Recession Obcession

I think it's a bout time that we as a nation owned up tot he fact that we are really enjoying this recession. Possibly not as much as we thought we were going to, but enjoying it none the less. How else can we explain our obsession with talking about it and our nostalgia for all the other recessions we remember. I have just been watching Reeling in the 80s a DVD of clips from the 80s which were part of the Reeling in the Years series. The recurrent themes are strikes and the Eurovision song contest as well as the odd clip of since disgraced politicians. My house-mate Alan got it for Christmas. Over Christmas I also watched the DVD of the best of the Den, from those days in RTE when budgets were small and hair was big. My friend Neil got that one for Christmas.

You see as a nation we like to feel hard done by. We have always liked the idea of 800 years of oppression and having to emigrate because the spuds were rotten in the ground and so on and so forth. Affluence didn't sit very well with us, not that we were all that affluent it turns out, it just so happened that banks were willing to lend people money like there was no tomorrow and people were willing to take it. Sure there were plenty of jobs for a while but were we really any better off? In some regards, yes. If you are the sort of person who judges a society by the prevalence of flat screen TVs and silicone breasts we were doing well. If on the other hand you are the sort of person who judges a society on the access its citizens have to health care and the quality of its rail network we were doing extremely badly.

It turns out that not charging taxes to large corporations who were free to take massive amounts of capital out of the country wasn't the best of ideas. We were told it was the only way and that ultimately it would be good for us but here we are now moving towards the second decade of the twenty first century without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. We were told that privatisation was the way forward but now we don't even have the public services or secure jobs that existed in the eighty's. After over a decade of an abundance of lowly paid, non unionised, insecure jobs we are faced with scenes eerily similar to those of the 80s or at least it's heading that way and Irish people don't really seem to mind all that much. A large section of the population are longing for the days when we win the Eurovision and beat England in soccer on an almost annual basis. It might seem a bit romantic but we are a romantic people, apparently.

The media have been at the for of this nostalgia drive, it was like they were hanging around outside social welfare offices waiting for the queue to grow long enough to make the front page. RTE started churning out the nostalgia DVDs in time for Christmas and Brewing up a Storm by The Stunning started to receive regular airplay. Headlines screamed about a return to the eighties and it seemed that at times they even hoped it could be a self fulfilling prophecy.


Ireland however could never return to the eighties and here is why;

Celebrities
Ireland nowadays has a different class of celebrity. We will no longer be satisfied with celebrities of the calibre of Twink, Maxi and Derek Davis. Nowadays we want celebrities like Katie French, who never did anything of merit in her life and then took a heap of drugs and died. We now expect out celebrities to be young, thin and talentless. The likes of Simon Young wouldn't get a look in any more.

Music
The Irish music scene nowadays is a bleak and soulless place. There was a time when we were blessed with bands like The Sultans of Ping, The Frank and Walters, An Emotional Fish, The Stunning and A House. It sort of ties in with the whole celebrity thing, these were extremely unattractive and very talented people. They could write a decent tune and perform it in a wry and detached manner while getting kids to dance at the same time. It's just not the sort of thing that young lad from up the North who won X Factor could do. But he dresses stylishly and has nice teeth, it's only a matter of time until Louis Walsh buggers him, if he hasn't already.

Clothes and Hair
After over a decade of exposure to BT2 and Toni and Guy I just can't see the Irish returning to to perms and polyester jumpers. There was a time when the average Irish person thought Yves St. Laurent was the French foreign minister and Tommy Hilfiger was a mountaineer. Nowadays however people have haircuts named after characters on TV and there is a special breed of women driving Mini Coopers for whom death would be preferable to wearing something baggy.

Television
Television sets in RTE used to look like they were designed by Samuel Beckett's colour blind cousin. They were minimal and looked like their colours were inspired by something you'd see on a footpath in O'Connell street on a Sunday morning. Most home made shows involved a studio audience packed with unemployed people discussing how listening to The Cure defined them as a person. The presenter always looked as bad as most of the audience and everybody looked as if they had cycled there on a racer. Nowadays RTE has blessed us with Colm and Jim Jim's Home Run which is shit and has a massive and horrendously expensive looking set without going anywhere near the sort of high quality entertainment that Russian Roulette as presented by Maxi brought to us. Also we now have more than two stations and are more likely to be corrupted by outside influences.

Hating Americans
We used to love them. Everybody had relations there and everybody went there to work as a roofer. However eventually they had all the roofs they needed and we started to get annoyed with them and their loud and ignorant ways. Once we were able to afford the haircuts we saw on TV we decided they were no better than us and eventually we started to feel superior to them as they were fat and had no culture and were prone to invading people. In other words we just adopted the French perspective on the Issue.

Talking about the Recession
Back in the 80s we talked about stuff other than recession, back then nobody called it a recession it was just known as Ireland.