There is no other conclusion to draw. All we need is for a Donald Trump tweet to make vague sense and we're done.
Jacobin, after all, is not known for reasonable pieces on popular culture. They seem to think that "popular culture", as a field dominated by "the Class Enemy", is something to shout at. Their approach tends to involve declaring loudly just how much they are "Against" things in a bid to generate clicks with cheap didactic controversies.
This leads to some regrettablecases. Maybe the most extreme was the horrific and offensive piece they ran just after US country music legend Merle Haggard died, that involved an extremely dishonest and one-sided slandering of the singer.
However, their piece on legendary Irish folk singer Luke Kelly ('Ireland's Red Troubadour') is better. It is informative and sharp, capturing the dynamic interplay between artistic creation and the social conditions that surround it. Christ, I'd even encourage people to actually read it and God knows I never thought I'd say that about a Jacobin piece on popular culture!
The piece not only looks at the artistic qualities of Luke Kelly -- best known as a member of The Dubliners and often considered Ireland's greatest folk singer -- but provides a useful overview of the social conditions in which he grew up, and the broad social forces behind the Dubliners' role in reviving and transforming Irish folk music.
These economic and cultural changes helped The Dubliners update Irish folk music for the 1960s and beyond -- presenting it with a rawer, gritter feel, connected to the spirit of rock'n'roll. This in turn opening the way for the likes of The Pogues who, in the 1980s, took it even further and wedded Irish folk music to the spirit of punk.
It is true that in Luke Kelly, Jacobin has an easy case to manage. He was, after all, not simply a brilliant balladeer but also a dedicated socialist. At one point a card-carrying Communist, he travelled from pub to pub in England, performing songs then selling The Daily Worker to audiences.
Kelly's status as a socialist allows Jacobin to acknowledge his importance as a singer without getting caught up in awkward complications involving contradictory and shifting politics of artists as they seek to engage with the world around them in a process mediated by fucking capitalism, its power, and its capacity to determine how you earn a fucking pay check as an artist.
Not so poor Merle Haggard, who may have been one of the greatest American singers of the post-war period and a towering figure for millions of working people, but he did have some political contradictions, the goddamn sap. So fuck him, better to accuse him of fantasising about a place where "politics remained untroubled by the presence of non-whites” despite writing multiple anti-racist songs.
Not that I'm bitter.
Luke Kelly was not a songwriter, but a brilliant interpreter and performer of songs. His legacy rests on his stunning capacity to express emotion in his vocals and whose versions of several Irish folk standards are definitive.
He was also a socialist committed to the interests of ordinary people -- and saw folk music as a way to express this. He refused to tour South Africa, helped organise political rallies at which he also performed, and supported the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland, opposing internment and other brutal policies of the British state.
Jacobin concludes:
Ireland shaped Luke Kelly, his music flowed from the heights of its history, rose and fell with its social upheavals, and mourned its unfulfilled promises. But maybe more importantly, Luke Kelly shaped Ireland. His music became part of the national fabric...
But probably his greatest contribution was the fact that no other known figure in human history has rocked a giant Ginger Afro like quite like Luke Kelly,
GINGER AFRO!
In honour of Jacobin's unexpected achievement in publishing a cultural piece that doesn't make you want to tear your own eyeballs out, I made a playlist of 10 songs, posted below, sung by Luke Kelly.
It is a range of songs, including his iconic version of tracks like "Raglan Road" and "The Rocky Road to Dublin". It features his moving version of Phil Coulter's ode to his disabled son, "Scorn Not His Simplicity"-- a song whose emotional power Kelly respected so much only ever performed it publicly once, so as not to undermine it with repetition.
The only explicitly political song is the first on the list, "Alabama '58", about systemic racism in the US. But there is social commentary through out, especially the Coulter-written "A Town I Loved So Well", which details the destruction of British-occupied Derry in the 1970s.
Some are traditional songs that The Dubliners helped revive with defining versions, such as "Whiskey in the Jar", others more recently written songs that, in large part by the Dubliners effort, became classics and standards, such as Brendan Behan's prison song, "The Auld Triangle", and the English folk singer Ewan McColl-penned "Dirty Old Town" (like Kelly, both Behan and McColl were socialists).
For its part, the Kelly-sung Dubliners' version of "Dirty Old Town" is very similar in style to the version of The Pogues in the 1980s, which is how many, like me, first came to the folk standard. When The Pogues do "Dirty Old Town", they are covering not just the song, but the Dubliners' version specifically.
The track listing is below...
Alabama 58
The Auld Triangle
Raglan Road
The Rocky Road to Dublin
Leaving of Liverpool
Dirty Old Town
The Town I Loved So Well
Black Velvet Band
Scorn Not His Simplicity
Whiskey in the Jar
Since leading Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness died aged 66 on March 20, much ink has been spilt on the life and legacy of the ex-IRA fighter who helped negotiate Ireland's peace process. Praise and sometimes slander, from highest offices around the world to ordinary people, have come the way of the deceased man from Derry in Ireland's north.
But how many of these bastards have bothered to use McGuinness's death as a great excuse to bang on about one of the greatest songs most famously sung by possibly Ireland's greatest-ever folk singer as part of one of the great Irish folk bands? Huh?
A whole bunch of people have missed this rather obvious trick. But no more! The absence of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners in discussions of Martin McGuinness's life and times ends here! I WILL END THIS AND I WILL END THIS NOW!
Yes! You can listen BELOW to Irish songwriter Phil Coulter's classic song "The Town I Loved So Well", first recorded by the Dubliners in 1973.
It describes the Derry that McGuinness, like Coulter and thousands of other working-class men and women, grew up in. It captures the tragedy of the violence that wracked it from the perspective of the working class who were its victims. And YES there is much more to say and GODDAMN IT fear NOT I go on to SAY FUCKING BUCKET LOADS OF IT DOWN BELOW IN THIS VERY POST!
But first, before anything else should even be thought, much less said... first... Luke Kelly.
In my memory I will always see the town that I have loved so well Where our school played ball by the gasyard wall and we laughed through the smoke and the smell Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane past the jail and down behind the fountain Those were happy days in so many, many ways in the town I loved so well
In the early morning the shirt factory horn called women from Creggan, the Moor and the Bog While the men on the dole played a mother's role, fed the children and then trained the dogs And when times got tough there was just about enough But they saw it through without complaining For deep inside was a burning pride in the town I loved so well
There was music there in the Derry air like a language that we all could understand I remember the day when I earned my first pay And I played in a small pick-up band There I spent my youth and to tell you the truth I was sad to leave it all behind me For I learned about life and I'd found a wife in the town I loved so well
But when I returned how my eyes have burned to see how a town could be brought to its knees By the armoured cars and the bombed out bars and the gas that hangs on to every tree Now the army's installed by that old gasyard wall and the damned barbed wire gets higher and higher With their tanks and their guns, oh my God, what have they done to the town I loved so well
Now the music's gone but they carry on For their spirit's been bruised, never broken They will not forget but their hearts are set on tomorrow and peace once again For what's done is done and what's won is won and what's lost is lost and gone forever I can only pray for a bright, brand new day in the town I loved so well
The song is a great demonstration of the talents of Luke Kelly as a folk singer, as he hits lines bemoaning a sudden and devastating shift towards violence with ever greater force.
The song starts depicting a working class community that suffers poverty (the men are on the dole, though the women work in local factories), but with a strong sense of community and pride. The narrator leaves and later returns to find a town "brought to its knees" by violence, with the "army installed by the old gas yard walls, and the damned barbed wire grows higher and higher". Kelly's voice is almost broken with barely suppressed anger as he declares "My God, what have they done?", before insisting the town's spirit is "bruised but never broken" and they set their eyes towards peace.
It is a song about social realities in the folk tradition, and is not explicitly political. It is no "rebel" song, and while it bemoans British military violence there is no suggestion of sympathy for the armed resistance McGuinness helped lead in the 70s. If anything, the reference to "bombed out bars" suggests the violence, from all sides are fuelling the singer's despair and grief.
But this doesn't reduce its capacity to capture the reality that made McGuinness who he was. When it was clear the armed struggle could not bring about a speedy end to the war, while the violence wrecked havoc on all aspects of society in Ireland's north, McGuinness was part of the push for an end to armed conflict to shift the struggle to peaceful means.
The ;picture of Derry, and what happened to it in the Troubles, provides a great frame to understand Martin McGuinness.
Born the son of a tailor in 1950, McGuinness grew up poor, in the working-class (and largely Catholic and nationalist) Bogside in Derry. Leaving school at 15, he worked a series of low-paying jobs. He was working as a butcher's apprentice when, in 1969, he witnessed one atrocity against his community too many and joined the IRA.
Derry is the second largest city in the six Irish counties that Britain retained when Ireland was partitioned in 1921 at the end of the War of Independence that ended direct British rule over 26 of Ireland's 32 counties.
To ensure a population in the partitioned state that was "loyal" to the Crown, it was established with an artificial majority of the largely loyalist Protestants, with the largely nationalist Catholic population a minority (Derry, however, has a clear Catholic majority).
The state was set up on the basis of Protestant supremacy, with Northern Ireland's first prime minister James Craig famously declaring it "A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people."
Run along sectarian lines, Catholics suffered poor services, housing and were denied access to many jobs, often reducing to living in slums. Local voting rights were granted to those who owned property. As many Catholics didn't own homes, they couldn't vote. In Derry, this meant that despite Catholics being the majority, the town was run by bigoted pro-British Protestant unionists.
Most of Northern Ireland's working class were Protestant, but within the working class, the poorest and most deprived were overwhelmingly Catholic (and nationalist).
In his funeral oration at McGuinness's graveside, his long-time comrade and Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said:
Like many other Derry ‘wans’, Martin grew up in a city in which Catholics were victim of widespread political and economic discrimination.
He was born into an Orange State which did not want him or his kind. Poverty was endemic.
Unsurprisingly, such injustice sparked opposition. Inspired by the US civil rights struggle, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed in 1967 to campaign for equality for Catholics. The response to peaceful civil rights marches was extreme violence — especially in Derry.
Extra-legal loyalist gangs and the infamously sectarian and violent Royal Ulster Constabulary viciously attacked marchers. When marchers sought to defend themselves, attacks grew into anti-Catholic pogroms.
Catholics in mixed or largely Protestant areas were driven from their homes, which were often burned — turning the Catholic areas of cities like Belfast and Derry into besieged ghettos. Adams, in his 1997 memoir Before the Dawn, describes police snipers on building tops, opening fire on any Catholic they saw move. At this time, the IRA was all but non-existent.
In 1969, tens of thousands of Catholics were forced from their homes, many fleeing across the border into the Republic of Ireland — at the time, the largest forced movement of people in Europe since World War II.
The besieged population did not take the repression lying down, and brutal attacks by police and loyalist gangs were met with barricades and riots as people sought to defend their communities. In January 1969, with barricades erected, the nationalist areas of Derry (including the Bogside) declared their areas "Free Derry" — a liberated zone, protected by residents armed with clubs, rocks and petrol bombs, in which the sectarian authorities were barred from entering.
In August 1969, three days of violent street fighting between the RUC, which used CG gas (the first time it was used against civilians within the British state) and the nationalist community, known as the Battle of the Bogside broke out, sparked by attempts by a notoriously sectarian Orange parade to march through nationalist areas.
With the community undefeated, the British government took the fatal decision to mobilise British soldiers, sending them to the Bogside.
The Troubles had begun.
The British military failed to take control of Free Derry until 1972 (while the IRA operated openly, defending the area), but the path to full scale military conflict was opened.
In his graveside oration, Adams continued:
I remember [Martin] telling me that he was surprised when his father, a quiet modest church going man, marched in the civil rights campaign here in Derry.
The Orange State’s violent suppression of that civil rights campaign; the Battle of the Bogside, and the emerging conflict propelled Martin into a life less ordinary.
With British soldiers on the streets, the conflict spiralled into war, as a civil rights struggle morphed into an armed struggle for national liberation.
To crack down on the newly re-energised republican movement, the British authorities introduced internment in August 1971. Doors were smashed in, homes raided and hundreds of overwhelmingly Catholic men and women (most of whom weren't active republicans) were interned without trial, often tortured.
In Before the Dawn, Adams describes a terrible event in the working-class Catholic neighbourhood of Ballymurphy, where he lived. The day interment was introduced, the British Army set up a "free fire" zone in the area. For three days, soldiers opened fire on sight on anyone within their line of fire — shooting 11 civilians dead, including a priest who ran to to aid a wounded man and a mother of eight, on the streets desperately trying to round up her children to keep them safe.
This massacre predates the start of the IRA's bombing campaign. There has never been any justice for the atrocity. The soldiers responsible came from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment. Five months later, on January 30, 1972, the same regiment opened fire on unarmed civil rights marchers, killing 14 in the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre.
McGuinness, a leading IRA member in Derry at the time, witnessed the events on Bloody Sunday. In an April 1972 Irish Times profile of McGuinness entitled (to McGuinness's embarrassment) "The Boy Who Rules Free Derry", he said:
The worst I ever felt was Bloody Sunday. I wandered about stunned, with people crying and looking for their relatives, and I thought of all that about honour between soldiers. The British Army knew right well we wouldn’t fight them with all those thousands of people there, so they came in and murdered the innocent.
Think of this context and listen to the song again.
It's not hard to see how the likes of McGuinness ended up IRA volunteers, responding to such conditions with guns in their hand.
McGuinness may have become a leader of note, but his story was typical of his generation. Young working class men and women, looking to live ordinary lives, were driven to resist by violence and oppression.
A story told often about young working class men from nationalist areas being "lifted" by the British occupying forces, interned with trial and tortured — despite frequently having no involvement in republicanism. Instead, they were interested in the same things as young men everywhere — watching sport, getting drunk, trying to get laid.
But once released, the previously apolitical youths would search out their local IRA recruiter.
Adams pointed out in his 1997 memoir Before the Dawn, the working class nationalist in Ireland's north were not better or worse than anyone else. They were neither devils nor saints, just ordinary people facing extraordinary violence. Neither inherently pacifists nor predisposed to violence, they didn't want war but were willing to fight one when they felt they had no choice.
And with that reality of ordinary people — will all the good and bad that comes with it — came good and bad in the armed conflict.
There was incredible bravery, resilience and sacrifice. (None are more justly famous than the 1981 hunger strikes in which 10 men died rather than give up their dignity in the face of the Thatcher government's heartless cruelty).
This existed along with reprehensible violence that can not be justified no matter the cause. (One infamous example is the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing, when an IRA bomb went off at an Remembrance Day event at a War Memorial in Ennskillen in Northern Ireland and killed 10 civilians. The incident was described by Sinn Fein as a "huge tragedy" and Sinn Fein's An Phoblacht criticised it as a "monumental error". The IRA unit responsible was disbanded. The IRA had not intended to kill civilians, instead aiming to target British soldiers, but such deaths were always a strong risk with such bombings.)
The point is not whether both aspects have equal weight — I think the republican movement, whatever it did wrong, was trying to respond as best it could to a horrific situation not of its own making. Merely to point out that people enter such struggles with all their flaws and imperfections, not helped in this instance by the role of militarist thinking in the republican tradition.
(There is something sickening about the lecturing of one side of a conflict, which did not start the conflict, by those writing in safety who have never lived through one thousandth of the suffering of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland.
And when pointing out the reprehensible, it is reprehensible not to point out the sheer scale of the violence dealt out against not just active republicans but the general Catholic population during the Troubles, who were targeted for cold-blooded mass murder by loyalist death squads operating in collusion with the British state. This ugly truth is proven in great detail by Anne Cadwallder's 2013 book Lethal Allies: British Collussion in Ireland.)
McGuinness and Adams, especially, grasped that the issue was not simply which side had greater cause or was responsible for more suffering, but finding a way to resolve the armed conflict so the struggle for republican goals — and to advance the interests of working class people who bore the brunt of the conflict, from all sides — could occur in a peaceful framework.
As a few commentators have pointed out, there were never *two* Martin McGuinnesses, a violent terrorist first and a peacemaker second. Rather just one with the same goals, who proved willing to adapt strategy and tactics through experience. Adams put it in his speech at McGuinness's funeral:
"There was not a bad Martin McGuinness or a good Martin McGuinness. There was simply a man, like every other decent man or woman, doing his best."
The best evidence of that intent — to do his best for the community he came from, lived in, loved and sought to serve as best he could — came with the turn out to McGuinness's funeral. Thousands accompanied his coffin and is made its way down the streets of his beloved Bogside.
McGuinness's funeral, March 23.
Looking at the pictures of McGuinness's tricolour-draped coffin almost lost in the sea of people, I wracked my brains to think of a single living Australian politician whose funeral would generate such a response. I finally concluded a few could — but only to ensure the bastards were definitely dead and buried.
Make no mistake. The town McGuinness loved so well sure loved him back.
"The Town I Loved So Well" may not be a rebel song, but here is one about Joe McDonnell, one of the republican prisoners who died in the 1981 hunger strikers.
'And you dare to call me a terrorist, while you look down your gun...'
In today's Daily Carlo, I will share two things I learned by going into the horrible depths of NSW Parliament House tonight at Macquarie Street... that I am going to put *on my blog* despite having put it on Facebook because I have decided that fuck it. FUCK IT. I AM GOING TO START USING MY BLOG TO *MICRO BLOG* AND JUST PUT UP RANDOM SHIT!!! COZ I CAN!!! FUCK YOU!!!
NSW parliament is not like other parliaments I have visited. the WA parliament is no where near as "historic", "prestigious" and "fucking pompous" as this building. SA parliament? Don't joke. The ACT Legislative Assembly is a fucking B-grade , all-plastic convention centre compared to this. Not even the federal parliament feels as "steeped in history"/pompous crap" as the NSW Parliament.
And these are the lessons of my visit to the place:
1) the security police are *much* friendly, nicer and happily jokey than they are when you have to go to court.
2) The fucking beer is reasonably priced in the parliamentary bar. Like I mean $5 for a fancy fucking over-hopped pale ale craft beer that, anywhere else, with that amount of suits and soulless bar atmosphere, would surely cost like $8 or $9. I mean you can barely get a fucking schooner of VB or Toohey's New anywhere in this state for five bucks these days. WE ARE PAYING FOR THESE GODDAMN HACKS TO DRINK REASONABLY PRICED BEER! IT IS AN OUTRAGE!!!
3) Well... I'll get to that.
To expand on point one... at least I *got dressed up for fucking court*. You would think they would give you *some* respect! But no... cold, mechanical, harsh, soulless... that is some of the things the mothers of the cops at Parramatta Court House say about their sons who work there as security.
But Parliament House? Never mind I went in looking like I'd just woken up from my park bench I call home, as I go through and set off the metal detector the cop is all like "steel caps in your boots? not a problem... only problem is you are still sober at this time of night!" (Somewhat presumptuous to assume I was sober...) Way out was met with equally jokey cops. I really am not used to, and feel quite nervous around, friendly cops.
And while we are on the topic of point TWO... I should point out it was hardly a smooth ride... they really didn't seem to want us in their bar and for ages we couldn't get served because the guy behind the bar was very clear that you needed to be associated with some sort of sitting elected parliamentarian. And ours had disappeared to go off to prepare a speech for somethingorather. Eventually one parliamentarian was scrounged up by someone who *knows* these kind of people and the nicely dress man behind the bar was satisfied he was allowed to serve us.
Which was fine until I needed to order another and, standing there for sometime while the man behind the bar did various other tasks, was not convinced I would *get* served at all, what with looking, as I explained, as though I had just arrived from my park bench. But sure enough he did... and I was stunned by the change I got for the twenty I gave him. STUNNED! OUTRAGEOUS! THIS IS THE TAXPAYERS MONEY HE WAS GIVING BACK TO ME!!!
You might be wondering why I was even there.,.. and that reminds me. Point three. I didn't just learn it at Parliament House today, but was told of it once more .. .and that is:
Established, proven, collusion between the British state and death squads in northern Ireland to carry out the most heinous, unspeakable, stomach turning, soul wrenching massacres of civilians is truly ... well fucking unspeakably horrific.
And for more information, read this article by some prick who wore a suit to parliament today (and was forced to tolerate me shuffling along after him) about more details. Or watch this documentary about the British state's use of what can only be described as serial killers to slaughter civilians, often wiping out whole families. And think about both how this is a direct continuation of an approach the British state took to other parts of its Empire over the centuries, perfectly the craft, and how this practice in Ireland has led directly to the occupiers actions in Iraq -- using sectarian violence and death squads to divide and rule for Great Power.
If you really want to have your stomach turned, your tear ducts dried out and your heart taken and stomped on and smashed into a thousand pieces at the sheer unspeakable destruction of innocent human life driven by hatred, bigotry, cold-blooded hypocrisy that has never been properly recognised or had anything like justice administered for, then you can read Anne Cadwallader's Lethal Allies.
Oh well. Luke Kelly sings a mean song about the mess, at least.
