste saying such a thing, let alone meaning it, but the thing she did say, according to Waters, is that ‘Ireland has the potential to build on its wealth-creation by being more generous’.

Generous? A lot of averagely/poorly paid people are the key to what hold’s Ireland’s increasingly fragile infrastructure together. These are the truly generous people who underwrite all of what makes it possible for the so-called wealth-creators to make their exclusively personal wealth. There are a lot of very generous people in Ireland, quietly and unquestioningly donating their working lives to helping a very small number of people become disgustingly rich. It is on this point that Waters excels in his satire:

“After a decade of the Celtic Tiger, the economic opposition – politicians, clerics and commentators of the left – still offers an analysis of the economy based on a simple carve-up of the cake, even though this is of diminishing usefulness in an increasingly complex context.’

Whatever was wrong with dividing the cake, anybody? The answer (tongue-in-cheek of course) from Waters is this:

‘[It’s wrong] Partly because our conventional notions about wealth distribution and societal equity have their roots in narrow interpretations of Christianity and, more especially, a particular strain of socialism, our ideas about circulation of resources remain based on a poverty model.’

Perhaps the most insightful part of Waters’ satire, is the point at which he brilliantly sends up the internal quelling of all moral AND social conscience in the minds of the same ‘wealth creators’. He says (tongue well in cheek, I hope):

‘Because crude left-wing rhetoric has become unfashionable, many of their [left-wingers] pronouncements are couched less in the jargon of Marxism, than bizarrely, in the prescriptions of Christianity. They, rather than priests and bishops, remind us of our duty to the poor, of Christ’s injunction to love our neighbour.’

If there is a moment at which the reader might begin to doubt whether Waters is being satirical it must be surely be on reading the following – which I admit is difficult to reconcile with the article as satire:

“The culture arising from such influences is hugely deficient in understanding the true psychology of prosperity or in finding practical ways of appropriating its subterranean sentiments. One of its effects is to conceal the degree to which economic disparities in society are the source, even in wealthy individuals, of guilt, sadness, loneliness and feelings of powerlessness in the face of an unjust world. Concerns about the plight of ‘those less fortunate’ tend to be placed, on average, midway down (or up) the scale of concerns of the average adult – most others tending to be selfish concerns, like financial security or personal popularity. Crude left-wing ideas contribute hugely to the sum of such counter-productive sentiment, offering nothing feasible in the way of solution.”

Now John. The idea that excessive wealth accruing to a small percentage of the population is inherently unfair is neither crude nor left-wing. Do greedy people sometimes feel a little bad about themselves? Is that so terrible? Really? As for offering a solution, that is the one thing the left has never had any difficulty about. What on earth was ever wrong with carving up the cake equitably? The world is no more complex now that it ever has been and we have never wanted for a solution – only the honesty to acknowledge that nobody deserves to prosper at another’s expense.

But Waters is in full flight at this point and I leave it to readers of this last quote from his article to decide whether or not it's ture that he is being satirical:

“Other than through a philanthropy verging on recklessness, there is no way of satisfying the conventional leftist demand for an egalitarian Big Bang and thus quieting the pseudo-leftist accusation as it bears down on the prosperous individual…What this ignores is not so much unselfishness (a moot concept), but the complex ways in which helping others offers a way to feel better. Virtue yields psychic income and this offers a whole new way of seeing the issue of redistribution.”

Click on this link to read the whole, sorry piece itself:

http://www.villagemagazine.ie/article.asp?sid=1&sud=36&...=1674