With Dobbo gone, who’ll hold back the tide?

In Dob we trust. Indeed, you’d wonder if Dobbo was the last thing holding it all together. I guess we’ll find out soon. But you wouldn’t be surprised if historians look back and say Dobbo’s retirement was the final nail in the coffin of the monoculture. In a world increasingly lacking an agreed version of reality, they may argue that Dobbo at least provided a version most of us could roughly go along with.

In an increasingly uncivil world, Dobbo projected an old-fashioned civility. Even when he was demolishing people, he did it with impeccable manners and surgical diction.

Dobbo was like the guy in a prison movie who wielded a shiv fashioned from a bar of soap and a razor blade.

He’d bump into you in the yard, maybe even apologise and you’d have gone another 10 steps before you realised he’d severed one of your arteries.

He takes his leave at a time when the monoculture — built by mass media in the 20th century — is starting to seem like a quaint notion.

Sometimes it feels as if we’re reverting to the Middle Ages, or maybe even back further, when the world was full of different communities, all with their own version of reality, worshipping their own types of gods, and all certain of the rightness of their beliefs and the wrongness of everyone else.

While we briefly came together for the last few centuries on certain basic facts, the ground is now constantly shifting beneath our feet.

Indeed, reality — or the facts on the ground — are really only a sideshow these days. For example, if we didn’t know already, we finally understood last week that it’s not the awfulness of what’s happening in Gaza that matters. What matters is what you think about it and what you feel about it.

Something felt instinctively wrong about seeing cops beating up students in America, but something felt wrong, too, about the US turning it into another culture war that has nothing to do with the children of Gaza.

It’s possibly the ultimate expression of the internet age, where the dying children have been squeezed out of the headlines by the solidarity of young people in the richest country in the world.

And look at Trump, licking his lips as he thinks of how Nixon got elected after the chaos of 1968, on a ticket of — you guessed it — “law and order”.

Meanwhile, we’re having our own “law and order” moment. We, too, are conflicted about reality.

We’re good people, right? Compassionate people? This is not the kind of country where there are shanty towns in the capital, right? But “legitimate concerns” are OK, right?

Our confusion is probably summed up by tale of the migrant men who were reportedly allowed to camp overnight in a park by a church in Dublin 4 — but who needed to be gone by Saturday before the confirmation. Every competing version of our reality is bound up right there in that vignette.

Perhaps, when they look back, historians will say that Dobbo wasn’t so much holding it all together — he was more like Canute, trying to hold back the tide of the inevitable, for 45 minutes each weekday.