IRELAND, NEWS ADDICTION AND CORONAMANIA

In September, 1987, I visited the northwest of Ireland with my wife, Ellen, whose father was raised with five siblings in a thatched roof farmhouse in County Mayo. Four other siblings died in infancy. Ellen still had multiple cousins, an aunt and two uncles there.

For three days, we stayed in Ellen’s Aunt Anne’s modest stone rowhouse at the western edge of Ballina, a town of 10,000. Northwest Ireland looked and felt very different from the places I had lived. Unlike the Northeastern US, with its megalopolis belt of heavily-trafficked, cheek-to-jowl municipalities, Northwestern Ireland’s towns were each separated by ten or more miles of scarcely inhabited, treeless, rolling hills. These towns had many fewer cars and buses and no trains, factories or modern buildings. The quiet there was palpable, especially because Anne’s was the next-to-most-western home in a municipality with zero sprawl. Beyond the sidewalk outside her front door was another mile of land and then, the Atlantic Ocean.

Anne, then in her seventies, was a retired schoolteacher who never married. During our visit, Anne’s brother, i.e., Ellen’s Uncle Willie, a life-long bachelor, still lived on the century-plus-old family farmstead four miles southwest of town. Each day, whether the Yanks were in town or not, Willie rode his clunky old bicycle to share lunch with Anne. When we saw him come up the road, he pedaled so slowly it was surprising he could keep the bike from tipping over sideways.

While Ellen prepared food in the kitchen with Anne, Willie and I chatted at the lunch table adjoining the front window. Despite our different accents and idioms, the fifty-five years between us and the very different settings and cultures in which we had lived, we sustained nice enough conversations.

On the first day, when I asked Willie about his farm, he said, “Well, I used to keep cows, pigs, chickens and goats.”

He added, “But now I just keep chickens and goats.”

I asked him why he didn’t still keep cows and pigs. He paused, smiled faintly and explained in his thick brogue, “Well, I am 84 years old.”

After each of the three daily lunches we shared, Anne sprinkled Willie with holy water before he left the house. We went outside, waved goodbye and watched him pedal slowly over the horizon.

On his ride back to the farm, Willie might have wondered if all Americans asked stupid questions.

—

Anne’s home lacked heat, except for the peat fire in her hearth. Each night, Anne cooked us salmon that had just been running in the River Moy that flowed through her town. As What’s App didn’t then exist, Ellen had never spoken to Anne before our visit. Thus, we didn’t run out of things to discuss. But other than focusing on their shared family, I only remember that Anne described one of her townspeople as “house proud.” I had never heard that characterization in the US. In the US, people would have said that Anne’s house “needed updating.” But I liked her ascetic sensibility. And Irish teachers’ salaries or pensions were far below those in the US.

After dinner, Anne turned on her black-and-white TV to watch the 7 PM news on the national TV station, RTE-1. The program didn’t, as in the US, begin with dramatic staccato violins, martial drumbeats or blaring trumpets. Nor did the anchorman ominously “tease” top stories.

Instead of reciting from a teleprompter, a solitary, dark-suit-wearing man impassively read a series of short news stories from a stack of 8.5 x 11-inch papers he held in his hands. Little video footage and no correspondents were shown, though one night we saw ten seconds of a funeral procession for someone killed in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. I also remember an account of some inter-tribal violence in some African country that US news shows wouldn’t cover. And a similarly not-played-in-Peoria report that the reggae singer, Peter Tosh, had been shot to death in Jamaica by a home invader. The staid anchorman noted in passing that Mr. Tosh was known as “The Prime Minister of Weed.”

Unlike most of the Irish citizens we met, Irish news was terse and delivered in a somber tone. There was no flash or dash, no commentary, no commercials and no obvious political bias, though, as a twenty-nine-year-old visitor, I may have failed to apprehend some subtleties.

If, as in the US, a local news show preceded the national and world news, Anne didn’t watch it. Given the region’s sparse population and sleepiness, I wondered what stories the local news might have presented.

The national and world news lasted 17 minutes. It ended by showing an analog clock with the little hand on the 7 and the big hand just below the 3. Each night, Anne shut off the TV seconds after the program ended.

Thereafter, a stark silence re-emerged. We drank tea and talked until bedtime, two hours later. Shortly before bedtime, Anne put two hearth-heated hot water bottles between the sheets of the single bed in which Ellen and I slept. Given the chilly, damp weather, we appreciated the extra increment of warmth and hospitality.

—

While I enjoyed rural Ireland’s landscape and slow pace, I don’t mean to romanticize it. Ellen’s father and her mother’s father and eight million other Irish left The Emerald Isle to find work and have enough food to eat. During our visit, in every town of any size, many individuals stood on sidewalks and asked for spare change. And Irish weather is often “desperate.”

Given the foregoing, it’s understandable that the Irish are prone to depression. There’s such a thing as too much silence. Greatly exaggerating the lethality of a virus as an excuse to lock down people who already dealt with excessive isolation was an especially bad idea there. How one fills silence matters. In part to deal with loneliness, the Irish drink a lot.

I’m not proud to say I was a participant-observer in such drunkenness on the weeknight before I flew home after Ellen, who had a few more days off from work than I did, had already gone to spend a few days in Dublin. While in uniquely rundown Limerick, I went to a local pub named The Holy Ground to eat a simple dinner washed down with a pint of Guinness.

As I did, Anthony, a jovial, dark-haired man a little shorter and few years younger than I, walked in and sat down next to me. He requested the bartender to pour him his own pint and put it on his tab. The bartender needed some convincing but gave in.

Anthony initiated what the Irish call “the craic,” i.e., yakking with me, and soon turned our session into a competition. I wasn’t much of a drinker but somehow it seemed appropriate to go to extremes in that time and place.

Four pints later, my new drinking buddy and tour guide enthused about the adjacent cemetery and repeatedly exclaimed, “There’s skeletons in there, can you believe it?!” With both our judgments impaired, Anthony insisted that we go out into the evening gloom and see the place for which the pub was named. He opened one of the many previously-vandalized crypts, revealing disjointed bones. We went back inside and resumed our substance abuse. I lost count.

An hour later, my unofficial tour guide exhorted me to walk over to see “the doggies” racing in the dark at the nearby track. As we had arrived late, the grandstand was already packed with enthusiastic bettors. The races were brief and frantic. As Anthony carried no cash, I funded our wagers. We lost every remaining race. Each time we did, Anthony laughed and howled “get langers!” or proclaimed what a “wanker” I was. I didn’t know what either expression meant. Oddly though, at night’s end, Anthony won the door prize: an all-expenses paid weekend trip for two to an “international football match” in London a month later.

Thereafter, Anthony insisted that we go to another pub, where we downed a few more pints and shot pool till the wee hours. At one point, he danced, holding his cue stick, around the table while the juke box boomed the then-current Paul Simon song, You Can Call Me Al. Anthony told me he’d been “on the dry” for two months before that night.

The night ended with a short car ride back to Anthony’s public housing flat, where his sane, sober brother, whom I met at the second pub, both wrestled and steadied Anthony as he stumbled up the open-air stairways, resisting being put to bed well after midnight. When Anthony reached the third-floor balcony, he shouted to me a profane, slurred, neighbor-waking farewell.

After Anthony’s brother and his girlfriend took me back to my lodging, I soon switched off the lights and climbed into a spinning bed.

That December, I received from Anthony an Air-Mailed Christmas card with a color photo of Limerick’s Cathedral with and a big “Greetings from Limerick” message on its front and a long, boisterous, nostalgic, blue ball-point ink message inside. I may still have that card in a trunk in my basement.

—

I don’t know how the Irish present news now. But I was struck by how little time Anne spent consuming news and how irrelevant stories from other parts of her country and distant places seemed in her remote corner of the world.

Just as that night with Anthony—or rather, the way I felt next day—made me self-pledge to never again drink nearly as much in one night, seeing the austere Irish news has lastingly made me question, and sharply reduce, how much news I consume.

While many people consider news-watching educational, when I see a news story, I ask myself what I’ve learned from it. The answer is nearly always nothing of value. The news is more likely to mislead or inflame than inform.

I’ve imagined a world with no news shows; one in which people’s minds were where their feet were and they noticed only the changes in the places they inhabited and that they would disregard the most recent iterations of such time-worn themes as natural disasters, political horseraces, Mideast violence, criminal trials, and celebrity scandals or deaths.

During my legal career, some of my cases got on TV or in newspapers. The reporters sometimes misstated or omitted important facts. Thus, aside from doubting how true various news accounts are, I always wonder which parts of any story have been conveniently left out and if there are other stories, typically involving trends, not events, that might, if presented without bias, be more interesting and important.

For example, the news could do nightly stories about government or corporate corruption or individuals’ grand theft of public money. But researching these stories would require real work. It’s much cheaper and easier to go to the site of a storm, a press conference or a courthouse. Or to do a Zoom call with a dubious “expert” like Birx, Fauci, Gates or a WHO official. The news is a business. Meetin a daily deadline is far more important than doing serious journalism. Moreover, news outlets have political agendas. Truth is secondary to them.

Ted Turner, the father of 24-hour news, died last week. Non-stop news was a terrible idea, for which he should be vilified, not praised. For the past three decades. the Internet has multiplied 24-hour news sources. People constantly check their newsfeeds in fear of missing the latest headlines. Without doing serious investigation, there’s not enough news in the world to justify ‘round-the-clock coverage.

—

Addiction is clinically defined as habitual or compulsive behavior that causes adverse consequences. News-watching and alcohol consumption can both fit that description. Many people are inexorably drawn to ostensible news as alcoholics are to beer and gnats to streetlights.

Consuming too much news or consuming too much alcohol each damage mental health. News images and alcohol or other drugs are used to sway human perception and emotion. Peer pressure also drives much news and substance abuse. As I showed in Limerick, it’s easier to go along with others than to say “No.”

Though saying “No” often turns out better.

—

As I saw from the beginning how alarmist, propagandistic and biologically untenable the coronavirus news coverage was, I was especially news-averse during the Scamdemic. The death and case tickers, the spiky graphs, the morgue trucks, the guys keeling over in the streets, et al. struck me as implausible and as trying way too hard to incite fear.

As they nearly always had the TV on, I saw TV news snippets while visiting my parents and heard them and others express ideas that plainly weren’t true. I asked them where they heard such things. They told me, self-assuredly, “It was on the news!”

If, during Coronamania, people had considered only the people they knew, no one would have believed that a virus was causing mass-scale, premature deaths among non-old, non-sick people. Because it wasn’t. Throughout the past six years, when I asked others, no one could name a non-old, non-sick person they knew said to have been killed by The Deadly Virus. None of the Covophobic had any inkling that the old and sick were iatrogenically killed in the hospitals, while officials attributed these deaths to Covid.

In contrast, I, and likely many others, know over a dozen people who have died “of other causes” after taking the Covid shots. As I’ve seen so little news, I don’t know if the media has spoken ill of the jabs. I doubt it, because doing so would undermine the Scamdemic’s overarching, pro-Med/Pharma narrative and thus alienate their main sponsors.

Seeing even small bits of the contemptible Covid coverage angered me. Based on its Covid propaganda and its refusal to ask obvious questions or cover anti-Coronamania voices, the news industry deserves to die. I’m doing my part by eschewing legacy media. If a story is big enough, I won’t have to look for it. It will find me. I use the time saved by avoiding the news to talk to other people, listen to or play music, exercise, grow and make food and pray, et al.

I sometimes read Substacks or X accounts of people I trust. And I briefly scan the hype-heavy headlines to see what’s passed off as worthy of attention. But I don’t read the underlying stories about, e.g., a hantavirus said to have caused a handful of recent deaths.

Some say the hanta story is an attempt to grease the skids for the next viral crisis and vaccine. Maybe. But to me, the hanta focus feels more like a rearguard attempt to reinforce the narrative that lethal viruses are always lurking and thus, to retroactively justify the Covid response. The ludicrous, but still widely held, notion is that in 2020, the world spontaneously got smacked by the worst virus ever and that many more people would have died if we didn’t lock down, mask, test and mass-inject. The hanta message is that “it’s not nearly as bad as Covid.”

Nor was Covid nearly as bad as Covid. Mass virally-induced death is a myth. Without the news industry’s relentless support, Coronamania couldn’t have been sold to a gullible, news-addicted populace. By pushing hantavirus, monkeypox, avian flu, et al., Public Health “experts,” university researchers and Pharma execs, many of whom made millions promoting Coronamania, seek to cover their Scamdemic tracks, justify their existence and continue stealing multiple billions from the public.