The Irish Times, the Stench of Jews, and the Dirt of Travellers

Reading a paper with a dubious agenda such as the Irish Times is always fraught with danger. In the midst of an otherwise dull story about Fianna Fail trying to grab some law’n’order votes before the election, I noticed this throwaway comment by Mark Hennessy:
Last year, Dublin local authorities were forced to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to clear up damage left by Travellers at Dodder Park and Ballyboden.

Personally it’s little “us-and-them” bizarro lines like this that amuse me and set me thinking. This offhand remark about “Travellers” or Gypsies just leapt out.

The Corpo and the Government spend literally hundreds of millions cleaning up all the refuse and shit and crap and effluent produced by the “settled” community every year. We don’t hear so many complaints about this. Yeah, some people pay taxes and fees and rates to subsidize this operation. However, many others do not but nobody would never suggest making it a criminal offence for those people to flush their turds down the toilet! Pols and developers zone and build identikit suburbs in greenfield sites then stick it to the taxpayers to fund the sewage and road infrastructure. People driving cars or SUVs with absurdly low mileage are not condemned for spewing excess pollutants and waste, instead their mobile pollution engines are envied. Ours is a culture that smiles on excessive consumption, as long as the damage is displaced either in time or space. Regions far away from centres of power are despoiled or denuded, while we condemn ourselves to a carcinogenic twilight of elder years while our grandchildren inherit a greenhouse world of heavy weather, enviromental chaos, and depleted natural resources.

Anyway, people living together in communities make messes, get over it. Some archeologists spend their entire career digging through millenia-old crap piles and shit houses. This is an old story.

What makes this Irish times piece most immediately interesting, however, is how the pschological feelings of racism have been conflated with feelings of disgust concerning a visible, alternative lifestyle.

This is of course also an old story. Medieval Christians used to feel physically repulsed by the “foulness” of Jews:
Early Christians, and later on the Nazis, found Jews disgusting: The Jew “smelled of excrement that was the true substance of the money he lent; he smelled of sex and women because of his diabolical desire for Christian flesh and blood. Nowadays, we can only be disgusted by those who offered up this nonsense as reasons for their disgust.

This is how discrimination and racism work, and how they work through mass media, and how they try to recruit your embodied feelings to short-circuit their non-rationality. Once upon a time priests fulminated from the pulpit about the stench of Jews, now we get “political commentators” talking about the dirt of Travellers. This is what Adorno and Horkheimer were talking about when they linked anal retentives, coprophiliacs, and fascism.

Same old shit.