Having been sick for three weeks has left me seriously cranky, I fear. It was nothing life-threatening, and thank you for your concerned e-mails, notes and phone calls. But I am still cranky, writes Breda O'Brien.
What is annoying me? It's election posters. I haven't actually seen the damage the Labour Party has done to two perfectly good sentences, but I suspect it will be enough to cause my inner English teacher to grind her teeth when I do. However, it is the Bertie posters that really get to me.
Bertie beaming with senior citizens. Bertie sharing a laugh with the 20-somethings. (And Labour Party supporters need not write sniffy letters to The Irish Timeswondering how I dare to criticise their punctuation given my own liberal use of sentence fragments and sentences that begin with conjunctions. I may be cranky, but I know what I'm doing.) Why do the Bertie posters bother me so much? It's not just that the pictures are composites, whereby using computer software several images can be combined to make one. (And if they are not composites, they have the dubious distinction of looking as if they are.) Yes, I know that composites are a fact of life in advertising. Every second advertisement for everything from washing powder to banking services uses composites. In my innocence, I thought there might be some difference between a washing powder and a political party.
Yes, I also know that there are practical difficulties involved in using real photos, including the need to get permission from everyone depicted. Surely, at the 974 openings of pubs, newspaper office extensions and henhouses that Bertie has attended this year so far, there must have been someone willing to give written permission to use their image in advertising? Of course, in a country as small as Ireland, even that might be a problem.
The chosen ones might be from Galway, and gleeful neighbours would only be too glad to point out that the people pictured with Bertie had been imbibing cryptosporidium with their morning coffee. Or that the image of the healthy-looking elderly man was actually the son of one of the hit team in Beal na mBlath. Or something.
Alternatively, someone could have hired a photographer to take some posed pictures of Bertie with real people. Not that the people in the photos are not real, you understand. I don't think even FF would stoop to a computer-generated voter, but I mean photos of Bertie with people in the same place as he is.
It's much easier, though, to manufacture images. For all we know, that photo of him smiling beatifically could have been taken after he won a fortune on the tote in Galway.
Anyway, what's with the beaming smile? What passes for a smile with Bertie is a peculiar tight little purse of his lips, part Mona Lisa, part Confucius and part northsider.
Bertie is far too busy to stand around in studios making election posters, so draft in a few models, or search the stock photos, add a bit of digital wizardry, and there you have it - Bertie, the man of the people, Fianna Fáil's greatest weapon. Except you don't. You have Bertie and two senior citizens, one who lives in Yorkshire and the other in Wisconsin, all gazing adoringly at each other.
Okay, so I exaggerate. It is just that these posters are all so bland and so completely vacuous. Sure, they are not on a par with airbrushing out Mao's opponents, or even with the way an image was altered during the 2004 American presidential campaign so that John Kerry appeared to be sharing a platform with Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam rally. A real picture of Kerry, which had him sitting a few rows back from Fonda at another rally was not considered damaging enough.
Perhaps it is that even in my sickbed, the image of Bertie shaking hands with a smiling Ian Paisley was better than a tonic. Of course, you can't put Big Ian on a billboard with Bertie, either. But if you have a party leader who inspires lie-down-and-die loyalty, unfathomable as that fact may be to many, should you not even gesture toward the idea that there might be good reasons for that?
Should there not be better reasons to re-elect Bertie than the fact that lots of people like him? It's the old curse of personality politics. We want people to vote on issues, and they persistently and stubbornly vote for personalities. Never mind that the real 20-somethings represented by their stand-ins in the posters probably work god-awful hours, commute unthinkable distances and drink too much for lack of better to do.
Forget the fact that the senior citizens represented by these proxies are often on waiting lists for essential operations, or living in rural areas where a sense of community is slowly dying. We have the shiny, happy images and that's enough. Or is it?
There are lots of people who went into politics because they had ideas or because they thought they could make things better. Are these images fair to them? Bland advertising campaigns and auction politics just make people more cynical.
A government is always at a disadvantage because the opposition can hammer away at everything from traffic chaos to climate change, while blithely sidestepping any responsibility. Any offers to tackle problems by members of government raise an inevitable question. What were you doing about it until now? There is an alternative.
Instead of ministerial speeches that run to 10 pages extolling all the wonders they have done, why not look the voters in the eye, admit that there is a hell of a lot that has been less than desirable in the last 10 years, but that there will never be a utopia. Then, throw in a few self-deprecating references to real achievements. The shock value alone would be worth the experiment. If you really wanted to become radical, try some vision. Try something a little more adventurous than Bertie is such a nice guy, why don't you vote him in for another five years, because you'd never know what the other shower would get up to. In other words, let us have something real and passionate, and not something pre-packaged, glossy and utterly fake.