John F Kennedy knew well the importance of paying journalists a decent salary.
In 1961 he gave a speech to the American Newspapers Association in which he reminded them of one of their number from the nineteenth century.
Horace Greeley of the New York Herald Tribune employed an impecunious foreign correspondent in London who was forever asking for more money.
Greeley refused every request, and the journalist eventually turned his attention elsewhere. The rest, as they say, is history.
Karl Marx, for it was he, became the scourge of capitalists like Greeley, and his thinking remains one of the dominant political forces in the world today.
Kennedy, who faced down the forces unleashed by Marx and his companion Frederick Engels, told his audience: “If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different.”
Funny the things that change the course of history.
Marx – whose original thinking transcends those who took his theories and twisted them for their own ends – noted that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and second as farce.
That thought weighs heavy on my mind today as I look back at the events of 2018 and look forward (if ‘look forward’ is the right phrase) to 2019.
Our parents and grandparents lived through the tragedy – two world wars and the Troubles - and we are living through the farce.
The world has gone to hell in a handcart, and no-one quite knows why.
Our times only make sense if you think of them as some sort of situation comedy. Run a laughter track underneath the news and you wouldn’t know the difference between it and the Blame Game or Frasier or Peter Kay’s Car Share.
Some blame social media, and its power brokers – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you know the list.
But social media alone is not responsible for the rise of Donald Trump in the United States or Vladimir Putin in Russia.
It is not responsible for the rise of neo-despots in countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary, which just a decade or so ago offered the prospect of a new world order after the fall of communism and the Arab spring.
It is not responsible for regimes like Saudi Arabia which resort to old-style butchering skills to silence journalists; or Myanmar which practices genocide under the watchful eye of a winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
And it is certainly not responsible for the antediluvian Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk who emerged victorious in a referendum on leaving the EU, and whose pursuit of that goal since has imperilled relations between Britain and Ireland and fundamentally undermined the peace process.
Such is the madness of the world around us, you could forgive Arlene Foster for taking refuge in front of a nice warm fire fuelled by wood pellets, or Ian Paisley Junior searching out five-star holiday spots around the world.
Wouldn’t you do that yourself if you could?
Brexit – hard or soft, managed or (as it has been) mismanaged – will fundamentally transform the way we live for a generation.
I, for one, hope sense will prevail and it will be stopped in its tracks. But I see no sign that the English – and yes this is an English issue not a British one – will come to their senses.
The UK has already thrown away much of its capital. It is, quite literally, a laughing stock. The risk is that it drags us all down with it, fatally undermining the European project in the process. That is a real and present danger.
And what of the passengers on this sinking ship? In the UK, virtually everyone with an Irish grandparent is checking out how to get an Irish passport. Scotland will undoubtedly look again at whether it still benefits under a union with England.
The Scots are instinctively international in their outlook, and totally at odds with the Moggites.
And then we have the north. What happens here?
Nobody in their right mind wants out of Europe. It has provided the context for peace, and the resources to sustain it.
Through the Good Friday Agreement, there is a mechanism to be free of the ideologues at Westminster.
There has been much talk of the triumph of Irish diplomacy in the way the Brexit negotiations have been handled. A much greater triumph would be for Dublin to win the battle of hearts and minds in Northern Ireland, and to secure a meaningful vote for reunification within a European Union rather than continued membership of this disunited kingdom.
