Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

I'm reading a wonderful book called The Best of Myles. It's an anthology of newspaper columns published in the Irish Times in the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, written by one Myles na Gopaleen -- pseudonym of author Flann O'Brien (which was itself a pseudonym for Brian O'Nolan). To call "Myles" a humorist, as some do, is to put rather a strain on the word. His work was humorous, yes. But really he's a "humorist" in the same sense as Spike Milligan, say, or as the collective persona known as Monty Python. Sometimes wry and gentle, sometimes surreal.

One form which his column occasionally took was as a dialogue between the author and a fellow who shares the same bus stop. This other fellow is talkative, especially about his brother -- referred to simply as "the brother," never by name -- who, as the book jacket declares, is "a man with a solution for everything, from the common cold to the economic crisis."

Here's a taste; comments in italics represent the contributions, such as they are, of the somewhat stuffy narrator:

The brother has it all worked out.

What?

The war. How can we get through the war here in the Free State. I mean the rationing and brown bread and all that class of thing. The brother has a plan. Begob you'll be surprised when you hear it. A very high view was taken when it was explained in the digs the other night.

What is the nature of this plan?

It's like this. I'll tell you. We all go to bed for a week every month. Every single man, woman and child in the country. Cripples, drunks, policemen, watchmen -- everybody. Nobody is allowed to be up. No newspapers, 'buses, pictures or any other class of amusement allowed at all. And no matter who you are you must be stuck inside the bed there. Readin' a book, of course, if you like, but no getting up stakes.

That strikes me as a curious solution to difficulties in this difficult iron age.

D'ye see, when nobody is up you save clothes, shoes, rubber, petrol, coal, turf, timber and everything we're short of. And food, too, remember. Because tell me this -- what makes you hungry? It's work that makes you hungry. Work and walking around and swallying pints and chawin' the rag at the street corner. Stop in bed an' all you'll ask for is an odd slice of bread. Or a slice of fried bread to make your hair curly, says you. If nobody's up, there's no need for anybody to do any work because everybody in the world does be workin' for everybody else.

I see. In a year therefore you would effect a saving of twenty-five per cent in the consumption of essential commodities.

Well now I don't know about that, but you'd save a quarter of everything, and that would be enough to see us right.

But why get up after a week?

The bakers, man. The bakers would have to get up to bake more bread, and if wan is up, all has to be up. Do you know why? Because damn the bit of bread your men the bakers would make for you if the rest of us were in bed. Your men couldn't bear the idea of everybody else being in bed and them working away in the bakery. The brother says we have to make allowances for poor old human nature. That's what he called it. Poor old human nature. And begob he's not far wrong.

Very interesting. He would do well to communicate this plan to the responsible Government department.

And you're not far wrong there yourself. Bye-bye, here's me bus!

I'll tell you: strike out the contemporary references to rationing (we're not there yet, knock on wood) and the Irish Free State and I think this would go far to turn around not just Iraq, but also the US itself.