Splenetic trivia
Sir: Mr Cosgrave has exhumed (September 25) a number of arresting ideas that have survived intact their burial in the common clay. He clatters away at his typewriter over a page of The Spectator generalizing bravely. I agree with him. There is a certain Ilanle of permanent ideas abroad in these lands, over which the bleary Image rules and for which I find no time. No doubt Mr Cosgrave's essay may be read in a thousand years or so and be found, if only by dint of its hardy vagueness, practically applicable. I do not issue constructive abuse on the cheap basis of scorning the general clatter of typewriters so particularly remarkable in the tenor set by articles from your editorial echelons; I would request of a sensible journal that it ignore as pointedly and as Colossally as possible the splenetic trivia of mass-visual politics.
Because of the times that are in it, Mr Cosgrave's remarks are remarkable, and brave, but absolute courage lies in the slapping down of the proper general laws and in following them through — tneedewdhere they are currently Perhaps Mr Cosgrave felt he was not being paid enough or perhaps ic9t1 Plan a connecting article by . Irn or by another of your !ntellectual pathologists on the big irony that an eminently understandable love of England should lead the well-known book-reviewer, Mr J. Enoch Powell, to criticism of very brief historical
perspective regarding that same fundamental passion on this other island from which I write — the passion of nationalism.
Now Internationalism is the prior refuge of the scoundrel, particularly in disguise. If the man Powell is really intelligent — and not the remains of a wonderful memory which never in its days of complete functioning saw all the photographs — all that I touch upon in these words shall have occurred to him long ago; possibly he has worked out the paradox of nationalism and imperialism to his private satisfaction. If Mr Powell is intelligent he is a scoundrel and if he is not a scoundrel he is a fool, or so it must seem to me until he takes up where Mr Cosgrave left off.
Patrick BurItley The Kerries, Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland
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