One of our letter-writers took issue the other day with the juxtaposition in a recent EL supplement of an Irish Leaving Cert poem and a picture of a flimsily clad Jennifer Lopez with her ex-boyfriend, Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs. The objection was to this "soft porn" picture accompanying an analysis of the poem Brid Og Ni Mhaille.
I was fairly shocked myself to see a picture of a depressed-looking Lopez and Combs on the Irish Ordinary Level page, while on the facing Higher Level page was a delightful picture of two happy young schoolgirls from the Co Meath Gaeltacht, both of them playing traditional Irish button-accordions.
What sort of message was this sending out? That rap will come and go, but Irish traditional music is your only man for the long haul? There are dubious connotations of cultural superiority here. Or were we meant to conclude that youthful innocence will always triumph over superficial glamour and wild excess?
We have to be very, very careful when it comes to other people's feelings. It cannot be right for us to take pleasure in the obvious difficulties of Ms Lopez in getting clothes to cover her, or in the horrendous legal maze in which Puff Daddy finds himself after a silly misunderstanding over a nightclub melee, the shooting of three people and a handgun subsequently found in his car.
Given the unfortunate pair's recent sad break-up, it seemed particularly insensitive to run their picture alongside a poem written by a man described by our letter-writer as an emotional loser: "He has lost in love. His ability to communicate his pain is an education in itself."
Puff Daddy too has lost in love, and he too has communicated his pain in his rap song Pain:
I feelin' some pain,
It go 'way then come back again,
You know what I sayin'?
To me it be plain.
That time I hit on Shane*,
I meanin' his wife who not be called Jane (she Esther)
I feelin' his pain,
Man, I sorry for layin'
Pain on Shane,
So I say - shame on you, Pain!
(*This bein' Boyzone's Shane Lynch an' refer to when I hit on his wife in Lillie's that time way back.)
Running Brid Og Ni Mhaille alongside a picture of the pop-star couple was all the more insensitive given the poem's theme of an unfortunate man whose beloved goes off with someone else: the whole world knows that Ms Lopez has left Puff Daddy and taken up with a dancer. Moreover, 97.4 per cent of the male population of the world fancies Ms Lopez, so there is a very clear comparison with Brid Og herself, quite obviously Babe Number One in Tir Oireall, with "na milte fear" mad about her.
As for the Irish poet's feelings, or mothuchain, we have to be very concerned about a Leaving Cert poem in which a young man spends an entire night crying just because his girlfriend has dropped him for someone else. Is this part of the dread "Exploring Masculinities" programme which has crept into our schools, making wimps of our young men? Puff Daddy himself has a much healthier take on this sort of situation, as anyone familiar with the rapper's What Goin' Down Here?" will know:
I be learnin' as I go,
Money ain't the only thing, you know,
You got girls an' you got guys,
What be often tellin' lies,
It be hard to separate
Who you love an' who you hate
No use cryin' when you find
Yo bitch been screwin' with yo mind
She done gone off with your friend
You be thinkin' it the end,
She gone done a bed-time bunk
with that m*****f***in' skunk,
But soon they fallin' in the shit,
Man, you better out of it.
bglacken@irish-times.ie