MEDIA WATCH: My mother told me as a boy (repeatingly)"Ever to confess you're bored means you have no Inner Resources."I conclude now I have no inner resources,because I am heavy bored
This election reminds me of those words of the American poet, John Berryman. Let's hope the electorate has been saved from lapsing into a catatonic state by two people: Michael McDowell and the Custard-Pie Thrower from Boyle.
Let's not forget that Mr McDowell is Attorney General of this State and a member of the Cabinet. But in his latest pronouncement he compared the sporting dream of his head of Government with a project inspired by the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu (deceased).
Fine Gael and Labour wags might say the comparison is a bit hard on Ceausescu, but the reality is, if Bertie really was another Ceausescu, McDowell would have kept his mouth shut or suffer the consequences.
When Nikita Khrushchev exposed the crimes of Stalin after the dictator's death, someone at the back of the Central Committee reportedly asked why he had not spoken up when Stalin was alive. "Who said that?" Khruschev demanded. There was a deathly silence, and Khruschev continued: "That's the reason we didn't speak up."
It was a pity from both a political and entertainment viewpoint that Mr McDowell was not chosen to represent the Progressive Democrats on RTÉ's Questions and Answers.
Coming immediately after his denunciation of the "Bertie Bowl" project, it would have made compulsive viewing rather than the First Arts economics seminar it turned out to be.
Picture Michael, reddening slightly around the collar, mixing it with the Kildare street-fighter, Charlie McCreevy, and the sarcastic Fine Gael mandarin, Alan Dukes.
Instead we had McDowell's PD colleague, Liz O'Donnell, dressed to the nines, explaining blandly that, although her party didn't consider the Bertie Bowl a priority, McDowell's language was "emotive".
The subliminal subtext was: sure don't be minding him too much, there's no harm in the lad.
You couldn't help feeling that someone was being too clever by half. The PDs were having their cake and eating it. This was politics as the art of the impossible.
Whereas the real dictator would have sent in the secret police and cancelled all election coverage to screen the Show-Trial of the Imperialist Running Dog M. McDowell, Bertie Ceausescu literally laughed it off on the RTÉ news as an election ploy in the freefire zone of Dublin South East where McDowell is in a war to the knife with the Green TD, John Gormley.
For a brief moment we saw the Real Bertie, worldly-wise, good-humoured, mocking it all as a bit of a game.
What a contrast with the wimpish, dewy-eyed fellow in the "More to be Done" poster who looks as if he's about to blub because the Dublin team has just gone down by a last-minute goal in the All-Ireland final.
The mega-poster must have seemed like a good idea, but now it's becoming a liability: it is quite simply Over The Top. I squirm to think how foreign visitors must react when they see the ginormous picture of Bertie spreading like St Brigid's Cloak all over a wall at Stephen's Green.
The excessive focus on De Leader is probably counterproductive. Watching the RTÉ footage of Bertie greeting Pee Flynn like a long-lost brother, one could sense the votes draining away on the east coast.
The Flynns, father and daughter, are a pet political nightmare of the chattering classes.
The custard-pie episode showed there may still be some life in this campaign. I admit I cheered for the perpetrator as she fled the scene on the TV3 news. There's hope for democracy yet.