Got to admit it's getting better

My first thought when I saw the Sunday Independent (February 1) slagging off Bono as a “sacred cow” suitable for culling was that they’d invaded my territory. Haven’t I been shouting this for yonks? If Bono’s to be culled, am I not entitled to the ears and tail?
But then another thought struck. Anybody targeted by the Indo must have good in them.
I looked again at the cover picture. It showed up Bono’s grey roots. Positively endearing.
Didn’t Bono used to have a young woman to look after that sort of thing, tell him to put on a cowboy hat or something? They should bring her back.
Plus, the new single, ‘Get On Your Boots’, is quite good, in a U2ish sort of way.
The Indo piece alerted me to the fact that Bono has become an occasional columnist in The New York Times. In the first of his offerings he fashioned a couple of good phrases – Sinatra’s “knotted fist of a voice”.
On the downside, he goes on to vary his appreciation: “In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn – such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.”
The cut-backs gone so deep the Times can’t effort copy editors?
Still, I’ve read columns of even more jumbled-up clauses and magimixed metaphor. In the Sunday Independent, usually.
Perhaps things are beginning to get better for Bono. With Bush’n’Blair gone, there are fewer war criminals and pathological liars around to lure him into their ambience and poison his innocence. And Sir Geldof of Southside seems to have slunk out of sight. Always a bad influence, that Geldof.
There you go. Anybody being mugged by the O’Reilly Gang can count on me to weigh in on their side.

They have learned nothing. That’s been the angry cry of dozens of commentators at the refusal of the Catholic bishops to press their Cork colleague, John Magee, to resign. He’d been exposed for failing to cooperate with investigations into clerical child sex abuse in his diocese.
True enough, they have learned nothing. The angry commentators, that is.
There never was and still isn’t the slightest possibility of the Catholic Church coming clean about sexual abuse of children by priests. It’s been happening for centuries. Church bosses have always been aware of its extent, and have always covered it up.
To call upon the bishops to take a different approach, to magnify the supposedly progressive role of one bishop – Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, for example – when compared to others, is, deliberately or not, to miss the main point.
The reason the Catholic Church doesn’t cooperate with the civil authorities to dig out the truth is that it regards itself as above the civil law. So far above the civil law as to be out of sight. In its own rheumy eyes, the Church is the embodiment on earth of the Law of God. All its practices and protocols are shaped by this delusion.
Instead of calling endlessly on Church authorities to cooperate, the State should be kicking down the doors of diocesan archives, seizing the records and arresting Church officials who there is reason to believe may have covered up crime. John Magee should have been taken into custody for questioning.
Isn’t that what would happen if it were a trade union or a sporting or cultural organisation which had been shown to have systematically covered up serious crime over a long period, to have hidden perpetrators from the law and to be resolved to persist in the same behaviour?
The fact that this obvious argument isn’t advanced anywhere in the political or media mainstream testifies to the massive social power which, despite everything, is still exercised in Ireland by the Catholic Church.
And the same dodgy galoots remain in control of the schools where the majority of Irish children are educated.

Barack Obama ended his inauguration address with a quote from Tom Paine. But he didn’t mention it was Paine he was quoting.
Obama declared: “At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people. ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’”
The previous passage had made it plain that “the father of our nation” was George Washington. The formulation will have left listeners believing that Washington had himself authored the words he ordered proclaimed to the people.
On Xmas day 1776, the revolutionary forces were encamped on the banks of the Delaware in Pennsylvania, cold, demoralised, wanting to go home. Washington’s last-ditch desperate plan was to cross the raging Delaware by night and launch a surprise assault on the enemy, gathered at Trenton. Paine’s words ringing in their ears, the revolutionaries crossed the river and routed the army of George III. British power in America was broken.
Why did Obama decline to mention Paine, fighter for freedom the world over, inspiration of revolutions in America in 1776, France in 1789, Ireland in 1798?
He must be too dangerous a man to be named even now.
Incentive enough, surely, to go google The Rights of Man, Common Sense, Age of Reason. We have need of him now.