Just who are those masked men?

Every imperialist onslaught in history has been accompanied by cartoons.

The people being targeted must be dehumanised through caricature so as to suggest that they are mad or bad or anyway unworthy of rights appropriate to regular human beings.
The depiction of Africans as blood-crazed savages or of the Irish as simian beings of menacing aspect are cases in point.
The Danish cartoons suggesting that Muslims epitomise terrorist atrocity come into the same category. They are an element of the War on Terror. They are war propaganda. To defend their publication on grounds of free speech is to miss the main point, and to take the wrong side.
Chewing the fat about football in Eddie Mahon’s sporting emporium, the talk turned to Jimmy Johnstone and the curious omission from the mainstream obituaries of one of the clubs he’d turned out for.
Celtic, San Jose Earthquakes, Sheffield United, Dundee, Shels and Elgin City were all mentioned. But no reference to Carfin Emeralds.
The Emeralds date from the golden era of the North West Summer Cups, when every Donegal townland with a sprinkling of get-up-and-go hosted a knock-out football competition for sizable cash prizes. The equivalent of 10 grand at today’s prices to the winner was by no means unusual. Nor was a gate of 5000 at a final.
The basic arrangement was that the players and a mentor or two divvied up the winnings, so it paid anybody who could play a bit to join a team and have a go. Scottish professionals back in ancestral Donegal for the summer were the stars of many a side – invariably under false names, sometimes in disguise, so as not to alert their regular employers to the holiday nixer.
The Emeralds’ possibly unique distinction was that they played in masks. Fans used to stand on the sidelines debating whether the guy who’d just fallen over the ball could really be Ian St. John. But there was never any doubt about Jinky.
So, the complete and accurate list of the genius Jinky’s clubs would read: the Bhoys, the Quakes, the Blades, the Terrors, the Reds, the Marbles and the Emeralds. Glad I could clear that up.
All of which reminds me of the year Kildrum Tigers’ supremo Bobby Toland was devastated to discover in the week before the final of, I think, the Raphoe Cup, that his key player had been summoned for a pre-season European qualifier against Czechoslavakia. Bobby explained to the Derry Journal that Kildrum wouldn’t be able to field a full-strength team on Sunday, "because of the international match in Bratislava." The man with the double booking was Pat Crerand.
My mate Mickey Joe O’Kane proposed that a formal protest be lodged with Fifa about fixture congestion, but, sadly, was overruled by conservative elements on the Tigers’ committee.

Northern Secretary Peter Hain, ever the man for the elegant phrase, warned on March 26th: "We are planning to bridge the gap between the Unionists and the Nationalists and Republicans. But at the end of that bridge, there is a gate. Either that gate will open to devolved government, or it will close to the assembly allowances and pay and salaries will stop."
I’d have thought that at the end of a bridge over the gap between Unionists and Nationalists there’d be Unionists or Nationalists. But what would I know?
Bertie Ahern had no problem deciphering the permatanned proconsul’s code: ‘There can be no further delay, There is no space for further manoeuvre.’
The exchange took me all the way back to November 25th 2004, the never-to-be-forgotten, make-or-break, cut-off point and closing deadline for the Northern parties to agree to share power and set up a government.
I mentioned this to a panel of fellow Experts gathered in Mailey’s for a political natter after the Linfield match. "Takes you back to November 25th, eh?," I sighed. At which, naturally, we all fell misty-eyed into sentimental remembrance of the last last chance.
Some non-Expert readers of Hot Press may be hazy about the tense political drama played out in November ‘04. ‘Bush in late-night call to Adams as power-sharing deadline looms.’ ‘New hope for deal as Paisley hints at movement on IRA.’ ‘Progress on peace agreement, says Ahern.’ ‘Arms at heart of historic deal.’ That sort of thing.
November 25th 2004 marked the first anniversary of the 2003 Assembly elections which had confirmed the DUP and Sinn Fein as the biggest Unionist and Nationalist parties. Blair and Ahern had resolved that 12 months was time aplenty to reach agreement on a way forward. Ahern took the lead in repeatedly asserting that there’d be no slippage, no extensions, no more messing.
‘It is important that the parties understand that if this fails there will be no further chance of the devolved government which they all want in the foreseeable future.’
But, and not for the first time, the deadline came and went. Then it turned out there was a bit of space for further manoeuvre after all. The parties had been within an inch of agreement, it was widely reported: only ‘optical’ issues remained to be resolved. Paisley wanted photographs of the decommissioning process. The Provos would have none of it. A fortnight of extra-time wrangling ensued. It wasn’t until December 8th, at a joint press conference at the Odyssey, or was it the Waterfront?, that Blair and Ahern shiftily conceded they’d failed. And that was that. Except that it wasn’t.
Now they tell us again there’ll be ‘no further delay...’
The reason this repeatedly happens is that when the Irish and British Governments, with the support of the main opposition parties and mainstream media outlets, say that ‘There is no alternative’ to the Belfast Agreement, what they mean is that they have no alternative. The only settlement they can conceive of or are willing to consider involves Catholics and Protestants settling down independently of one another, each to live in their own area according to their own ‘culture,’ as separate tribes at wary peace. They constantly replenish the wells of sectarianism even as they insist they are striving to drain them dry.
Every time they miss the moment they solemnly promised would see an end, they set a new end-time. They erase all memory of the failures of the past, even as they warn that failure is not an option any longer.
Goldfish memories on Groundhog Day.

My cybernaut associate Danny Schechter has been ruminating on whether Democratic or Republican men make the best lovers. I never knew he cared.
Danny’s News Dissector blog, run from New York, is one of the best sources of cutting-edge info. on the malign manoeuvres of the neo-con rabble who run Government in the US these days. Amatory technique isn’t usually his bag.
But now he reports a correspondent suggesting that Democratic men send e-mail messages along the lines of, ‘I can’t wait to eat your pussy.
‘And unlike Republicans, they actually mean it.’
To which Dissector Danny ripostes: ‘Republicans mean it, too, which is why it’s imperative you hide your cat.’
A feminist friend suggests to me that this item is sexist. I see her point. Why should it only be Republican and Democratic men?