UPFRONT:MAYDAY! MAYDAY! I seem to be lacking a cause, and given the weekend that's in it, I need some reason to take to the streets. I work, after all, making me a worker, and given that yesterday was International Workers' Day, it's all about me, right? I can boast proper red credentials too, with a socialist grandfather, whose own father went down in the history books as a fully paid-up Fenian Socialist Republican.
Admittedly, my family has been leaning less and less to the left as the generations dilute, leaving me with such a slight inclination it could easily be confused for a limp. But that’s not what keeps me from painting my picket sign this weekend. The truth is, the thought of joining a throng of fist-pumping fellow citizens fills me with ennui.
Oh, but it wasn’t always thus. In university, I was only gagging to take to the streets. All I wanted was some oppression to fight, or yoke to throw off, a dictator, Vietnam, any old sniff of tyranny or subjugation would have done it. But apart from a brief kerfuffle over whether condoms could be sold in vending machines (thankfully, the opposition caved while I was still busy trying to find suitable rhymes for my marching chant), there was no cause worth lacing up my Doc Martins for.
The one time there was a demonstration, convened to protest an increase in fees, I was out there like a shot, all Che Guevara and Paris ’68. Still, it’s hard to really maintain the appropriate levels of ire and outrage when it dawns on you that, given that your parents pay your university fees, you’re actually protesting on their behalf. Such are the realisations that dampen a renegade’s spirits.
Apart from that, my college days provided only one sit-in: in one of the buildings on the university campus. I leapt through a window to join the protesters and I proudly took my place with the mass of students inside who were angrily, er, sitting down (in retrospect, I’m not sure what was wrong with using the door, but I assume it represented the System that we were Overthrowing, or some such).
I made it through a full half-hour of the planned 48 before crawling back out the window in search of a passing, unwashed musician with whom to become hopelessly enamoured or a two-litre bottle of Linden Village. Part of the reason I didn’t stick it, I’m ashamed to admit, is because I didn’t quite understand why we were there in the first place, which is how you can really tell a bad protest from a good one. If the cause can’t be pared down to a good two-line rhyming soundbite these days, your revolution hasn’t a hope.
The whole thing kind of dented my demonstrationary zeal for a while, despite the fact that there was plenty to protest about. But writing letters to African heads of state or handing out leaflets about women’s fertility control doesn’t quite offer the same emotional high as a good mass rally, which can be as seductive as a soccer match and every bit as fun.
It’s like that moment in a U2 concert when they get to nth chorus of Sunday Bloody Sunday and everyone suddenly knows the words, and all at once you feel yourself freed from the chains that bound you and part of a glorious, powerful mass. Put simply, protests rock.
They also have that moral high ground thing going on, that us-versus-themness that can really fire a body against the Bin Tax or the Judean People’s Front, as the case may be.
Monty Python references aside, protests can have an effect, and there is still plenty out there to get riled up about. And of course, there are other ways of protesting that don’t involve taking to the streets, as illustrated recently by Mia Farrow’s decision to fast in protest at the atrocities taking place in Darfur. It’s not often you can laugh at a news headline with the word Darfur in it, but that one really set me off.
No doubt Farrow has noble motivations, and is at least acting on a reaction that for many of us lasts only until we read the next news story. So she’s keeping Darfur – and herself – in the news, as she attempts to raise the profile of a cause clearly dear to her heart. There may even be some gombeen fan who will be converted to the cause of Darfur by Mia Farrow’s new diet (“Why, it’s the woman who had Satan’s spawn in Rosemary’s Baby! I will follow wherever she leads!”).
What galls me most, though, is that Mia Farrow appeared on the 2008 Time magazine list of the 100 most influential people in the world. It could be because she is blindingly intelligent and highly effective: but I suspect a great deal of her influence has to do with her celebrity status as an actor and former fashion model. I wish her well on her fasting, though am reminded of the comment from her adopted-daughter-who-married-her-adopted-mother’s-ex-husband, Soon-Yi, who famously described Farrow as “no Mother Theresa”.
And even though her hunger strike will probably make less of a media splash than Susan Boyle, the point remains that an actor and former fashion model is one of the world’s most influential people. Now that’s a sad fact worth protesting.
fionamccann@irishtimes.com
Róisín Ingle would like to thank everyone who sent good wishes for the safe arrival of her twins and she’s delighted to let you know that 4lb Joya and 5.5lb Priya were born on Tuesday, April 21st, in Holles Street, Dublin. Both girls are doing well and mother and father couldn’t be happier.