If the shower theory is right, then McCain's home and dry
Allow me to ask you a rather personal question (though, please, spare me the answer): do you pee in the shower? If you do, you'd probably vote Republican in the US elections this November.
You probably also believe that justice is more important than mercy, that charity should begin at home, that patriotism is a cardinal virtue, and householders should be entitled to use firearms upon intruders in their home.
As you might have guessed, I tick all the boxes here. The shower is the best place to empty one's bladder: it's hygienic, and saves time and water. Justice is more important than mercy, because mercy is merely random and arbitrary: justice is systemic and logical, and includes mercy.
Charity should begin at home, for hungry neighbours are bad neighbours, whereas grateful neighbours might help you out when it is your turn to starve. Patriotism is a cardinal virtue because it makes loyal allies of strangers. Lethal force should be a lawful option to repel intrusion because otherwise, the initiative lies with the intruder, whether he is there to steal some soap or to rape your wife. (Must you wait until she is half-raped before you act? Does she then applaud you for your scruples towards possible soap-stealers?)
If, however, you consider that it is unsanitary to urinate naked in cascading water; if you think mankind should be as one, if you urge the homeowner to consider the intruder's troubled childhood before being too hasty, and if you think that government should be an active force for good, you will vote Democrat.
US politics tends to shape itself around the natural division in human nature far more authentically than do Irish or British politics. This division has the stereotypical qualities of the two sexes. Republicans are fact-based, reasoning, conservative: Democrats are intuitive, emotive, empathetic.
Republicans were enlisting in the Marine Corps while Democrats were having sex in the mud at Woodstock. I know what I'd prefer to have been doing: but I also know what needs to be done.
For US Republicans revere no country but their own; they don't play soccer, and they prefer beer to wine (which, needless to say, is never French). Democrats, conversely, can sometimes be addicted to knocking the US, especially when abroad.
This division is the ying and yang of society. Almost no-one in the arts or music in the US today supports the Republicans, confirming the mutual dependency of the two sides of the divide, rather like that between the two sexes. I do not want to be protected by George Clooney, but nor do I want to see films made by the USMC.
And yet, and yet: art has not always been associated what we might call female politics. Milton believed in the sterner male virtues: Shakespeare lauded patriotism more powerfully than any poet in English, or perhaps any language. If they'd had showers, they would have pissed in them: they vote for McCain.
The younger Lake Poets would of course vote for Obama: but Coleridge, in his later years, would go for McCain, as would Wordsworth, who (it is often forgotten) was the first poet laureate appointed during Victoria's reign. Tennyson, of course, is a McCain man. Indeed, it's clear that the association between the arts and feminised politics, is relatively new. Most of the great poets in English would vote Republican today.
Moreover, the two most celebrated and cerebral women writers of the 19th century, Jane Austen and George Eliot, would probably have gone unexpectedly opposite directions. The former backs McCain out of practical necessity, the latter goes for Obama, because she believed in the unalloyed impulses of the heart: as in that romantic prig, the insufferable Daniel Deronda.
In the US, Mark Twain, with his unflinchingly pro-American views, is a modern Republican. Emerson and Longfellow, the same. Frost, I'd say, is an Obama man. Likewise, the anglophile TS Eliot.
Moving on to film, Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart are easy: volunteers with the USAAF when they could easily have dodged combat, both would be McCain men. Gary Cooper, McCain also. Mae West, a McCain girl (but break the news to him gently: John, you're probably not the first). John Ford, McCain. That despicable, draft-dodging fraud, John Wayne, likewise. And Hollywood today? A sanctimonious, superstitious, witless, babbling shower of either sex, who, far from peeing in the shower, only pass their perfumed water into certain Scientologist-designed, Kabbala-approved, astrologically aligned and personally tailored receptacles.
And so to Ireland. Edmund Burke, of course, is a McCain man. But O'Connell, a crowd-pleaser, is probably for Obama. Likewise, the sentimental Tom Moore. Wilde -- that unbearable snob -- would no doubt declare himself in Favour of True Art; in which case you may break his shin and poke him in the eye with a rusty bodkin. Joyce is utterly impenetrable; beyond analysis. That gabbling, pseudo-Fabian poser Shaw would have gone for Obama, as too would that wretched apologist for Stalin, Sean O'Casey.
Which leaves us with the greatest Irish woman-writer of the 20th century. Kate O'Brien would certainly have peed in the shower -- and not just that, either. McCain, for her, all the way.
kmyers@independent.ie
