OUT-AND-OUT LIARS The STORY of SUCCESS by MAL-COMBED BADWILL
Author of The Missing Point and Blank and What God Saw
INTRODUCTION
The Blarney Mystery
“BLARNEY, BLARNEY , WHAT HE SAYS HE DOES NOT MEAN.”
OUT-AND-OUT LIARS
Out-and-out adj being completely as specified at all
times or from every point of view.
Liar /’lie-ɘ/ noun a person who tells lies esp habitually.
1.
Since the fifteenth century, the peasants of Blarney , toiled in the surrounding fields, stooping for
days in order to cultivate the potato, walking for miles with the
burdensome harvest. Life was dull. These townsfolk, unable to read, were dirt
poor, and with the potato famine at the end of the nineteenth century things
became desperate. Word reached Blarney of the
land of opportunity across the ocean.
January eighteen-forty six, a group of five Blarneytons-
five sisters-set sail for New York .
They spent the first night telling stories in Times Square. Then they settled in
a small town outside of Taos on the edge of the Sierra Nevada , finding jobs forging travel documents. The
following year fifteen more Blarneytons left Ireland
for the New World . Those new arrivals, in turn, sent news back to Blarney about the promised land, and although the news was
received as an out-and-out lie, soon wave after wave arrived, until, a porky became
a whopper (A blarney metaphore). In 1849 twelve hundred applied for passports to
America , and the streets of Blarney were completely empty, save for one man who was
still convinced the whole thing was made up.
The Blarneytans began irrigating the parched land and
planted potatoes. They built homes identical to those left behind in Ireland with
cobbled streets running between them. They erected a church and christened it
Our Lady of the Blessed Virgin Queen and named the main street, Cormac MaCarthy Street , after the Lord of
Blarney. Initially they called their town Little Ireland, but agreed on Blarney , which was apt as , as you will see, they did not
want anyone else to believe it existed.
In 1896, an English priest called Father Swithan I Dulaye
became the preacher at Our Lady of the Blessed Virgin Queen church. Father
Dulaye wasn’t English at all, neither was he a priest:, but since in his youth
he found that lying viz-a-viz his origins, among other things, stood him in
better stead as regards a basic education
denied Catholics, he out-witted the
English and jumped ship to finish his religious education in Rome. He was
actually Sean Delaney, one of Blarneys’
own, and new Blarney greeted him with the collective ocular twinkle of a prodigal
son. He encouraged the town folk to turn everything they grew into alcohol.
They distilled onions, beans, potatoes of course, melons and all manner of
fruits in the long backyards behind their houses. Even seeds and bulbs were
fermented. The town came to life. The pigs were perpetually drunk on homemade
wine. The shops and bakeries and restaurants were converted into store houses
for the variously flavoured jars of ethanol. Factories sprung up, great
distilleries, making booze for the ever-increasing appetites of Blarneys’ inhabitants.
Fights broke out with their neighbours, the Welsh, Germans and Italians on each
side- Blarneytons were ferociously xenophobic. Still today, if you walk down Cormac MaCarthy Street
in Blarney US of A you will still hear the distinctive growl and mischievous
laughter of a dialect originating 8km outside Cork City Blarney , New Mexico ,
is one large self-sustaining liquor store, or off-license, as you say in the UK- which would
have remained secluded from the outside world, but for one man. George Carew.
George Carew was a geneticist. He studied genetics at
Harvard. He was staying at Alamo, centre for nuclear research with former
colleagues and academics, not far from Blarney- although Carew had only heard
of Blarney by reputation. “ I had been invited
to Alamo to give a talk on the genetic origins
of alcoholism,” Carew said defensively, still in a visible state of acute
distrust. “ When the talk was over a local barber from Blarney invited me for
some liquor whose like I had never tasted before and whose potency I have not
found since. The barber had confided 'I have cut hair all over the world but I
have never come across a whole town where, without exception, everyone’s hair
is the same exactly the same hue of red.' ”
Carew was astonished. It was the 1920s, years before the
invention of hair dye, Platinum blonds were considered loose women who would,
on sight, be taken off the street and made to work in the then equivalent of
Ireland's Magdelane Laundries. The platinum blond pandemic would have to wait another
decade. Hair colour was passed on through the X chromosome, the female line. It
was impossible to be a geneticist, rationale dictated, and not see incest.
Carew decided to investigate. With the help of some students
and colleagues from Harvard University, he gathered samples of hair from
cuttings of residents of all ages by the afore-mentioned barber, who expressed,
on behalf of Blarney, the reluctance of having a stranger wielding scissors in
their midst. The samples, all the same hue of red, were taken. "With these
samples genetic genealogies could be constructed. Work began” Carew said. “We
analyzed the genetic structure of each sample of hair. The mayor of Blarney
sent his sisters out to the laboratory I had set up in Alamo, direct
descendants of the original five who left the old Blarney
for the new, each one a red-head. The ladies bought us food and strange tasting
beverages which induced periods of black-out. We had a strand of hair for each
resident of Blarney .
The results were earth-shattering. Blarney
showed no signs of genetic variation. They were all the same down to the
smallest decimal point".
Carew consulted a friend of his, a fellow geneticist, John
Brown, as a second pair of eyes. "We conducted over three hundred tests on the
strands the barber had delivered from Blarney" . Said Brown, obviously still scared by the event. "When we checked them against
our data-base we were amazed. These people were all literally carbon copies
and direct descendants of England ’s’
Queen Elizabeth the First.”
Carews’ profession had no name for a place like Blarney- a place that lay outside everyday experience,
where normal morals did not apply, Blarneytans were out-and-out liars.
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