Coalition of the Willing... !!!

 

The more I listen to and see news reports broadcast on multi-media platforms these days, the more often than not a certain phrase or even theory surfaces in my mind and which I typically formulate into a rhetorical question that I pose to myself, which is; could not the war in Ukraine be described as a ‘Woke’ War, or if you prefer a war which was brought about, in part, due to ‘Woke’ ideas?

What exactly do I mean by this? I hear you ask, perhaps intrigued, a little, and certainly perplexed!

I should frame all of this, by the way, with the image of the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, in my mind, as his bespectacled face is plastered all over the front pages of both the mainstream British and Irish media, yet again.

I must say, before I continue any further, have you ever seen a more ‘Woke’ looking Prime Minister in your life, other than Keir Starmer? I suppose, I am referring  to the constant pose of self-righteous indignation that Mr Starmer is constantly adopting in the chambers of the House of Commons, or when he is standing behind rostrums, what a century for rostrums!, as he faces down the world’s press…!

And to be honest with you. I am done. I have had enough of it, I tell you. “The Coalition of the Willing”. Where have I heard this expression before? Oh yes, I remember, once again it was New Labour, in the guise of poodle, once again, to Geroge Bush’s response to the tragedy that was the ‘Twin Towers’ debacle which launched this disaster of a twenty first century back on the 11^th, September, 2001.

Do you remember where you were, exactly? I certainly do, working on a split shift in the bar of a hotel on Baggott Street in Dublin, playing Randy Newman’s Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America while I watched the fallout of the event on the television screen in the lounge with the office workers who had staggered into the bar in an attempt at trying to comprehend what was happening; a lot of whom would have had family members, cousins, friends working in New York at the time, and who knows, even in the Twin Towers themselves…!

We were all moved, it was unforgettable what had happened. This was our JFK moment. I still remembered where I was when Elvis had died. You see, we all grew up with America, the USA. As they, the United States of America, were in fact…us. That is what the US actually meant to people worldwide. Us. Russians, Italians, Irish, Jews, Muslims…we were all concerned at what was taking place as we all felt a little part of us had died that day. There was the translation of a poem by Saadi Youssef and that was published in The Guardian newspaper, back then when it was still an actually newspaper as opposed to some propaganda rag bought off and paid for by the status quo, that summoned up everything that we felt; this now was when the atrocious government of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Tweddle  Dumb and Tweedle dee of the Neo-Con global wrecking corporation.

I hated that pair as much as I detest Keir Starmer today, for it is the same eternal BS. The Coalition of the Willing, this is the exact same horse shit phrase that Tony Blair and George W. Bush used to justify their abominable war against Iraq, and which was built on a lie, and which is the single most cause, I would say, of the total fundamental mistrust of the entire world in regards to the credibility of the west. Everyone knew it was bullshit then, and so….

Here we are again! Another Labour mug, this time bespectacled; he has been described as the most hated British prime minister in his own lifetime, and he hasn’t even served a full year!

And why is that? Why do you think that Keir Starmer is the most hated British Prime Minister ever, in his own lifetime?

The mendacity of the man. The MOTM. He so believes his own lies…This is the full horror. I mean, say what you like about Bush and Blair, and the other pair, but I think the one thing that separates them all from Starmer is that, at least speaking for the Americans, whatever about Blair, they didn’t really believe their own lies. They were arrogant, conceited even, and awfully so. God how I hated them at the time… Kissinger’s boys. It was his phrase they were using after all. They lived and breathed Kissinger.

But this Starmer fella, he’s from a totally different school. Jesus, what a shmuck!...    

  

Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America

 

How It Has Been and Continues to Be With How It Is/ Comment C’est by Samuel Beckett, A Novelist’s Perspective

How It Has Been and Continues to Be

With How It Is/ Comment C’est

by Samuel Beckett,

A Novelist’s Perspective

 Peter O’Neill

 

I will always remember reading the opening two paragraphs of Comment c’est / How It Is for the very first time, I had had an old Éditions de Minuit version which I had brought back with me from Paris where I had been living from 1989 to 1995. That first year in Paris, just before he died that Christmas, I remember travelling on the public transport systems, particularly when travelling through the inner city, quite terrified that I would ever meet the almost mythic writer. I hadn’t even really attempted to read the book back then as I was still struggling to read Molloy and I knew that Comment C’est was a work that was way beyond me, so I had put it aside for the day when I would be ready. Little did I realise that it wouldn’t be until 2012, when I was doing my Masters in Comparative Literature under the guidance of Brigitte Le Juez[1], that I would actually pick up the book again. That is a period of 23 years! I would then spend the next several years studying the text, I eventually presented two articles that I had written about it, the first in 2018, in Paris[2], and the second in 2019 in my hometown of Cork. I had been invited to present a third text at Reading University, at the Centre of Beckett Studies, but Covid put a stop to all of that and by the time I was  invited to participate online, the following year in 2021, I had moved onto another major influence, Charles Baudelaire.[3]

As you can see, my engagement with French literature, or let me rephrase that, Franco-Irish Literature has been lifelong and it has taken me to places and people that I would never have been given the opportunity to meet if I had not first started reading Molloy back in The Phoenix pub on the quays in Cork City, sometime back in the late eighties when Judy Hegarty Lovett and Conor, who later went onto form Gare Saint Lazre Players Ireland [4]  were, no doubt, also busy engaging with the works of Samuel Beckett. I should probably say something about Cork, the city where both Judy, Conor and I all grew up, back then, and how it was in the late eighties.

Firstly, pre-1989, the world was a very different universe, back then. The former Soviet Union was, of course, still in place and the Cold War was just about coming to an end. Allof this is very important to appreciate and understand. Think of the play Catastrophe ( 1982)which was dedicated to the Czech playwright Václav Havel and who was actually imprisoned by the communist regime that was working hand in glove with the Soviets who had taken over the country in the summer of 1968, after the so called Prague Spring protests which had been ongoing. Havel, a political dissident, had written a number of plays critical of the political situation in the country and had become even more politically active, which led to his imprisonment. So, the fact that Beckett was to write an entire play, Catastrophe, which treats the whole theme of censorship, and which was dedicated to Havel just goes to show how politically motivated Beckett was as a writer. But, when one considers his involvement with the French Resistance during the occupation of France, in WW2, and his subsequent flight to Roussillon ( 1942) with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, his life-partner, and where he remained until the end of the war, one can hardly be too surprised at the political aspect of his writing[5].     

 Cork, at the time, was a very poor place having been hit very hard by recession and Unemployment, something about the dark and shabby world that Beckett’s prose and plays evoked easily resonated with us back then. Of course, we all had to emigrate as there was nothing but despair for us in the Republic of Ireland back in the nineteen eighties, and this too, emigration, is a common theme of the early Beckett, think of his novel Murphy ( 1938) which portrays a typical Irish bohemian living in exile in the UK, surrounded by fellow migrants who, like him, are trying to eke out and existence. 

To be continued..  

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[1] Le Juez, Brigitte: Beckett avant la lettre, Chez Grasset, 2007.

I bought a copy of this work when it first came out in 2007, I had just graduated ( I majored in philosophy as an Oscail student where I encountered the philosopher, Cyril McDonnell, author of Heidegger’s Way Through Phenomenology to the Question of the Meaning of Being: A Study of Heidegger’s Philosophical Path of Thinking from 1909 to 1927, Verlag Köenigshausen-Neumann, 2015.) and on reading Brigitte Le Juez’ s work I made the decision to do my MA with her eventually in 2011-12 in Dublin City University, it was a part time course and I eventually graduated in 2013. I delivered my first presentation on Beckett on the 3^rd August, 2013, in University College Dublin, Joyce’s old university and this experience formed the basis for my first novella, More Micks than Dicks, 2017.

https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/Beckett%203%20programme.pdf

https://www.amazon.in/More-Micks-Than-Dicks-Beckettian/dp/0955685796

 

[2] https://garestlazareireland.com/how-it-is-symposium-paris

 

 

[3] I was invited by the Alliance Francaise in Dublin to organise and host the bicentenary celebrations for the birth of Charles Baudelaire.

http://web.alliance-francaise.ie/newsletter/april21.htm

 

[4] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50fe596ee4b0499abb0986a9/t/5ef32fd88dc5576f4ffff7c2/1592995801206/Symposium+Review%3A+How+It+Is+by+Samuel+Beckett+Symposium+2019+%E2%80%93+The+Beckett+Circle.pdf

 

[5] There have been many essays and books written about Beckett’s political outlooks and engagement, Hugh Kenner’s very eloquent and insightful interpretation of Waiting for Godot, in which he grounds the so called-abstraction of the events taking place to the very empirical reality of life under the Gestapo in occupied France in which Beckett experienced at first hand, is one of the most revelatory, in my opinion.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH92D2EwvZA