#420: The Abolition of Reality With John Waters
The Patrick Coffin Show | Interviews with influencers | Commentary about culture | Tools for transformation
Support our Affiliate My Pillow. Mypillow.com enter code Patrick at check out. Host Patrick Coffin welcomes Irish journalist and author John Waters, whose eleventh book chronicles the "heinous crime" of the past five years through Substack dispatches. Waters, a former Irish Times columnist and First Things contributor, frames the work as Winston Smith's diary from 1984—a record for the unborn, preserving truths amid erasure. Waters argues we've entered a copy of reality detached from the original, where politics, ethics, and truth dissolve. COVID lockdowns exemplify this: a health "crisis" masking authoritarian overreach, with media flipping from truth-telling to industrialized lying. Was COVID a dream, or did it really happen?Once the "land of saints and scholars," Ireland now embodies cultural collapse—abortion's moral ecosystem shattered, fatherhood in apocalypse (echoing Waters' 1994 play Long Black Coat), and institutional betrayal. He laments: "I am an authority on the destruction of my country," wishing instead for skills in boats or squash.Waters dissects systemic wickedness: tyrannical police, corrupted judiciaries, silent abolition of laws. Beyond news events, Waters probes meanings—lost freedoms, fractured subjects "subdivisible to infinity," and humanity's thieving under technocratic masks. Despite censorship (his book has been shunned by Irish shops), Waters sees Substack as resistance. Advice: Hold fast to the good; pass truth to posterity.