CULTURE SHOCK:DUSTIN'S VICTORY is a narrow-minded, two-fingered salute to the people who enjoy Eurovision, writes Fintan O'Toole.
One of the more telling Irish TV chat show moments of recent years (the competition, admittedly, is not hot) came on Miriam O'Callaghan's programme in the summer of 2006. Among her guests were Germaine Greer and Daniel O'Donnell.
Greer is among the most influential public intellectuals of the 20th century. O'Donnell, shall we say, is not. It didn't take long for naked antagonism to manifest itself. O'Donnell was talking sweetly about the time he was at the Abba musical Mamma Mia!, and realised he missed the woman he later married because he was thinking "God, Majella would love this". He could see from the monitor that Greer was looking at him with what he took to be a snooty, sneery expression.
He turned sharply towards her and said: "You don't believe romance exists." She replied, like an empress patronising a simple-minded peasant, "I think you can have a romance with people who like Abba - just!"
Daniel's riposte was quietly, coldly brilliant: "And people," he said, "who like a lot more." His point was not just that it's okay to love people who like Abba but that people who like Abba may also like a lot of other things. (They may even like The Female Eunuch.)
The moment was telling because, in that exchange the drippy crooner came across as being far more culturally open-minded than the ex-professor who has written important books on literature, visual art and cultural history. He did not seem to despise anybody for their tastes. She obviously despised him for his.
The exchange crystallised a cultural shift that culminated last weekend with the choice of Dustin the Turkey as the Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.
Even 25 or 30 years ago, it was probably true that among - to use a crude shorthand - Daniel-type people, there was a fierce antagonism towards intellectuals. This was a country in which "smart" was a term of abuse. Now the sneer is on the other side of the nation's face. "Smart" is now a term of approbation, but there is a deep antipathy towards Daniel-type people.
What, after all, is the idea of sending Dustin to the Eurovision all about? It's not about invention - the song is not verbally or musically clever enough for that. It's not about a bright left-field idea - the gesture was performed with infinitely more wit and aplomb with My Lovely Horse in Father Ted. It is simply and solely about spoiling the harmless enjoyment of people who actually like the Eurovision.
In our hip, post-ironic, postmodern culture, it is increasingly unacceptable to be none of the above. It's not that you can't like naff things, but you have to like them in a self-conscious, camp, "guilty pleasures" way.
The hundreds of thousands of people who listen to Country Mix FM, buy Daniel O'Donnell records, and vote in You're a Star commit the unforgivable sin of being un-self-consciously, un-ironically naff. And these, for the most part, are the people who take pleasure in the Eurovision.
For every one person among the 750,000 who watched the show in Ireland last year with a knowing smirk at a camp so-bad-it's-good party, a hundred watched it with mild, but nonetheless real, enjoyment. Most of those people would have knocked a bit of crack out of rooting for Leona Daly or giving out about Liam Geddes in the comtest to choose Ireland's Eurovision entry. But they'll see the Dustin entry for what it is - a two-fingered salute to them, their tastes, and, by and large, their age group. The pleasures of people who enjoy the Eurovision have been invaded by people who don't.
This is as narrow-minded as it is spiteful. You don't have to enjoy Daniel O'Donnell's singing to recognise that he brings contentment, solace, and diversion to a lot of people. If you dislike the Eurovision, you're not obliged to watch it. (I do, so I don't.) And even if you have contempt for such stuff, there's no excuse for having contempt for the people who like it.
In the days when, through censorship, willed ignorance and general hostility, people who didn't like high art imposed their taste on those who did, the culturati were rightly outraged. An element of revenge, in the form of defensive condescension, might have been justified. But now the insistence that everything must be cool and knowing simply repeats the old intolerance in a new form.
A culture that was genuinely smart wouldn't be so uptight about the terminally uncool. It might recognise that when there's Arvo Pärt in Drogheda two weekends ago and a book club festival in Ennis today, serious art is hardly under siege. But the persistent need to sneer at Daniel O'Donnell or make a feck of the Eurovision exposes the anxiety within the clever, clued-in, media-saturated world. RTÉ knew very well that when it put Dustin on the shortlist in a contest that would be won by text voting, the lines would be jammed with 20-somethings leaping at the chance to prove their own distance from the gormless, tasteless past. Even if that meant voting for a pantomime act that is in reality no more ingenious than its rivals.
What are we afraid of? Surely not that in our smooth glide across the shiny surface of postmodern global culture. we might actually be skating on thin ice?