Connect Eddie HoltA few weeks ago we heard of "Shake and Bake". This week's euphemism was "rendition", sometimes bogusly normalised by being described as "extraordinary rendition", as though ordinary "rendition" were tediously commonplace. Anyway, we know that "Shake and Bake" combines the criminal use of white phosphorous and high explosives and we know that "rendition" invariably ends in torture.
We know too that Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern's assurance that Shannon airport hasn't been used by America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for "anything untoward" is meaningless.
Ahern fears irritating US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice or other Washington bigwigs. His supine attitude reflects, of course, a general cravenness among this country's politicians.
In fairness, however, it's not only Irish politicians who have a craven attitude towards the US. British prime minister Tony Blair has debased himself and his country by becoming George Bush's abjectly obedient poodle. Frankly, it's embarrassing. Politicians call it "realpolitik" - dealing with the reality of power - and as power, not truth, is always their currency, maybe we should expect no better.
They will argue that what might be termed cravenness is, in fact, diplomatic skill. It's for the good of the country, they'll say, to have close links with and not upset the Washington administration. There are ties anyway between Ireland and the US, even though whenever it has suited Irish politicians to condemn Irish-Americans for their allegedly time-frozen nationalism they have done so.
And so it goes . . . we've heard it all repeatedly. Politicians invariably pay homage to the biggest power, but it's sad really that an outfit that claims to lead the "free world" sits on a gathering of peoples whose politicians, like Ireland's, are notably unfree. It's understandable that few want to attract the bully's attention - there aren't votes in that - but how complicit with torture must we be? The trade-off, despite attempts to repress and obfuscate it, is well known. It is this: we do not want to jeopardise our material prosperity by criticising the US because American-led multinational companies contribute a great deal to that prosperity.
Anyway, it's Ireland's turn to prosper because we've had poverty, misery and emigration for far too long in the past. So there! It may well be, as WB Yeats wrote in Easter 1916, that "Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart". Certainly, there are increasingly widespread stone-hearted practices and attitudes in contemporary Ireland that suggest disturbing degrees of naked selfishness and abject plunder.
It wouldn't, for instance, be particularly pleasant in most cases to be an immigrant in this country.
On Wednesday, in a video-taped Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Harold Pinter excoriated a "brutal, scornful and ruthless" US. Yet we in Ireland are complicit with its vile "rendition" which ends in torture.
So, are we brutal, scornful and ruthless? Do we really want our politicians to complain about Shannon or do we just want to salve our consciences by criticising them for not doing so? It is an important question and one that reminds us that sometimes politics are far too important and meaningful to be left to professional politicians.
It's not just Dermot Ahern who is compromised by what he determines - and, in fairness, not without reason - to be realpolitik. He has, after all, been thrown up by this society and landed the job of Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Pinter continued: "You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." Even acknowledging, as he does, the "brutality", "atrocities" and general "suppression" in the post-war Soviet Union and eastern Europe, that's damning.
Yet the situation is, he claims, not without hope. "Many thousands, if not millions of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet." Problem is that without a hugely improved media they may never be. Once enviable, the US media is now woeful.
Mind you, our own media face similar pressures to those that brought about the downfall of the US media. Those pressures include absurd concentrations of ownership which inevitably lead to conflicts of interest between truth and business. As politicians serve power - they will argue that they have to and call it "realpolitik" - journalism should serve the truth as best as it can be established.
Anyway, the latest abuse of language - that "rendition" outrage - tells you yet again that the cabal with power in Washington at present is nasty. Sure, the effrontery of using such an idiotic word is kind of funny. But when you hear that "rendition" results in cigarettes being extinguished on human bodies, toenails being plucked out and salt being rubbed into fresh wounds, well . . .
There's a price on Ireland's continuing prosperity because we are, in greater or lesser measure, complicit with US government policy. Just how much, I wonder, are we willing to pay?