Sir Myers na gCopaleen of Cruiskeen Eile

Colonel Kevin Myers has been tending in his Cruiskeen Eile the most coveted real estate in The Irish Times for quite the number of years, much to the frustration of aspiring gCopaleens the length and breadth of the island. But it's been hard, thankless work with our hero often having to note the reluctance of his vast, silent army of supporters to out themselves among the letter writers of the adjacent acreage.

I have to admit that I'm quite fond of Mr. Myers really. I was among the first to defend the beleagured Colonel during Bastardgate when the feminazis and anarcho-syndicalist freedom haters descended on him like a ravening horde. Sure, I would say, he argues from the particular to the general.  Sure, he despises so-called "evidence". Yes, he attacked a vulnerable and largely voiceless social group by deploying in its most shocking iteration a word (bastard) which it is dubious in the extreme ever enjoyed the neutral value he claimed in his defence to have ascribed to it. But you have to understand, the poor man is as mad as a fucking balloon.

Of course, it's a tidal thing. The Colonel ebbs as well as flows. He was at his most hysterical and incoherent in the aftermath of the events of 11 September, 2001. Myers vascillated from pole to pole as the beast slouched towards Bethlehem and he exhorted the falconer to bid the falcon gyre and gimble in the blood-dimmed wabe. Deploying all the lit-crit powers a UCG undergraduatcy can bestow (not many), I managed to identify his weltanschauung as an alarming comingling of the terrifying perspectives found in two poems; Yeats' apocalyptic classic, The Second Coming and the, er, Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

I'm hoping Myers provides a bit of gold for my reading pleasure tomorrow. But if not, I noted as I sat in typical Rodin pose on the jacks yestereve and thumbed through his collected Irishman's Diaries, a volume of which is a mainstay of my privy library, that he addressed himself in February '95 to the case of Lee Clegg and the mischievous doings of the illustrious Parachute Regiment. So maybe I'll blog about that instead.