If proof were needed that begrudgery is dead, we need look no further than the existence of VIP magazine. One wonders what the hero of the opening chapter of Breandan O hEithir's The Begrudger's Guide to Irish Politics would have made of this latest addition to the Irish literary tradition, that doughty Cork blacksmith who, on the day after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, riposted to his parish priest's assurance that "We're going to have our own gentry now", with a spirited "We will in our arse have our own gentry".
Well, now we have the next worst thing: our own Hello! magazine.
But one does not wish to be unfair to Hello!. VIP has none of the rich literary merit, none of the exhilarating sense of tradition, none of the inspired touch of the esoteric, none of the thirst for deeper meaning, none of the refined respect for ancient civilisation, none of the profound sense of knowingness and irony, and none of the subtle commitment to the metaphysical which are (comparatively speaking) so much the hallmarks of Hello! magazine.
VIP is a magazine full of pictures of people famous for having their photographs taken. It features Irish "personalities" and "celebrities" - at home, at play, in the company of beautiful wives/ husbands/cars and houses, at charitable functions such as the recent "Media Ball in aid of Kosovo". (Judging from the VIP spread, not a single Kosovar showed up, which just goes to show that you're wasting your time trying to help these people.)
If the boys in the GPO on Easter Monday 1916 could only have had a premonition of VIP, Irish history would have taken a very different road. It is the Celtic Tiger in full-blown form, a testament to the sorry pass at which we have now arrived. The title, I imagine, stands for "Vacuity in Perpetuity", or perhaps "Vanity in Public".
Whatever it stands for, VIP is a publication utterly bereft of redeeming features. No, I tell a lie: the fact that no Irish person contributed as much as a single original idea to this magazine must surely be to our credit - even the colour codes on the cover are ripped off from Hello!. It might be described as the publishing equivalent of the showband, except that this would represent a gross defamation of such comparatively startling creative colossi as Samba and the Philosophers, Magic and the Magic Band and Hugo Duncan and the Tall Men.
There was a time when a publication such as VIP would have become one of the richest jokes in the culture, but now it is seen only as a mark of our "sophistication", its promoters feted as courageous entrepreneurs, not to mention creative geniuses. Is there none among us now fit to emit a snort of derision when it is so badly needed? Oh where, where are they now, those dark mustachieoed men who once could be relied on to toss a well-turned jeer at such endeavours?
What would we not give now for what J.J. Lee called a "cosmic displacement of bilious resentment" with which to give utterance to what surely must be our collective deepest feelings about VIP magazine? The Celtic Tiger has brought the final extinction of the increasingly lesser-spotted begrudger. Since the precursor boom of the Lemass era, the begrudger had been getting a bad press, but for the kind of mediocrity represented by VIP to prosper in the land, it was essential that his pulse be stilled forever.
This was achieved by a war of attrition, the constant whingeing of mediocrities about the resentment which greeted their every achievement, resulting in the creation of a culture of imagined begrudgery which bore no resemblance to the extent of actually existing begrudgery. Most of the time, save for the occasional slightly-curled lip, nobody was taking the blindest bit of notice of such people, but they convinced themselves, and us, that their vital entrepreneurial activities were being endangered by rampant begrudgery.
As a result of several decades of anti-begrudger propaganda, we now tend to identify begrudgery purely with negativity, envy, jealousy and spite. In fact, there may, in the modern world, be a profoundly redemptive quality to this much maligned disposition. A couple of years ago, Dr Oliver James, a British clinical psychologist, published a book, Britain on the Couch (Century, £16.99 stg), in which he suggested that perhaps the principal difference between the 1990s and the 1950s is the fact that most or all of us now "know" far, far more people than would have been the case had we lived a generation ago. Whereas our grandparents "knew" just their immediate family, neighbours, a small circle of friends and acquaintances, most of us today, courtesy of mass media society have come to "know" hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.
This, he argued, has multiplied the effects of our natural tendency to compare ourselves with others. Being pummelled by the "success" of the more famous, we are confronted at all times by the evidence of our own "failure". This constant, invariably negative comparison creates chemical imbalances which attack our self-esteem, confidence and sense of self-possession, creating envy, depression and spiritual malfunction, spawning drug-addictions, obsessive compulsive disorders and insatiable appetites for new forms of gratification.
It is, in short, the green-eyed monster as pathological condition, and at its heart in modern Britain is the spectre of Hello! magazine, the forum in which the unattainable "achievement", "celebrity" and "glamour" of the famous is flaunted before the general public. Hello! and VIP are part of a culture which sells to the addicted public the means to feed its own self-abasing masochistic envy by presenting a diet of photographs of and information about people whose lifestyles no normal person can possibly hope to emulate.
Begrudgery, which as Joe Lee outlined in Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, is a defence mechanism born of the need to maintain a sense of status and dignity in a society with scarce resources, may be the only known antidote to this condition. This is why it is a mistake to confuse begrudgery with simple envy or jealousy: a begrudger does not envy the target of his rancid passion; he tears him down, dismisses him and consigns him to oblivion. In the begrudger's denunciation lurks also an annunciation of pride and self-satisfaction which nullifies any danger of succumbing to true envy.
Begrudgery is therefore a form of what Oliver James calls "discounting", which is to say a device to minimise the demoralising effects of the relative success or attractiveness of others. If upward social comparisons are not to result in a depressing sense of inadequacy, he wrote, we need to remain mindful of ways in which the object of the negative comparison has been more privileged compared to ourselves or alternatively disadvantaged in ways we are not.
The art of the begrudger in remembering the celebrated and successful when they hadn't a pot to piss in becomes, therefore, a device for the preservation of sound mental health and the avoidance of dangerous feelings of inferiority.