It's no wonder the X Factortwins are so popular: they embody the Celtic Tiger era but do none of the harm, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
OFTEN, THE most poignant and potent moment of a culture is its dying gasp. Before the end, as a world implodes, there is a last great gathering of its energies. A shaman has a vision in the forest and arrives back with a millennial vision of salvation in which the ancient spirits are revived. A writer emerges to chronicle a way of life with a steely clarity forged from the urgent knowledge that it must be recorded before it dies. A painter evokes its colours and essences with a feverish intensity imbued with the magical hope that, if only it can be captured, it will not fade. A singer sustains a plaintive dying fall on the air and, in that note, a whole world hovers on the edge of extinction.
And so we get the unbearably poignant last gasp of Celtic Tiger culture. The nation turns its lonely eyes to the last recesses of hope. Where is the shaman who can conjure up the spirits of our dying world that they may walk among us one more time? Where are the artists who can evoke the passing era with such divine intensity that we can believe, for a moment, that it will linger forever? Where are the voices that can sustain that last plangent note in which, when we close our eyes, we can imagine that the past will always be with us?
Step forward John and Edward Grimes, aka Jedward, aka the terrible twins of the X FactorTV show who have no discernible talent but who got enough public votes on Sunday night to stay in the competition yet again. Jedward are the pure essence of a culture we have inhabited for 15 years and that is now functionally extinct. As Simon Cowell, one of the talent show judges, puts it: "They are completely deluded and they live in a fantasy world, but they're lovely."
Who better to embody the nation we have been?
Admittedly, there is a certain falling off here. Traditionally, the standard of last gasps in Irish culture has been pretty high. One thinks, for example, of the great flowering of Gaelic poetry in the 18th century (exemplified by Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire). Or of the potent recollections of the Blasket Island writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Or of John McGahern's haunting hymns to the rhythms and speech of a rural way of life on the eve of its eclipse. There used to be a certain grandeur to these things.
Grandeur would be out of place for the Celtic Tiger, though. It wasn’t big on stoicism, tragedy or nobility. It was as shallow and brazen as the reflection of a full moon in a puddle of spilt lager. It is entirely appropriate that the figures who should emerge from its twilight to sing its last lament should be ludicrous, deluded and disposable.
And Jedward do capture the essence of Tiger culture with stunning precision. Born and raised within its brassy ambit, they embody its ruling values to perfection. They have boundless ambition and no talent; phenomenal energy and no point; hyper-confidence and no substance. They are completely immune to useless emotions like embarrassment and shame. With their American accents and plastic appearance (they look like they’re actually designed as models from which toy manufacturers will make Jedward dolls), they are supremely vacuous.
They are wrapped in the magical cloak of self-delusion that is woven by year after year of lavish assurance that you are utterly, unalterably wonderful.
And they are, indeed, lovely. Two years ago, they would have been worth hating, or at least holding up as examples of our folly. But now that reality, in all its relentless grimness, has overtaken the fantasies they embody, they have a deeply poignant charm. They are like indigenous peoples from tribes that have been safely conquered. While their culture was alive, and they were throwing spears, they were to be regarded with brutal disdain. Now that it’s all but dead, they acquire the warm, nostalgic luminosity of the exotic.
There was, after all, something nice and cosy about self-delusion. It felt good to be released from self-awareness. It was fun to swagger. The drug of limitless self-confidence, even if (indeed especially if) it suppressed a continuing sense of failure, delivered a euphoric high. All that pointless energy made us glow.
It’s not just that Jedward, by being so gloriously out of synch with the times, remind us of those boom years. Their graceless dancing does summon up the ancestral spirits of 2006, but they don’t just bring us back there. They return us instead to a more innocent version of that recent past. They give us the madly disproportionate ambition, the impregnable self-regard, the supreme sense of entitlement, the shamelessness. But they do so without the harm.
What we get with Jedward is a detoxified version of the toxic cocktail of arrogance and ineptitude that has done so much harm. They allow us to relive the boom culture without its vicious consequences. Who wouldn’t prefer to vote for that than for the real thing?
Fintan O'Toole will debate the subject of his new book, Ship of Fools, with journalists Matt Cooper, Shane Ross and Pat Leahy at the National Concert Hall tomorrow evening