The name calling game

The last time controversy raged about whether Derry should be called “Derry” or “Londonderry”, the late, great Micky Joe O’Kane, zen poet and encyclopedic doggie man, suggested we call it Fred, after Ringo’s haircut.

When reporters asked during the Beatles’ first trip to America what they called their mop-top haircuts, Ringo (according to Micky Joe, anyway) replied, “Fred”.
Additionally, Micky Joe elaborated, and as an added attraction, “Fred” could be of any religion.
Three hundred and fifteen workers who have just been dumped on the dole by garment-makers Desmonds will have appreciated Micky Joe’s point. The announcement of the job losses, in Derry and Dungiven, came in the last week in January. The company explained that it couldn’t compete with low-cost operations in Asia and eastern Europe.
The day before the announcement, the SDLP and Sinn Fein had put a motion through Derry City Council beginning the process of deleting the “London” from “Londonderry”.
Paisley’s main man in the north west, Gregory Campbell, denounced the move as anti-Protestant. David Trimble promptly weighed in to accuse Sinn Fein of “belligerent sectarianism” and the SDLP of “moral cowardice”. Both men made much of the Belfast Agreement’s promise of equal respect for all traditions: to drop “London” would be to dump on the Unionist tradition, they argued.
Meanwhile, the nationalist parties were arguing about which could claim more credit for putting the issue on the agenda. The Shinners insisted, rightly, that they’d made the initial running. The SDLP retaliated that it was their subtly-worded motion which had won through on the council. Both quoted the Agreement’s pledge of “parity of esteem”: to retain “London” would be to disesteem Derry nationalists, they declared.
Come Assembly elections, probably in May, the unionist parties will compare and contrast their respective records in their fight to save “Londonderry”. The nationalist parties will likewise debate their performances in the struggle for “Derry”.
Both communities do feel done down on the issue. To Catholics, “London” symbolises the sectarian imbalance in Derry politics through the years, as evidenced in Unionist gerrymandering and job discrimination. Contrarywise, more than 10,000 Protestants have left the city in more recent times: for those remaining, the proposed name-change symbolises how their presence has diminished.
Straightforward, clean-cut Orange-and-Green stuff. But not so the parties’ reaction to the Desmonds closure.
The DUP expressed “sympathy with these breadwinners and their families... a terrible personal blow,” and demanded that the Northern Ireland Office “explain what measures can (be) put in place.”
The Ulster Unionists declared that, “this awful news... reinforces the need for a coherent strategy to develop and defend a competitive hard core to our textile industry.”
Sinn Fein conveyed its “concern and genuine sympathy” and called for “a focused task-force.”
The SDLP was “saddened” at the job losses, and believed that “everything which could be done should be done.”
Actually, I’ve reversed the Sinn Fein and DUP statements, and switched the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists. Indeed, any of the four statements could be swopped for any other. The Orange and Green groups were absolutely at one. None voiced criticism of Desmonds’ management. None mentioned that Desmonds have recently set up garment factories in Bangladesh, Turkey and Sri Lanka. None challenged the capitalist logic behind the textile industry’s “race to the bottom”. None referred to any possibility of resistance, through the occupation of the plants to prevent machinery being shipped out, for example.
Communal consciousness was vindicated and deepened by the name-change debate, even as workers, irrespective of religion, were being treated like dirt.
This is the inevitable result and probable intention of the Belfast Agreement.

I gather that the man who invented the axis of evil was sadly disappointed by Bush’s State of the Union address.
David Frum had hoped that the phrase which made him famous would feature for a second year running. The publicity might have boosted sales of his book, The Right Man – The Surpise Presidency of George W. Bush. (It came as a suprise to the majority of voters, certainly, who had plumped at the polls for Al Gore.)
But no. We had “focus, clarity and courage” and “deceiving not disarming.” But no “axis of evil.” Frum must be fretting that, like the one and only Chesney Hawkes, he’ll prove a one-hit wonder.
Reports of his discomfiture prompted me to browse in his book, wherein I discovered the solution to an irksome puzzlement of recent times. Bush’s axis of evil comprised Iraq, North Korea and Iran. So how come North Korea, which has kicked out nuclear inspectors and begun revving up its weapons of mass destruction, is being bombarded with diplomacy and offers of US economic aid rather than with Tomahawk missiles?
The Right Man tells that Frum’s original offering was “axis of hatred”, which he’d penned in November 2001, having been asked to “sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq.” (Within weeks of the Twin Towers attack, then, Bush was setting up an assault on a country which he knew had had nothing to do with it.) “Axis” was designed to associate Iraq with Germany and Japan, the “axis powers” of World War Two.
“Hatred” was discarded because senior Bush officials thought “evil” would be “more theological.” (Interesting, that.)
Then, somebody remembered that there had been two axis powers. Condoleezza Rice suggested the inclusion of Iran. The mention might even help pressurise the country’s ruling theocracy, she mused.
North Korea was added after it was realised that including only Muslim countries might give an impression of anti-Islamism. Thus was the Iraq-Iran-North Korea axis of evil compiled. Iraq had been the only intended target. North Korea had made the top three inadvertently, as it were.
From a speed-read of his book, Frum seems entirely unaware of the cynicism and duplicity in which these events were steeped. He doesn’t see, either, the intellectual banality which they reveal at the heart of the Bush administration. But the rest of us, being dragged the last few steps towards the brink of war, should surely take note.

That petrol emotion:
At a Not In Our Name mobilisation outside the UN building in New York a couple of weeks back, the writer Tony Kushner – who won a Pulitzer Prize for Angels In America – read a poem by Brecht.
Before launching into stern declamation, Kushner made a little speech by way of an intro. Thought I’d share it with you.

“I have always found that, when you’re at a demonstration freezing your ass off because some malevolent moron of a president has decided to stage a first strike against another country in opposition to the whole world’s opinion that he shouldn’t, mustn’t do this, when you’re freezing your ass off in the streets because this aforementioned malevolent moron, this calamitous cretin, this petroleum addict, this thief of elections and grand executioner, when this not-really-the-president refuses to conduct himself in a grown-up fashion, or is simply not capable of such behavior, when because of him and his imps and demons you are standing outside in New York in January frozen solid from the top of your head to your tuchis, nothing warms you up like a good poem. So I am going to read you a good poem today. Brecht wrote this poem about Hitler, who he called The House Painter. When you hear ‘House Painter’ in the poem, I probably don’t need to tell you to substitute in your head ‘The fratboy plutocrat blood-grizzled schmuck of an inarticulate rancher from Crawford, Texas’.”
The poem must have come as something of an anti-climax.