All the 'Feels'

In the ‘baby talk’ of public discourse, cheap sentimentality sells

On the war on Ukraine and other ‘devastation’

It’s the companion animals do it: tell the truth, break the heart. The muscular Alsations, Huskies, the assorted mutts in black-and-tan hefted over shoulders, the acceptance of indignity in the canine eyes, as the trusted protectors become the trusting protected. The cats peeping out of coats and backpacks, gazing zen-like from trains are miraculous as anyone forced to don a padded coat and gardening gloves to wrestle their moggy into the cat carrier will attest. That photo of the little boys who lost their cat at the Polish border and found him, said it all. Here was hope, mercy, victory, love. And here too, were all of us for whom our companion animals are family. We got it. We get it every day. No wonder then that, anecdotally, sales of cat carriers and harnesses have shot up with the war, as observers in the safe havens of Berlin and Dublin and Rome wonder ‘what if’. Over coffee and chocolate cake my daughter and I had our own epiphany: a collapsible suitcase trolley where the three of them could be crated. (Possibly sedated). Outrageously, or perhaps now that mothers in Kyiv had gone from Prada-suited prosecutors to fatigued defenders, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, star of Servant of the People, was de facto leader the free world, it didn’t seem outrageous at all.

The conversation on the animals came from the deep sentiment observed in the people, not any sentimentality on-screen. The battle between the two is raging in what passes for a public life, public discourse. Sentiment is serious, intrinsic; we invest in it, so it comes at a cost. By contrast, sentimentality for all its ‘feels’ is frivolous, extrinsic, allowing us brief but thrilling incursions into actual sentiment, which we claim falsely, and therefore wrongly, as our own. A woman is murdered, music is played, vigils are held, candles are burned, strangers express love for someone whose existence they were unaware of the day before. But the sentimentality circus is a travelling act; it moves to its next site, leaving only the family and beloveds to grief, trauma, sentiment.

With Ukraine, the false-flag sorties into sentiment go geopolitical, the hashtag of a dead woman’s name becoming #SlavaUkraini #Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian national anthem an earworm. Three weeks into the war, a certain tedium has set in, fewer rushing to check the shelling situation at Irpin overnight. Ukrainians know this. Just as they know that every time they sing the national anthem against syncopated gunfire, drive Russian Z tanks back with flags and fists, they’re doing it from the deep and life-threatening sentiment of love of freedom, country, independence, not the sentimentality of five-seconds-of-fame that goes viral from their phones.

That same sentimentality is breaking out in the media, an interviewer pushing Latvian PM Arturs Krisjanis Karins on the need for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone ‘because if Ukraine falls. Russia will be on NATO’s border’. With a straight face he explained Russia already is: his own. With steel and without compromise Karins went for the deep sentiment of the subjugation of a country, people paying with their lives for freedom, the rise of autocracy in Russia, the consequences of NATO action, he and his neighbours shoring up their own territories and defences from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the naivety about Putin evaporating and how the fear of him must go the same road. I have a family-member living in Latvia. He says the mood is steady, resolved, stoic because for Latvians the invasion of Ukraine was always when, not if, and they are long ready and able to defend themselves, their own.

While sentiment makes and changes history, sentimentality amuses, sells. Last week, Ireland’s minor disappointment when the shamrock couldn’t be presented at the White House was elevated to near national tragedy in language of dismay, devastation, unlucky, hammerblow, dreams shattered followed by ‘the race against time’ to get the Taoiseach to Brussels, a phrase more suited to President Zelenskyy escaping the latest FSB assassins. I’m sure the Taoiseach himself took all this in his stride. He’s a man in his 60s, the leader of a country, not as he found himself often presented, a child selected by the local Make-a-Wish fund.  As a veteran politician he would know beidh lá eile ag an bPaorach and there will be other big days for him with President Biden. But in a world where trivia fascinates more and more, discomfort becomes anguish, and as Neil Postman puts it, public conversation is reduced to a form of ‘baby talk’, something as banal as missing an event, can easily find itself up there as something of public moment, even while families are melting snow with lighters for drinking water, children dying of thirst under long bombardment in Ukraine. How? Because while deep sentiment with its coherence and continuity can differentiate, weigh, clarify, dignify, sentimentality is entirely superficial, sufficient unto the day, throwing shapes, pulling heartstrings, eliciting mushy ‘feelings’, its primary ambition being to entertain.

In Ukraine, sentiment is more powerful than switchblade kamikaze drones, Kalibr cruise missiles, thermobaric and hypersonic weaponry. If phosphorous rains over its cities now, it will not reign over its people in the future. Because that sentiment lives in the Verdi sung before the opera house in Odesa, a Bach cello suite played in the rubble of Kharkiv, a hit from Frozen sung in an icy bombshelter. It dwells in the apartments or basements where old men and women, survivors of the Soviet regime make their peace, their stand. ‘Slava Ukraini’ they say to their cat or dog. Tell the truth, break the heart.