Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

"But the banking system is called the banking system because it operates according to principles owing more to mechanics than justice. Economies are the mechanisms at the heart of the illusion we call civilisation, the motors that no matter how bad things get, still gets us out of bed." Very philosophical, no doubt. And very John Waters, too. The last time we mentioned the Irish writer and thinker here was after he had been trounced in public by Christopher Hitchens during a public debate about God, but Waters could stage a comeback now that materialism has been revealed as a false god, as it were.

Regarding the bailing out of the banks, here's what Waters wrote in the Irish Mail on Sunday: "But the moment when radical Government action became necessary to save the banking system was the moment when, for the first time in our history, we came face to face with the fact that all human endeavour is eventually futile, that what sustains us in this existence is almost entirely illusory, and nothing is as it seems." Kafka would have liked that. Waters concluded by warning his readers that talk of fairness in matters economic is equally illusory, and he ended mysteriously and somewhat metaphysically by saying, "Fair is the colour of my true love's hair."