As a journalist and writer you only ever commit about one percent of the things you see and hear to paper - any more than that and the libel lawyers would soon be collecting the keys to your house.
It’s been a weird week on that front. The story I’ve spent most of my time working on may never see the light of day, mostly because those who need to go on the record are afraid of doing so, lest their careers be destroyed in the aftermath.
I wish I could tell them that their fears are unfounded, but they are very well founded indeed.
More polarisation may not be a bad thing
This week saw Ireland’s Social Democrats take the fight to extend the commission into the Mother And Baby Homes extended for another year. It was a fight they won (their motion was passed), but they still ended up losing when the government simply ignored it by not doing what would have been necessary in the House to keep it going.
This kind of nefarious stunt is nothing new in politics; they are the reason we still know the name of Machiavelli. Deals are done in dark corners, fates and records sealed, only to allow those in power to remain so.
Of course, the moment you criticise this, the self-same sleeveens will round on you about your tone - there’s always something wrong with how these things are framed or phrased, and that always allows the incumbent sleeveens off the hook. And it doesn’t matter if you play by their rules; as soon as you do, they change them. And eventually the realisation dawns - you are never meant to win. In fact, there’s a whole system set up to stop you.
Let me be entirely clear - the people who gathered outside the family home of an Irish minister recently to protest about the lockdown and whatever else took their fancy were completely and utterly in the wrong. The family home should be a sanctuary, far removed form the political sphere.
At the same time as they did so, almost a thousand Irish families had no home of their own at all. These two things can both be true at the same time, and they have more in common than we might think.
There is no reasoning with the kind of idiot who would picket a minister’s home, knowing that his wife and young children lived there too, and nor should anyone try. For all its faults, there are ways and means of doing things in Irish politics, and for once the fact that barely any Irish politician has a principle worth the name is a good thing; it’s not that difficult to get them to change their minds.
But at the same time, there are almost a thousand families with no home of their own simply because it is tolerable; sad as we all believe it to be, it motivates none of us to get off our couch to do something about it.
To be fair, a few people do, but they will always be told to play nice, to say please and thank you, and, of course, to compromise.
The time for compromise is past, both with the doorstepping dickheads and the completely avoidable disaster of homelessness. Forget trying to reduce the polarisation - increase it instead, and maybe then things might start to change.
The Podcast
… this week featured Keith Begg, the Irish man who set up Media Watchdogs Sweden and who was pretty much run out of here for vocally disagreeing with the Covid-19 strategy. Have a listen here.
The Proverb
I write very little about basketball, so it’s the one sport that I can watch and enjoy - except when the Boston Celtics are shit, as they are at the moment.
They are a team bristling with young talent but that has no idea who it is or who it can be - it’s almost unbelievable that the most successful club in NBA history (you can get out of here with your LA Lakers talk, their first titles came in Minneapolis) should suffer from such a dearth of leadership.
At the same time as they were losing all round them this week, I happened to be reading the autobiography of Bill Russell, a former Celtics center who just happens to be not just the greatest American sportsman of all time, but one of the greatest ever Americans, full stop.
As a Black man in the 50s and 60s he suffered his share of racial abuse, but never quietly. Russell was a proud Black man, and he didn’t care who knew it. He didn’t see it as his job to compromise with racists - then and now, it’s a revolutionary stance.
Modern fans often point to the small, closed league that was the NBA when he was winning title after title as a player and a coach, not realising that it was much, much harder. Every night he would face a handful of the absolute best players in the world, and every night he would have to beat them. There were no journeymen lifting paychecks (not that the paychecks were anything to write home about compared to today’s riches) who could simply be steamrollered, no nights off, nothing. Just an endless grind of winning.
Every day I listen to a podcast about the Celtics made by journalist John Karalis, who played pro basketball in Greece and has been on my podcast a couple of times to talk about his work, and yesterday he gave out a number and asked listeners to leave voicemails.
The only things I could think of were Bill Russell, and the old Irish saying “Ní neart go chur le chéile”, which is often translated as “there’s no strength without unity.
Given the Boston Irish heritage of the Celtics, and the greatness that went before this generation of players in the shape of Bill Russell, it may not be a bad place to start.
The Weather
This week the winter sort-of ended in Sweden. The days are noticeably longer and when the temperature rose this week the snow quickly melted away. Though I know it can return as quickly as it left, I’m done with winter for now.
The Big Guy From Malmö
Over a decade ago I sent some questions to Zlatan Ibrahimovic through an intermediary at the Swedish Football Association - Zlatan doesn’t do many interviews that he doesn’t have to for broadcast or sponsorship reasons, not even with the biggest media outlets in the world. His brand is built on billboards, not on back pages.
There was an election coming in Sweden and I asked a simple enough question - if you could ask politicians to do one thing for Rosengård (the estate where he grew up in Malmö), what would that be?
The response was swift. Zlatan wouldn’t be answering political questions, even soft-ball vanilla ones like the one I posed.
I asked the representative to pass on the message that the way interviews work is that journalists ask questions, and subjects answer them - otherwise, there was no point.
That was the end of that interview.
This week Zlatan criticised LeBron James for speaking out about politics, and it was very telling. It was also biting off a bit more than he could chew.
The sum total of what Zlatan said has been said before - “shut up and dribble.”
LeBron remained calm and chose his words carefully, but when he did respond he essentially dunked all over Zlatan’s self-centred approach to speaking out about racism.
It’s almost laughable that Zlatan’s original comments were even picked up - a European ignorantly pontificating on the activism of Black American athletes is not news, especially not a soccer player, but Zlatan has a bigger brand than most.
But the man with the biggest sporting brand in the world, Michael Jordan, has also been pilloried for his lack of activism in the past, and his famously glib remark that “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
And of course, the even bigger elephant in the room is Zlatan’s tenure at Paris Saint Germain, where he was a key pawn in Qatar’s unprecedented sportswashing project.
Whether he likes it or not, Zlatan is very much involved in politics - his silence is just as much a political choice as LeBron’s outspokenness. LeBron speaks up for his community, whereas Zlatan stays quiet to maintain his wealth and privilege.
And if that’s the choice you make, then you have no right whatsoever to be telling others to keep out of it.
The Sport
This week and next week are all about the Nordic skiing world championships, which are taking place in Oberstdorf in Germany. I’m writing short reports each day based on what I see on the TV, and it truly is amazing sport. Though I' much prefer to do Alpine skiing or snowboarding, I don’t really watch either - the real drama is in the biathlon (which took place in February) and the lung-bursting cross-country races. The rivalries between the Nordic nations are as hot as you will find in sport too.
The Signoff
Thanks for making it this far, and if you enjoyed it please feel free to share with someone else.
I hope you have a great weekend, and that next week is even better. Better days are coming, even if we don’t know when just yet.
Look after yourself.