A running theme of the later Cruiskeen Lawns was the ruination of Dublin by civil servants of rural origin who had abandoned their proper vocation as “turnip snaggers”.
Here, encouraged by examples from the Middle East and with a nod towards Nietzsche, Myles suggests a way in which his archetypal “Shaun O’Shaughran” might be persuaded to return to the land.
In the process, he calls on the new forward-looking government (Fianna Fáil had just been returned to power, with Seán Lemass poised to succeed Éamon de Valera as taoiseach) to unleash the awesome potential of a neglected root crop.
I PRESUME the reader has read my notes of last week dealing with a report in the United Nations Worldconcerning the therapeutic metamorphosis of the desert Arab by confrontation with the American Way of Life as manifested by oil companies.
We saw that Mohammed Mutarid “doesn’t get about the desert any more – he’s too tied down at the office.”
I will quote a little bit more, this time about Ali din Hussein: “To see the result of this policy consider Ali din Hussein, a man in his late 30s.
He came to ‘Aramco’ from a Bedouin tribe 14 years ago. Today he is a superintendent of a ‘separator’, an installation which separates gas from oil as it comes out of the ground.
The separator is isolated in the desert, twenty miles from the nearest company office.
The continuous efficient operation of this complicated 700,000 [pounds] mechanism is essential.
Hussein, who has 30 men under him, is in complete charge.”
Let us again view this transfiguration from the viewpoint of our indigenous hypoanthrope (or untermensch), Shaun O'Shaughraun.
True we have probably no oil or even gas under the soil but we have something perhaps more valuable: I mean the mystical salts and nutriments which genially conspire to produce the turnip.
In considering Shaun vis-à-vis the national turnip wealth we seem suddenly (unlike so many perfectly good turnips today) pulled up.
If there is one thing about Shaun, you will be told, he will not snag turnips; he would prefer to be in the Civil Service. But read again the quotation above.
The essential of the American concept is that Hussein had men under him.
Why not Shaun? And there is no obligation in the code to give the names of those undermen or explain why they are not hyperanthropes (or übermenschen). Follow?
***
It is helpful sometimes to view the future in retrospect.
Consider Shaun O’Shaughraun, an Irish boy in his late 40s. He came to CARS (Cruiskeen-American Rehabilitation Scheme) from the Mushabejaber tinker hill tribe 46 years ago.
Today he is superintendent of a “separator”, an installation which separates turnips from the earth and from weeds, other turnips, tin cans, cigarette packets, muck, offal and the earth itself.
A magnetic sool gayr detects all sound turnips and directs them via an endless conveyor belt to a “hospital” where they are washed, shaved, uniformly shaped and scented, packed untouched by hand into ribbon-tied boxes and taken in snag-powered lorries to Shannon Airport for dispatch by air to Irish communities in the U.S.
Weeds and other snaggings are automatically extracted from the sool gayr's rejects by ingenious electrically-powered antennae known as lawva fawdaand conveyed to a complex of secret "secondary hopsitals" where the material is converted into Irish tweed, low-grade industrial usquebaugh, carpenter's scantlings, newsprint, plastic hurley sticks, cut-glass eggcups and ingots of radioactive turf.
Shaun, who has 45,000 men under him, is in complete charge.
***
Let us in heaven's name get a grip of ourselves. Dulce et decorumest pro patria mori my eye! If deposits of oil can attract American and Russian philanthropists to the Near East so readily, why cannot our scientists investigate the industrial potential of turnips?
It was reported recently that an Englishman had invented a process of making a substitute for petrol from turf and that he had come to this country after the British had rejected his invention.
Where is he and what is he doing?
The release of energy from natural substances is acknowledged to be merely a matter of probing out certain procedural secrets.
The combustion of natural oil is the lazy fellow’s way out.
I honestly believe that a nuclear bomb (if we are to take that as the summum of human achievement to date) can be made from a turnip.
Our agricultural lads seem to believe that, too, for they think weed-choked turnips are too dangerous to snag.
Napophobia, or fear of turnips, it must be the duty of the new Administration to . . . to weed out!