The Obituary Of The Transparent Ironist

[Editor's Note : The following obituary is reproduced from The Potomac Herald (London edition), March 26, 2005. It is the only authorised obituary of the Transparent Ironist, and it speaks more volumes for what he most passionately believed in when he was alive than any auto/biography of his ever can.]

Mr Robert McCullough, veteran Republican senator for Colorado has died in his sleep in his country home in Nashville at the old age of 86, Reuters reports. Mr McCullough, who played a vital role during the Nixon administration and was at one stage even highly tipped for the post of the Secretary of State, wrote a weekly column in the Washington Post under the pseudonym of the Transparent Ironist to popularise his Republican views. What nobody knew, however, except for some of his closest friends, was that he himself criticised his own views under another pseudonym, the Banal Optimist, in that very same newspaper. It was widely believed that the Banal Optimist was Mr Crispin O'Hear, Democrat senator for Idaho, but the truth is finally out that it was, in fact, none other than the devious Mr McCullough, as crafty as a prairie wolf, who wrote as a Republican under one name and as a Democrat under another. So skillful indeed was Mr McCullough, the hardened Republican, in talking, thinking, feeling, and behaving as a Democrat that on one occasion in 1992 he was even mistaken by Bill Clinton for a Democrat at a party convention.

It is no wonder, then, that some of Mr McCullough's most intimate and beloved friends were not Republicans but Democrats. He once told a Democrat friend that he had taken to heart Jesus's great commandment, Love thy enemy, and that it was possible for him to do this only by placing himself in the shoes of precisely those whom he disagreed with, that is, the Democrats. It was this dangerous desire of his to see the world through the eyes of his sworn enemies that often placed Mr McCullough under the suspicion of his fellow-Republicans, and earned him the bemused admiration of his Democrat opponents.

Mr McCullough was a lover of the good things in life which he associated with what he called the high culture of Beethoven, Homeric tragedy, white wine, Proustian prose, German Romanticism, Corsican cheese, Russian caviar, and a liberal dose of irony. Not that he was unaware, being the ironist that he was, of how 'politically incorrect' and 'elitist' these loves of his were, but he nevertheless remained forever loyal to them in a world where nothing is stable, nothing is solid. He was a life-long antagonist of genetic determinism according to which we human beings are merely survival machines for the propagation of our selfish genes. As if to refute such a determinism through his own life, he leaves behind no children.

The night before he died, he wrote the following words which were found on his desk by his house-keeper :

'We men have become living ghosts', the old man said

Standing at the smoky street-intersection

'For we have forgotten how to die'

And I leaned towards him

Trying to catch his words

That were soon drowned

In that great unholy din

Of the rush-hour traffic.

Mr McCullough once wrote that there is only one genuinely philosophical problem : why do we go on living when we know that there are billions of human beings who are living through the most unspeakable agony, agony that we cannot mitigate in any way. This morning after his death, we might perhaps like to pause for a moment in silence and put that question to ourselves : why do we go on living in spite of knowing that we can do nothing to remove, or even reduce, the suffering of billions of the wretched on this planet?

The Prayers Of Two Atheists

On Good Friday today, I cannot help remembering a most remarkable experience that I had in Cambridge within a few months of my arrival here from Delhi seven years ago in the white winter of 1998. I was then, and I perhaps am even today, a 'confused believer', meaning by that phrase a person who does not, on the one hand, deny the existence of God but who, on the other hand, fails to understand why a transcendent God, perfectly blissful in God-self, should have wanted to create a precarious world of fragile beings who are forever steeped in so much abject misery. These mortal questions were put to me most pointedly one cold November evening in 1998 when I went to a graveyard situated seven miles from my college, Trinity. As I was walking through the narrow rows of speechless gravestones, trying not to step on the autumn branches that were strewn all over the moist earth, I saw a middle-aged woman wearing a shining black coat kneeling at one of the gravestones, and softly murmuring something to herself. I stopped in my steps and was trying to read the epitaph over her shoulder when she suddenly turned round, stared at me for a frozen moment and, while still kneeling, burst out crying.

Almost at once, however, she restrained herself and fell silent. With her, so did the black crows on the leafless branches above, and a most dreadful silence began to fill the cold distance between us.

'I hope you will excuse me', she said at last breaking the uneasy calm, 'For a moment I thought you were him. You do bear a striking resemblance to him, and I felt that he had come to pay me a visit today.' And that was how she started narrating to me some isolated fragments of a heart-stirring story.

She, Fiona McGrath, had been born sometime in the 1950s in the poverty-stricken highlands of Scotland, though she could remember neither of her parents. She had been adopted by a man, Mark Witherington, who had taken her under his wings from an orphanage in the outskirts of Inverness and who now lay buried in front of her. It was in his home in Cambridge that she had spent most of her childhood and teenage years, and his home was the place around which some of her fondest memories were centred. He had lived mostly by himself, devoting all his spare time away from his work to being with her. Three weeks before he died on Good Friday, 1982, he had told her that his entire life had been one relentless protest against God for having created this world, this vale of suffering, and that the true atheist was not the person who denied God's existence but the one who did not repeat God's mistake of creating this world by bringing babies into this world. It was for this reason, he explained, that he had never desired any children of his own, but had adopted her with the hope that he might be able to remove a little bit of suffering from this world.

As for Fiona herself, she was an atheist in the spirit of her father. She would come to the graveyard every year on Good Friday and pray. But pray to whom or to what? She simply did not know. She would kneel down at his gravestone, drink in the surrounding silence, and strengthen her resolve to carry on through her own life the long protest that her father had sustained against the faceless, the nameless, the heartless, and, above all, the pointless God.

Last year, I went to that graveyard again on a summer evening, and when I went to the familiar spot close to the dilapidated brick walls, I saw a new gravestone beside the old one, that of Fiona McGrath's. Beyond their gravestones, the red sun was slowly going down into the misty fields where three black cows were quietly grazing, unware of the devious ways of gods and human beings. And high above them, there were two stars shining at each other in the dusk sky, stars that were scrupulously guarding the graves of two atheists and were patiently passing on their unspeakable prayers to a speechless God.

Three Aphorisms Of The Transparent Ironist

(a) One person's liberating 'holism' is another person's oppressive 'totalitarianism'.

(b) People who claim to be tolerant at one level are often virulently intolerant at another level, so that their surface tolerance becomes a mask for their subterranean intolerance. One must remember in all such cases that tolerance necessarily presupposes some form of exclusion, and to say that one tolerates 'everyone and everything' is to make a vacuous statement.

(c) How to speak with, to and for those who have suffered without glorifying suffering in the process; how to forge contingent forms of solidarity without skating over differences and disparities : these are perhaps the two most complicated tasks for our troubled times.

An Empire-ical Question

As the denunciations of America begin to reach a shrill crescendo, I begin to wonder more and more exactly what the anti-America invectives are directed against. Suppose tomorrow we do manage to dismantle this American Empire, will that be the end of the (his-)story? What if ten years down the line there emerge some people from our own midst who would wish to assemble a new Empire from its broken-down relics? Is it possible for us human beings to live together without feeling an inveterate itch to establish more and more grandiose forms of Empires?
The reason why I ask these rhetorical questions is because as an Indian I am only too aware that when Mahatma Gandhi opposed imperialism he was primarily challenging not the British Empire but the British Empire. (There is a vital difference between the two, depending on where we place the emphasis.) Do these questions imply that I am a covert apologist for the American Empire? No, for an Empire that needs such apologists is already on its way out. However, I do wish to point out that it is not clear precisely what we trying so desperately to exterminate in the present day : is it the American Empire or is it the American Empire?

How To Find Your Mr Right (And Keep Him)

Now and then I shall be offering on this blog some free advice to (possibly single) women on the topic, 'How To Find Your Mr Right (And Keep Him)', today's post being the first instalment in this series. Having said that, I must reply at the outset to a possible vitriolic objection : 'What the hell! Is he going to pull us back to the Middle Ages all over again? Is he an illiterate dumbo or something? Has he never heard of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Mary Daly, Luce Irigaray, and Donna Haraway? How can he be so paternalising, and so patronising (a long series of most dreadful P-words follows thereafter, too terrible to be repeated here)?' And to this, I shall reply as follows : 'My lovely dears, if it is a matter of ploughing through your arcane prose, I should like to state, but only for the sake of the record, that I have not only done my bit of reading but have also, if the pun be allowed, internalised what you have written. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that even as I type these words there are millions, millions, and millions of women out there who are just dying to meet their Mr Right. Now if it so happens that you do not belong to these millions, you are most welcome to stop reading this post right N-O-W and close this webpage AT ONCE. There, you see : you didn't do that, did you? And that means that for all your disclaimers you do, after all, harbour a secret wish to know how to find your Mr Right. So then, read on.'

Very well. Now that we have settled this rather nasty business, one disclaimer from my side this time : I shall not aim at any sort of comprehensiveness in this matter, picking up those topics that I believe you need to grasp properly if you are to be successful in your search for your Mr Right.

(A) ADVICE : Never, ever try to give advice to your man when it comes to important public matters. Indeed, if he comes to you asking for advice in these matters, pick up that cell-phone at once and call his psychoanalyst immediately. A man who needs such advice is in urgent need of psychiatric care. However, you are more than welcome to offer him sound advice relating to private concerns such as that random coffee stain on his blue tie, the specks of dust on his black shoe, and booking that summer holiday to Cyprus well in advance.

(B) SPORTS : Try to develop a taste for sports, the most common of these being cricket, football, golf, baseball and basketball. Now this does not mean that you have to know the precise difference between a square-cut and a straight-drive in cricket, or a penalty and a foul in football. In most cases, it is enough that you know that Jemima Khan has moved on in life, that Victoria Beckham was almost about to move on in life, and that Wayne Rooney is yet to find a life.

(C) HUMOUR : Be careful on this rather sensitive point. Most men become extremely serious when they are told that they do not have a good sense of humour (GSH). However, if you are lucky enough to have found a man who does have a GSH don't let him know this, for that will save him the agony of having to come up with some one-liner everytime you drop your hat.

(D) IN-LAWS : Now we are moving into dangerous terrain, and my beautiful dears, please, I beg you, give me your undivided attention. I shall start with his mother, that is, your mother-in-law, and in this respect there is one thing that you must completely internalise. It is this : no matter who you are, no matter how many university degrees you have, no matter how many offices you have worked at, no matter how many times you go to the gym, no matter how beautifully you can smile, and no matter how many grandchildren you are going to give your mother-in-law to repay your social debt to Maternity, in her opinion you always were and will always remain a little piece of shit until you reach your grave. Now, now, don't try to run away from this gospel truth with replies like : 'Oh, how mean of you to generalise this way! You should just come and see my mother-in-law. She really is so different from all others, she loves me just like her own daughter!' No, my dear, please trust me when I tell you that is the first step on the road towards sure disaster. The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions. There is not a single mother on this planet who can forget the fact that her daughter-in-law is the secret interloper who came in the silence of the night and stole away her son from her side. Anyway, enough of mothers-in-law, a rather pitiable breed of women. As for his father, that is, your father-in-law, ah well, he is an innocent lamb compared to your mother-in-law, a breath of fresh spring air in a fusty room. This formula usually works with fathers-in-law : Pick up a thick book from his shelf, pretend to read the first page of it very carefully, close your eyes for a minute, and then meditate on what you have (supposedly) read. Then look at him carefully with shimmering eyes and say : 'Oh, now I know why Mark has so much class. He must have got it from you! You have given him such a wonderful education!' A hundred years ago, the standard response used to be : 'Oh, Mark has got your beautiful eyes!', but in these post-Freudian times that we live in, I must warn you that this reply might be just a bit too risque a slip.

(E) ARGUMENTS : Make sure that you know exactly what your man means when the word 'Argument' is flashed on a white screen in front of him. From an anthropo-logical point of view, men can usually be grouped into three categories in this respect. Use this table to find out what sort of a man yours is.

Category 1 : If you were to argue with a man who belongs to this category, be prepared to see a --- 'What? Women know how to argue?' --- look written all over his face. Such men believe that women are illiterate folk who barely managed to scrape through school, and their first reaction to a woman who argues with them is one of utter shock.

Category 2 : In contrast to the above men, those who are in this group believe that the basic problem with women is not that they argue too little but that they argue too much.

Category 3 : This is a rather charming category of men who believe that the only people who quarrel are those who do not, in fact, know how to argue. For them, their entire existence is one long never-ending argument which can take various twists and turns into unknown alleys but somehow always returns, even if battered and bruised, to the high street. A Health Warning, however : such men should be carefully avoided by women who are low on patience and are seeking ready-made solutions.

(F) COOKING : Face this fact : in spite of women's liberation and all that nonsense going on, you will have to cook (or even be forced to learn how to cook) at some point or the other in the future. Now there used to be prevalent in the dark days of yore a barbaric system called arranged marriages when the only slogan that wives had was this one : 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach'. Which was quite ironic given the fact that most of these men were, in fact, heartless, so that what these wives actually managed to reach through their husband's stomachs is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, now that we have all become enlightened people and are living in the glorious light of the system of free-market marriage, there are two major problems with that slogan.

Problem 1 : There is always that odd (possibly intellectual) fellow out there who will respond in the following way to your cooking overtures : 'Be gone from my sight, O seductress of a Woman! Do you not know that there are higher things in life than cooking and eating food? I eat to live, not live to eat.' Which is clearly not a reply that you can stomach.

Problem 2 : It may so happen that your man belongs to the opposite group so that the problem with him is not that he knows too little about food but that he knows too much about it. He could be, for example, a chef in a French restaurant who will never be satisfied with anything you cook, no matter how much of your heart you put into it.

Solution : Here is a solution if you, my patient dears, find yourself having to tackle with either of the above problems. Adopt the slogan : 'The way to a man's heart is through his mind.' Once again, however, I must caution you that there are three problems with this reply.

Problem 1 : There will always be that weird (possibly homeless) Romantic who will reply to this slogan as : 'The heart has its reasons which the mind knows not of', so that the more heartless he becomes, the more mindless you will feel.

Problem 2 : Your man might be a materialist ('materialist' = 'a person who believes that the only things that exist are strings of DNA'), in which case he will spend his entire life trying to prove to you that the mind, his as well as yours, do not, as a matter of fact, exist.

Problem 3 : This, however, is the biggest problem. When you were a young teenage girl planning to join Che Guevera's army, subvert the Establishment and fight side by side with your men comrades, your mother must have shouted at you at least once : 'It is very rare for men to think with their minds.' Precisely so, for I will be damned if she has not learnt her lesson yet! It is, in fact, so remarkable what difference it can make to a woman which side of the wall she is standing on. As a mother, she is Wisdom incarnate, but as a mother-in-law she becomes Satan incarnate overnight.

(G) BABIES : In the good old days, marrying a man was the same as earning a sure passport to motherhood. But in these weird times of ours, there are always a few 'existential' ones out there who have the strangest notions about why having babies is unethical, immoral, and all sorts of dreadful things. So once again, my lovely dears, please come out clean on this matter, and let your man know where you stand (or wish to stand) on the matter of babies, lest every time you go ga-ga about babies he goes boo-boo.

(H) SARCASM : Avoid like a serpent a man who passes sarcastic comments on a third person in his/her absence. For all you know, that third person could be you when you are absent.

(I) MUSIC : Be sure that you know well in advance what your man's tastes in music are like. Most men suffer from an Alterity Syndrome when it comes to music, that is, they believe that musical choices are a simplistic question of Either/Or. Either they like Beethoven or Bhangra, either Bartok or the Beatles, either Mozart or Madonna, and the list never ends. It never enters their tiny minds that music should be a case of Both/And. Therefore, place all your cards on the table in the beginning so that you do not have to spend the rest of your life facing his music.

(J) FEMINISM : Now, now the tricky F-spot. Once again, from an anthropo-logical perspective, men can be readily grouped into three categories. (If you are getting the feeling that men are so predictable, well, my wonderful dears, trust me when I say that this is just the beginning.)

Category 1 : These men have not the faintest clue what Feminism stands for. These are a very rare species of men who do not, in fact, need to know the complexities of feminist theory for they are, as we say, feminists before feminism.

Category 2 : These men have not the faintest clue what Feminism stands for, but this is because they keep themselves at an arm's length from a social practice which they fear will take away their womenfolk from under their control and will lead to widespread social disharmony, political chaos, and moral disorder.

Category 3 : This, in fact, is the most dangerous category of men so far as Feminism is concerned. These men have learnt the nuances of French prose, and have patiently read through the entire feminist canon under the midnight lamp. And yet they remain blissfully unaware that their sister is being forced into an arranged marriage she would rather not enter, that women in his own office are being discriminated against, and that his female secretary gets paid less than his male valet.

(K) COMPLAINTS : Whenever you complain, make sure that you have, so to speak, covered your flanks properly. Here is one standard example : you complain to your man that he has been watching the telly for the last three hours, but he does not move an inch. He even refuses to acknowledge that you exist. But why should he? Why should he when being the smart fellow that he is he knows that the reason why you want him out of the living room is so that you can hog the telephone for the next four hours? In such cases, avoid this unnecessary cycle of complaints and counter-complaints : just buy a cell-phone which can have a genuinely cathartic effect on you.

(L) MR PERFECT : If you keep on waiting much too long, it might be possible that you believe that He has to be not only your Mr Right but also your Mr Perfect. Now you obviously have a little bit of serious thinking to do on this matter, don't you? It may be possible that the man you are waiting for is so Perfect that he is, in fact, a saint dressed in immaculate white. Not that I have anything personal against saints, don't get me wrong on this now, especially with Easter coming up and all that. It is just that there is only one problem with your wishing to marry a saint : most saints are misogynists. So the next time you go on dissecting the man who comes along your way, take pause to think for a moment : the fact that you have a compulsive habit of dissecting every man may have something uncomfortable to say not about him but about yourself.

How To Stay Alive

If you are in the contemporary West, and if you want to stay alive, that is, want to be accepted by the Sophisticated People as a member of their charmed group, you should know precisely who and what is dead. To help you to survive, I have compiled a list of slogans that you should try to memorise (='internalise') :

(1) The Author is Dead.

(2) The Reader is Dead.

(3) The Writer is Dead.

(4) The Subject is Dead.

(5) The 'I' is Dead.

(6) History is Dead.

(7) Politics is Dead.

(8) Society is Dead.

(9) The Individual is Dead.

(10) Man is Dead.

(11) Woman is Dead.

(12) Progress is Dead.

(13) God is Dead.

(14) Marx is Dead.

(15) Language is Dead.

(16) Truth is Dead.

(17) The Government is Dead.

(18) The Law is Dead.

(19) Socialism is Dead.

(20) Meaning is Dead.

(21) The End is Dead.

Perhaps you are now asking yourself : 'Oh boy, how did I manage to survive with all these things and people dying all around me?' To which, I can only answer : 'Perhaps with the daily dose of irony from my blog. After all, when you are hungry, irony will keep you alive.'

The Lonely Universe

Many scientists are fond of telling you the following bed-time story : We human beings are just a tiny blip on a minute speck of dust hurtling through billions and billions of miles of cold, unfeeling, and uncaring spaces. This blip is our universe which is but an accident, a freak, a quirk.

This is what you should you do the next time you hear this story : seize on the word ‘accident’, and do not let go of it until you have made your point. If you have to make 100 electric-bulbs, you would set up a factory and go about producing them from various constituent bits and pieces. Let us say that it turns out that 2 of these 100 bulbs are detected to be malfunctioning pieces. You would then be justified in saying that these 2 are accidental outputs with respect to the other 98. However, when someone claims that the universe itself is an accident, what could that possibly mean? Has that person had the experience, so to speak, of 50 million other universes on the basis of which it is declared that the one we live in is an accident with respect to those? How would she know that this universe is an ‘accident’ when this is the only universe she has ever lived in?

(1) Man does not live by rights alone. Which probably goes some way towards explaining why woman is usually found on his left.

(2) I shall vote for whichever political party is right after there is none that is left over.

Some pubs in the UK have the following phrase as a warning against low ceilings : Mind Your Head. If you think carefully about this phrase, at least 2,000 years of European philosophy are contained within it.

The Ambiguity of Political Correctness

London, November 2002, The National Gallery of Art. The Ironist and a friend of his are looking at a Victorian painting of a woman dressed in thick white fur with a golden-haired dog at her feet. The following conversation ensues :

Friend : This woman is awesome.

Ironist : So is her dog.

Friend : I would prefer this woman to the dog anyday.

Ironist : Are you nuts? This woman is a white imperialist who was living on the taxes from the African colonies. I would prefer that dog to the woman anyday.

Friend : Erm, I have this funny feeling now.

Ironist : Like what?

Friend : I mean, one of us is being politically incorrect here. But who? You by preferring an animal to a human being, or me by choosing an imperialist woman over a dog?

Why Money Can't Buy You Time

Some people these days, especially if they are in the corporate sector, the IT or the software industries, seem to be caught within a violent contradiction, and though they sometimes come to realise this fact, it is a realisation that, like the secular police and the religious God, unfortunately arrives too late. This is the contradiction involved in trying to save time and trying to save money at the same time, when as a matter of fact one cannot accomplish both concurrently. To see why this is so, consider the following.

Suppose you want to save money, say for your children's future education. In that case, you shall have to work more and more, and sometimes even do overtime duty. Consequently, you shall be able to save less and less time to spend with your children. Therefore, the more you save money, the less of leisure time you are able to find (Option 1).

Now look at it from the other end. The more you save time to take your children on a holiday to Disneyland, to teach them arithmetic, to tell them bed-time stories, and to play with their toys, the less often you will turn up at your work, the less money you shall earn, and consequently, the less money you shall save. Hence, the more you save time for leisure, the less you save money for the future (Option 2).

Which of these two Options is taken will vary from one person to another. An individual who takes Option 1 will say : 'Oh, I am just 28 today. Let me accumulate as much money as I can now, and I shall take an early retirement at the age of 40 in a Spanish villa with my spouse.' There are three problems with this Option : (a) s/he will probably be too worn out by the rigours of the 16 hours-a-day/7 days- a-week job by that time to be able enjoy the money that s/he is going to pile up, (b) in fact, most of this money may flow into the doctor's pockets, and (c) s/he seems to think that Death is a private secretary whom s/he can keep on postponing until s/he is ready to go. Option 2 is, by far, the much better of these two, so much so that I must leave it to you to tell me what problems you see with it.