In this extract from the preface to his new book, 'The Politburo Has Decided That You Are Unwell' - a collection of his recent articles - John Waters reflects on three events that made him re-evaluate his opinions and sympathies.
I reckon that I have had three key moments in my life which changed completely how I viewed the world and how it should be regarded. All were public moments, in a sense, and all were personal, in a deeper sense. I believe, along with the founding feminists, that the personal is political.
The first was a moment I shared with more than half the world: watching the Berlin Wall come down. Up until then, I had regarded myself as something of a socialist. In common with many of my generation, I felt the world would be a better place if run on left-wing lines. There were, of course, a number of inconvenient aspects to this belief, not least the reality of existing socialism in Eastern Europe, but the failures, and even the abuses of this were readily ascribable to the paranoia of the West and the inhospitality of the Cold War. Even after the Wall came down, I continued to imagine that it was possible to separate out the socialism that had failed in reality and the theoretical model that had not yet been tried.
Then, in 1990, I went to Prague to cover the first post-revolutionary Czechoslovakian elections for The Irish Times. There, I met a man about my own age, named Ivan, who lived in a beautiful small apartment just around the corner from Narodni Street, where the November 1989 revolution had started when a students' march in memory of a dead hero was attacked by police.
How many people now remember the reports that emerged in the wake of that revolution to the effect that this incident had actually been engineered from Moscow by the KGB, on Mikhail Gorbachev's direct command? It appears that there were fears in the Kremlin that the communist regime in Prague had become so hardline that the inevitable full-blooded revolution would result in the removal of communism and the termination of the link with the USSR. Gorbachev's plan was to infiltrate the Czech student movement in order to bring about a controlled rebellion which would allow the existing regime in Prague to be replaced by a more moderate, reformist administration of the Kremlin's choosing - still socialist, but socialism with a human face.
The scheme was, if anything, too successful. The student demonstration was put down by the police and the word went out that a student had been killed. Within days, the revolution was unstoppable. In fact, the "student" had been a member of the KGB, who had infiltrated the student group, and who lay down and pretended to be dead in order to provoke precisely the situation that resulted. But the plan began to backfire when none of the people Gorbachev wished to put in place were willing to serve, and the result was the removal of the communist regime and its replacement by a fully democratic administration under Václav Havel.
But, in the arcade of a shop on Narodni Street, at the point where the bogus student had fallen, an impromptu altar was created. In accordance with tradition, people came to pay tribute at the altar and to light candles in memory of the fallen hero.
Soon hundreds, perhaps thousands, of candles were burning there around the clock.
Soon, too, the candle wax became something of a social menace, pouring onto the street and blocking up the drains. My friend Ivan succeeded in having himself placed in charge of the problem, with instructions to clean up the altar every day and remove all the excess candle wax from the sidewalk. Soon he had quite a store of the stuff. A mixture of every conceivable colour of candle, it had fused together in a shite-coloured brown.
Then Ivan had an idea. He bought himself a number of bronze busts of the communist leaders of Czechoslovakia and the USSR, still readily available in only-just post-communist Prague. From these he made moulds, into which he poured the candle wax, making new candles in the shape of the heads of Lenin, Stalin and the erstwhile Czech tyrant, Klement Gottwald. He called his products "Gottwalds" (pronounced "Gottvolds"), and began selling them to some of the curious visitors attracted to Prague at that time.
When I was leaving Prague after the election to return to Dublin, Ivan accompanied me to the airport. On the way out in the taxi, I couldn't help noticing that he was carrying a somewhat conspicuous cardboard box, which he refused to discuss in any serious way.
When we reached the airport, he handed me the box, saying: "You must bring to Ireland the heads of the socialist murderers."
It was at this moment that any illusion about socialism melted away from me forever. For what struck me immediately was the banality of my own clinging to an ideology which, for Ivan and his countrymen and women, was an ideology of death. Literal death, certainly, but also other kinds of death, rendering Czechoslovakia a "Biafra of the spirit", in Havel's powerful phrase.
THE SECOND moment that changed me was a more elongated one, stretching through much of my 40s, amounting to the slow realisation that, in a certain respect, I was a second-class human being. Like many men of my generation, I had subscribed completely to the idea of what was termed women's emancipation. I would rarely have dared to describe myself as a feminist, but I undoubtedly subscribed to a broadly liberal-feminist worldview, and my essential views on relevant matters were pretty much indistinguishable from most of the feminists I knew. I agreed with the feminists that women in history, and right up to the present, had had a pretty bad deal at the hands of men, and that the relationship between the sexes was characterised by a gross imbalance of power and opportunity. For these sins I condemned all men, apart, oddly enough, from myself. I reckoned, I suppose, that my willingness to acknowledge the past wrongs of my sex was sufficient to exonerate me from any responsibility for the, as I would have seen it, continuing injustice towards women. Any feminist acquaintance seeking to gain support for her condemnations of the evils of patriarchy would have found herself pushing an open door with me. As a journalist I gave voice to these ideas in a fairly consistent manner, and as an editor I was more than willing to provide space to feminists to promulgate their views.
And then I became a father and discovered almost overnight that most of what we were peddling was humbug. Within days or weeks of the birth of my child, it began to dawn on me that, whatever had been happening between the sexes, and however society had formed its arrangements in this regard, the picture was, at the very least, nothing like as one-sided as I had previously accepted. As an unmarried father, I found myself without even the most basic legal entitlement to conduct a worthwhile relationship with my own child. On discovering this, as I have frequently outlined, I immediately headed back to the place where I had last seen my liberal-feminist cohort and urged them to Come quickly!, for they would never guess what I had just stumbled upon.
What I had stumbled upon, in my own certain view, was a clear instance of the kind of injustice and inhumanity that, as left-liberal-feminists, we had railed against for so long. The only difference was that the victims on this occasion were not women and children, but men and their children, but that didn't matter - did it? - because the principle was what was important after all. A little breathless at my discovery, I poured out my story, whereupon my erstwhile cohort set about trying to kick my head in.
As I began to reflect and read more and more about the subject, it slowly came home to me that the idea, which I had taken for granted all my life, that the world operated on the basis of the oppression of women by men was one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century, an elaborate tissue of Orwellian lies. And so, for several years at the end of the second millennium, Ifound myself writing publicly about things I could not believe: that in a supposedly modern, civilised society (whatever that is), abuses of fundamental human rights were taking place on a routine basis which, in another context, would be condemned outright by those who now and here sought to defend them.
Nothing I have written about has attracted so much opprobrium, but it seemed to me that few things in the world could matter so much, so I couldn't stop.
In some way, I believe, I was hoping someone would be able to explain to me that it wasn't true, that I was seeing it all wrong. But, to my dismay as much as to my increasing disbelief, I found that the responses to my observations were based not on factual refutation but on ad hominem assault.
What was being questioned was not so much the factual basis of what I was saying as my right to say it at all, my state of mind in saying it, my emotions, my motivation, my masculinity, my personal relationships with women, my sex life.
Although I was, for perhaps five years, subjected to almost constant splenetic attacks from representatives of the ideology I had identified and begun to question, it has often occurred to me that, without the concept of misogyny, they would have precious little in their armoury. I cannot recall a single deconstruction of my views on these matters that stuck to the facts, systematically deconstructed my arguments and exposed their weaknesses. I have, however, a drawerful of cuttings of personal attacks, snide commentaries and, indeed, a handful of grotesque defamations.
One leading feminist writer, whom I had for several years imagined to be a friend, used the knowledge of my personal life she had accumulated in the course of our relationship to portray me as someone who was writing what he was writing because he had been embittered by his personal experiences. In perhaps the ugliest piece of journalism I have ever provoked, this former friend began her sneaky tirade by attacking my use of facts:
"Never begin an argument with John Waters unless you have command of the facts to back that argument. And not just the facts but the source of the facts. And not just the source of the facts but the willingness to accept that there are alternative facts and alternative sources for facts which you have either been too intellectually lazy to seek out or too prejudiced to accept."
This, you might say, could be used as a workable set of riding instructions for any journalist seeking the truth about anything, but, for this individual, it was the basis of an assault which she clearly imagined would find favour among her chosen audience. I have no doubt she was correct. Having thus dismissed the concept of fact, she then sought out the safer ground of daubing me as someone so "seared" by personal "trauma" as to be an unreliable witness.
A good friend, reading such tirades, remarked that they reminded him of a story he had heard from one of the eastern-bloc countries during the Cold War, about one of the local party members who started to get uppity and make speeches critical of the Kremlin. An envoy was despatched from Moscow who sat the malcontent down, looked him in the eye and declared: "The Politburo has decided that you are unwell."
And so I was, in my early 40s, visited by a feeling that has not yet gone away, and probably never will. I would describe that feeling as akin to mourning someone deeply loved, except in this case what was being mourned was the innocence of certain beliefs - in justice, truth, honesty and decency in the public realm. These values, it seemed to me, which I had taken for granted for most of my adult life, were not present in the way I had imagined - unconditionally and indivisibly - and so could not really be said to exist at all. I still feel the same, except that, at another level, I accept that life must go on. I worry sometimes about what I am supposed to teach my child about what she should expect to find in the public domain of the values I once took for granted. I am frequently visited by an almost surreal feeling, for example when speaking about politics or social affairs in a public context, perhaps on radio or television, and find that I have reverted temporarily to my old way of perceiving the world. It is as though the memory of what I have discovered has disappeared, allowing me to talk about politics or democracy or freedom or justice, as though these concepts still had the meaning for me that they once had - and then I recall that, even to this day, the laws and legal system of my own country refuse to recognise one of the most fundamental elements of my own humanity, and I am bereft yet again, sitting or standing right there, with my mouth wide open.
THE THIRD episode that changed me, as it changed so many people in the world, was September 11th, 2001. Beyond all contest, the column of mine which attracted the most responses appeared two weeks after the devastation of the World Trade Centre, when I wrote about the most heartbreaking image of my life: a photograph in a magazine of a man and woman jumping from one of the towers hand in hand. I described their descent, speculated about what had preceded it and shudderingly considered what might have passed between them in the moments before they jumped and just before they hit the ground. It moved me greatly that, of those who wrote to me afterwards, many were women, and many were also from the United States.
Like so many others, I had watched the events as they happened in the company of someone I loved far more than I am capable of loving a thought, a belief or a political idea, and was overcome by the thought that, with a slightly different spin of the die, this person might have been plummeting to the Manhattan pavement. I have no doubt that this is why it became for me a life-changing moment. As Camus observed: asked to choose between those we love and even the most refined and beautiful ideas, we will choose the ones we love.
- © 2004 John Waters
The Politburo Has Decided That You Are Unwell is published by The Liffey Press (16.95)