It's all about me

The news that Obama’s pint came from a sealed barrel — and that he and that preparation of the meal he and the missus ate in the Merrion Hotel was overseen by the US Secret Service — marked a contrast with the seemingly more relaxed earlier visit by QE2. That said, I suppose, Barry drank the pint. Prince Phil, as much as he visibly longed to do so, didn’t. Them’s the breaks...

It must be a very strange life, being President of the United States. Every breath you take, every move you make...every step you take, they’ll be watching you.
One has immense sympathy for the objects of such attention. For sure, Ryan Giggs would sympathise! And he wouldn’t be alone. With every day that passes, we are coming to realise just how we all increasingly live under increasingly intense scrutiny.
Incredibly, it’s nearing 30 years since Sting wrote ‘Every Breath You Take’. It was long before the internet took shape, not to mention social media. You’d have been taken away in a van if you’d tried to describe Twitter. Yet the obsessive impulse of the song captures the times we now live in with uncanny accuracy.
“Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you...”
Of course, when Oprah Winfrey got going, there was none of these things either. She’s exiting the stage now but does so as a person of global influence. No mean feat. Essentially analogue in her construction of what she did, she made the transition to the digital era with ease. But there was more...
Oprah is one of the motherlodes of Facebook and Twitter. Her success was, to a large extent, built on the way she framed a universal discourse (of a kind) from very personal tales. It was terribly American, maddening in its sanctification of feelgoodery and new-age quackery and suffocating in its emphasis on ‘Me’. But boy was it successful and did it have a massive impact.
Aggregating personal Facebook pages generates the same kind of universalism. Amongst the happy snaps and updates, there’s enough neediness and scratchiness and self-absorption to fuel a million Winfrey shows. That it’s not a real universal story is not the point. It has enough compulsive force to override any reality that gets in the way.
When Sting wrote that song and Oprah began her rise, celebrity was an elevated station, one framed by a shell of money and discretion. This was both ruthless and shameless in its protection of those who had.
The biggest nuisance then were the bould paparazzi. But now? Well, phones can take pretty damn good photos anywhere. You can’t let your hair down or your knickers drop without the risk that someone will capture the indiscretion. And where in the old days a seasoned editor might see a line that shouldn’t be crossed, nowadays you can bang it out there yourself within seconds.
Recent events involving Ryan Giggs show that old conventions and regulations don’t apply.
The freedom to express yourself now enjoyed by billions is one that Winfrey would endorse (you go, girl!). Not only are we where we are, but for both better and worse, there’s no going back.
The gains are immense, not only for the freedom of expression – abused as it is by banality and egocentrism – and fascinating capacity to aggregate into bigger things, even into political movements as we have seen in the USA and the Mediterranean Arab countries. But there are losses too, amongst which we must include the death of discretion and the end of privacy.
“Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you...”
It never sleeps. The actor Hugh Grant has likened it to living under the Stasi. One sympathises with the exposure of monsters, but do we need to know about the peccadilloes of nonentities? Or of ordinary actors and players? Somewhere, somehow, we’ll need to find a sense of perspective.
Easier said than done, I’m afraid. Look at the small and vicious spat that arose from Enda Kenny’s apparently deliberate appropriation of a part of an Obama speech. The cluckers clucked and the finger-waggers wagged their fingers. No proportion there...
What made it more amusing to watch was that many of those who were snorting their derision about plagiarism were themselves churnalists of long standing, the kind of people who effortlessly begin their articles with the dreaded words ‘a study has shown...’
But to close, it’s back to Obama and his reference to returning to find the missing apostrophe from O’Bama. Well, Jasus, he’s right to look for it in Ireland because it’s everywhere you stay, everywhere you play, everywhere you stray! It’s the famous grocer’s apostrophe that turns up in banana’s, apple’s, beetroot’s, and in any and every plural you can imagine!
If he can get his hands on it and take it away, he’s more than welcome to! Go Barack, go...