WHO would have guessed that beneath those familiar turkey feathers beats the heart of a French metaphysician and cultural guerrilla?
OK, the title of his winning Irish entry for the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest, Irlande Douze Points, admittedly provides a clue, but the fact is that Dustin the Turkey appears blessed with a Gallic intellect and sensibility far beyond his rudimentary grasp of the parlez-vous.
Take, for openers, the cri de coeur that opens his song, a plaintive wail that asks us to consider "Where, oh where, did it all go wrong?'- as if Dustin were channelling those French philosophers, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, who first posed that very question about our increasingly homogenised, money-making world back in the 1960s.
Indeed, you could be forgiven for thinking that Monsieur Debord himself had been rattling on about the Eurovision Song Contest in his ground-breaking Society of the Spectacle, in which he argues that any sense of community has been replaced by "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images", and where "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation".
Abstruse stuff, to be sure, but a compelling argument for why we Irish - who once sang along in pub seisúns and belted out party pieces at a knees-up in our sitting room - will sit like zombies before the telly again this spring, somehow believing that all the hype, razzmatazz, and puppet-like songsters being beamed at us from Belgrade in any way relate to ourselves and a wider community called Europe.
OK, YOU SAY, maybe, just maybe Dustin has been gobbling up various French treatises critiquing all that we've lost to our brave new virtual world with its reality TV and the commodification of everything from news to art to entertainment. But can a bit of bed-time reading, you ask, actually turn a fun-loving turkey into a crusading cultural guerrilla? Well, think again for a moment of our feathered friend and his boisterous ballad in the context of an inspiring piece of graffiti I recently came across in Adbusters magazine. A graffito scrawled on a wall in - yes, you guessed it - Paris, during the May 1968 student and worker uprisings. A graffito that read: "The society that abolishes every adventure makes it own abolition the only possible adventure".
Laugh if you like, but it seems to me that Dustin has arguably taken up that challenge by crafting a bolshy ballad that is inherently more subversive (and more promising) than a simple piss-take or send-up of an annual spectacle so absolutely dire that our Italian neighbours walked away from it in 1997. Like many of us who voted for him, Dustin may indeed be more interested in striking a fatal blow at the Eurovision empire, than in simply giving it the bird.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems like Dustin and his ditty have taken a page from the playbook of the "culture-jamming" Adbusters movement, a global network of artists, activists, pranksters, and educators committed to reclaiming the real world from our pop-ridden, consumer culture.
Much as hostile states use radio signals to disrupt enemy communications, culture-jammers attempt to manipulate mass media in an ironic or satiric fashion in order to distort the messages of the same mass media. Or, simply put, culture-jammers dream up deviant schemes like sending an actual puppet with a purposefully woeful song to proudly represent their nation in the Eurovision. Not a Trojan horse so much as a Trojan turkey, which, if it wins, might bring the Eurovision walls crashing down all around! I doubt if I'll get to ask Dustin myself, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that our feathered Francophile sees his song as a perfect example of what the French (who else?) call détournement, whereby an artist faithfully mimics elements of well-known media (in this instance a Eurovision song), in order to create a new work (in this instance Irlande Douze Points), yet a work that conveys a message diametrically opposed to the original (in this instance "How awful is this?")
The faithful mimicry typical of détournement is both part and parcel of Dustin's performance, as anybody who witnessed the RTÉ TV competition (or saw it on YouTube) can testify. Rest assured, if you missed it, that ours is a plus-perfect Eurovison entry, replete with the requisite dreadful vocals, hideously over-the top costumes, and brillantly banal lyrics - not to mention a cartwheeling uber-babe chorus and frenetic guitarist.
But where's the different message then, you ask? Well, for starters, how many Eurovision artistes have made their entrance, as Dustin does, by being wheeled onstage in a shopping trolley? But just in case this consumer-culture reference proves too subliminal, Dustin makes sure to break wind loudly half-way through his song, prompting his sequined, swaying chorus girls to briefly hold their noses in perfect syncopation. What better way to proclaim that this song, this contest, and the hucksterism that spawned it, stinks?
Surely it's the Eurovision that's a laughing stock - not Ireland, not our Dustin. Go on ya good thing!