The Looks of Lisbon

I've been thinking, for a while, about the meaning of aesthetics. I've also spent a meagre amount of time thinking about the Lisbon Treaty, and – perhaps surprisingly - the two go quite well together.

No no no, don't stop reading, I've not gone all political. I've long been of the opinion that politics doesn't really matter, certainly not as much as – say – the second series of Skins rallying after a dodgy start to wind up being really really good. The most interesting thing about politics, these days, is how bad most of its practitioners seem to be at doing it; and if you want to look for the cock-obvious reason that the Lisbon Treaty got voted down, you don't have to look much further than the incredible incompetence of the people who were trying to get us to vote for the thing. One of the more grotesque results of the treaty getting rejected is the sight of people like William Hague congratulating the Irish people for striking against European bureaucracy. It's not that there isn't a grain of truth in that, but it's just that having the whole country suddenly – if inadvertently – align itself with shady organisations like Libertas, or downright nasty ones like UKIP, is just plain ugly. Aesthetics strike again.

(And if you want an example of political incompetence – the head honcho of Libertas, Declan Ganley, is the head of a company that acts as a contractor for the U.S. Military. And while there's nothing wrong with anyone leading a campaign about anything they like, and I'm sure his reasons were perfectly principled, blah blah opinion blah blah free speech blah blah please don't sue me for libel, you do have to wonder why no-one mentioned this – given that one of the good things about the Lisbon Treaty was that it was going to end the arrangements between the EU and NATO, thereby breaking the links between Europe and Declan Ganley's employers. If a politician was in this position, it wouldn't be long before he was accused of a conflict of interest. Oh well.)

And so if there's anything to be learned, it's that you can't keep insulting a nations' intelligence and then expect them to go along with you anyway, unless you're Bertie Ahern. The Yes side made great play of the No side presenting falsehoods and misrepresentations, but they missed the point. It wasn't that the No side had fictitious arguments, it was that they were only ones who bothered to present any arguments; simply putting pictures of politicians on a lamp-post with “Vote Yes” below them is so lazy, so derisory, so insulting, that the Yes side simply deserved to lose. On balance, there was very little in the Lisbon Treaty that was bad, and most of it was really rather sensible, but drafting a treaty in incomprehensible legal-ese smacks of a similar contempt for the average person. It's really not surprising it lost.

Which is where aesthetics come in. Politicians are such an out-of-touch, hopelessly esoteric bunch that they use words like “style over substance”, “image”, and, more than anything else, “spin.” This is so moronic that it's difficult to believe that people swallow it. What words like this boil down to is aesthetics, and it doesn't take much thinking to realise that the aesthetic of what someone does is as important as what they're actually doing. Again, you can tie it back to the Lisbon Treaty – the No side were able to win because the aesthetic of their argument was better. On one side you've got a Treaty which no-one understands which no-one's bothering to explain, on the other you've got people apparently fighting for the rights of the common man not to be pushed around by bullies. That wasn't really the case at all, of course, but it was presented to us this way; and who on Earth is going to vote for the first lot? Human beings instinctively understand things as broadly sweeping narratives, sand the No campaign gave them a story to identify with (our love of narrative is why, say, Eamon Dunphy continues to be reasonably popular as a pundit even though he's spectacularly wrong about most things. Dunphy presents his arguments in terms of sweeping storylines that he extracts from carefully-selected facts. His dismissal of Ronaldo as a brattish, spoiled footballer who was overhyped and lauded by celebrity-obsessed press is obviously one-eyed, but it's a terribly seductive story. We want to believe it, because it's a better story than the truth).

Politicians these days like to say that we live in an age of spin, because the word "spin" brings with it connoitations of something that's automatically a bad thing. It's worth pointing out that politicians like Eamon De Valera or Winston Churchill were as canny and savvy about their image as anyone today, but the main point is that 'spin' doesn't actually fool anyone. All the spin in the world won't make Willie O'Dea seem competent, and the image consultancies haven't made Gordon Brown any more likeable than he used to be. And if we're going to go for the big fish... Brian Cowen has always been a boorish, intolerant bully, and Fianna Fáil's attitude over the last few weeks have quietly reflected that. Image isn't something that gets veneered onto 'substance'; image is substance, and a more reliable indication of someone's personality than what they do. Martin Cullen may well trot out the Fianna Fáil line about the “ordinary people of Ireland”, but he's always going to be the man who went on live television and told a complete stranger that he was sponging off his neighbours (the man in question was “unemployed at the moment”, and his wife was a fucking social worker. Cullen got a smattering of applause for this, which was about as depressing a thing as you might ever see on television). Or take Mary O'Rourke's comment about her campaign team “working like blacks.” This is exactly the sort of thing that politicians will call a momentary lapse, and try and write off as 'certainly not good for her image'; look to the woman's record, they'll say. Thing is, that “momentary lapse” tells us far more about O'Rourke than her record ever will. Politicians will do anything, provided it's popular; their 'record' tells us nothing about them, since we've got no idea why or how they did whatever they did. However, when a woman says something that thoughtless, and then – more importantly – refuses to apologise for it, we know instinctively that she's a stupid, arrogant, stubborn and insensitive old bag who doesn't deserve to be elected to the head of her local branch of the Macra na Feirme, let alone public office. Her record can lie. Her image can't.

Ultimately, we need to ban the word “spin” from the collective vocabulary for a while. People trust aesthetics, and they're right to do so. You can instinctively tell whether a politician is half-decent or not from the way they behave and present themselves; that's really how politics works. Our new leader is a man who has a nice record of rounding on any members of the public who dared to oppose him on Questions and Answers, squinting his miserable eyes at them, and more or less shouting them down and calling them stupid. It doesn't matter what his budget tax measures were like; that's how we really know what Brian Cowen's like, same way you just know that any bloke you see wearing a hat inside a pub is an arsehole. People like to claim that Cowen doesn't go in for “the politics of spin”, or – more accurately – that he doesn't care what people think; however, that's because he doesn't really think their opinion matters.

The Yes campaign treated everyone with the same level of contempt, and as a result they lost. On balance, this is probably a good thing. What's more interesting, though, is how effectively it goes to show that if something looks wrong, it almost certainly is wrong. The wrongness of Lisbon probably doesn't lie in the treaty; but it's clearly lurking in the mentality of those who drew it up and tried to sell it to us.

And that's that. I'll be funny next week, I promise. I only wrote about this because I still haven't gone to see Indiana Jones yet.