'twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Never mind the media circus. There’s more to being Irish than shamrocks and boozing; there’s a proud legacy of revolutionary thought, too.

James Connolly: Socialist, labor leader, egalitarian thinker, Martyr of 1916. I wonder how the nation would have developed had he not been executed by the forces of the Crown. His idea for an ecumenical Irish state free of religious interference and equal rights for all, including women, was forward-thinking for its time, although the victory of the Free State forces after his death, meant that -- to paraphrase one disillusioned Republican -- all that blood was shed for the sake of handing over the keys to the kingdom to the priests and the shopkeepers, the very same bourgeoisie elements Connolly considered as much as an impediment to Irish freedom as the British were.

Both my wife’s grandfathers fought in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (on the Republican side, against Michael Collins’s Free State sellouts). My maternal grandmother’s people were Orangemen from Donegal and Carrickfergus, but radical politics have trumped upbringing in my case. (I’ve been told my mother used to wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day when she was in high school. It’s an ugly bit of spite that I have a hard time reconciling with my memories of her being a kind, good-hearted woman.) My wife thinks it’s kind of funny that out of all the kids in her very Irish, right-off-the-boat family, she’s the only one who married someone of Irish descent, and he turned out to be Anglo-Irish.

Although I oppose actions against civilian targets on general principle, I can at least respect that the Nationalists stand for something other than the Loyalists’ reactionary desire to maintain the institutionalized prejudices of the colonial status quo. It’s amazing how Sinn Féin gets raked over the coals for every misstep or bit of wrongdoing by the I.R.A., but the DUP is pretty much given a pass despite the fact they their armed wings have engaged in nearly an equal amount of violence since in the Good Friday agreement of 1998.

The Pogues and The Dubliners – The Irish Rover (from a 1987 single, collected on The Ultimate Collection, 2005) – Forget the nasally warbling of Celtic Woman or the grandma music of the Irish Tenors, this is real music of the people.

Flogging Molly – Rebels of the Sacred Heart (from Drunken Lullabies, 2002) – It just dawned on me that all of today’s tracks were played at our wedding reception…in between various punk and new wave favorites. Those four mix CD’s are a lovely glimpse into the nature of our relationship.

Wolfe Tones – Rifles of the I.R.A. (from Rifles of the I.R.A. 1991) – Anytime a large enough number of the wife’s relatives gather together for a holiday or whatnot, it’s a given that this song will be given a spin, accompanied by much whooping, stomping, and dancing.

poetic justice will come in time

I had another post planned for today, but after spending the better part of this morning swearing at the TV, the local paper, and various internet newsfeeds, I decided to work out my anger here instead.

What’s got me all riled up? The results of the gay marriage vote in the Massachusetts legislature, which means that a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the Commonwealth is one step closer to becoming a reality. The issue will now be voted on in the next legislative session, and should it pass again, it will be decided by ballot question in 2008.

It appalls me that a question of basic human rights and equal protection by law is subject to a referendum by lumpenproletariat, most of whose members I wouldn’t trust to know how to wipe their own asses. Rights are rights. They are not “earned,” they are not “given,” they should not be subject to the whims of popular opinion…unless we open up the whole shebang to that process. If the government is going to get into the business of legislating relationships between two consenting adults, then I want to be able to weigh in on every pending union, gay or straight. “Sorry. You have a beak nose, and she has beady eyes. Your children will be hideous-looking. Petition denied. And you two? He’s a bore and you drink too much. Denied. Next!”

As committed as I am to the idea of participatory governance, the initiative process of legislating via referendum has been corrupted by the basest, ugliest sort of populism. Originally intended as a way to bypass the graft-ridden political machines and their self-serving patrons of ages past, it has long since become a tool of the same special interest groups it was designed to thwart. The public interest takes a back seat to demagoguery and hidden ulterior motives, and even on the rare occasions when a nobly intended progressive measure passes, it ends its life as an ignored, unfunded mandate or gets reshaped as a post-dated Trojan Horse on behalf of some moneyed concern, at the expense of those it was posited to supposedly benefit.

So a coalition of out-of-state groups working alongside their Bay State counterparts wants to use the initiative process to strip a group of their rights, and for what? To “preserve the sanctity of marriage”? Because heterosexual marriages are special and wonderful and doesn’t crash and burn more than half of the time? What kind of insecure idiot bases the worth of his or her marriage on those of others? I’m a straight, white male who married his partner of thirteen years in 2004. The only parties that matter in our marriage are my wife and I, and rightly so. If the rest of the world doesn’t like it, they can fuck off. There is no just reason why that “club of two” status shouldn’t be enjoyed by same-sex couples.

It’s not about the “sanctity of marriage,” it’s about sanctioning bigotry by enshrining it in the state constitution, and there is no religious sleight of hand that can hide that ugly truth. If people were really serious about “saving marriage,” then maybe they need to start looking into legislation to criminalize divorce, or to rescind tax benefits for anyone who remarries...

…or we as a society could put these useless distractions behind us and get on with living our lives without feeling the need to persecute others. Seriously, this culture war bullshit has gotten tiresome.

In lieu of footnotes, please accept this little sampler of relevant tracks which span several decades and multiple genres. Diversity matters.

Neal Ford and the Fanatics – Shame On You (from Garage Beat ’66, Vol. 1: Like What, Me Worry?! 2004) – This one’s dedicated to all the state reps who voted in favor of the gay marriage ban, including that one asshole from the next town over who was the only rep from this area who cast a “yes” vote.

L7 – The Masses Are Asses (from The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum, 1997) – Indeed they are, ladies. Indeed they are.

Dead Kennedys – Religious Vomit (from In God We Trust, Inc. 1981) – It's a mix of cheap red wine, stale crackers, bile, and half-digested lumps of hypocrisy.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Ain’t Nobody’s Business (from Feast of the Mau Mau, 1988) - Damn right. It ain’t.

The Caravans – Know Your Rights (from This Is Rockabilly Clash, 2003) – It started off as just three, but the list keeps getting longer and longer as time passes.

I pull my shirt off and pray

This is a short reminder to my American readers to go out and vote today, preferably for Democratic candidates. To quote Crass, “It’s time to turn the tables. The future must be ours.” (I'm finding it hard to be too optimistic after decades of disappointment.)

The Soviettes – Multiply & Divide (from LP III, 2005)

Arcadia – Election Day (from So Red the Rose, 1985)

A couple other shoutouts, while I’m here:

Friend Dave Lartigue of Dave Ex Machina is running a contest, and the prize is a signed copy of Bryant Paul Johnson’s minicomic, Teaching Baby Paranoia. The extremely simple contest rules can be found here.

Friend CJ has started up a new blog, 8-Bit Gadfly, dedicated to old and unusual videogames. First up, an import NES title based on Dio’s “Holy Diver.”

we don’t torture, we’re a civilized nation

…or so claimed G.W. Bush the other day, shortly before he began prodding Congress to enact legislation legalizing secret military tribunals and the outsourcing of prisoner interrogations. Such steps are necessary, we are told, to shield military and governmental officials from being tried as war criminals. This is a war, we are told, and the government needs to use every available tool to prosecute it.

In any case, the definition of torture, as determined by the present administration, has been narrowed to include only those actions which will result in serious injury or death. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in his previous role as White House counsel, worked hard to find exploitable loopholes in the national and international war crimes statutes in order to justify the administration’s handling of prisoners. Concerns about prisoner treatment are shrugged off or derided as being soft on those who would do our nation harm. Fear mongering with a hint of racism always goes over well with the red state crowd.

Our post-industrial society is infatuated with the myth of the “hard man”, the proactive badass unconstrained by petty rules and bureaucratic timidity: someone who provides simple, preferably visceral, solutions to complex problems. In our modern world, where it can sometimes feel like every aspect of one’s life is delimited by external forces, the notion of stepping outside the boundaries to “get things done” has a strong appeal.

The traditional iteration of this archetype used to abide by a code of personal honor and responsibility to the greater good. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” wrote Raymond Chandler in 1945. This character aspect has since been abandoned. Sheriff Kane and Phillip Marlowe have been pushed aside in favor of trash-talking thugs of the Mike Hammer variety, Machiavellian predators whose “goodness” is measured in the rawest utilitarian terms.

That may work in the controlled environment of an artificial universe, but not in the real world. Real-life pretenders to hard man status either find themselves rendered ineffectual by the constraints they vowed to bypass (like two entertainers-turned-governors were), or they resort to vicious and unrestrained methods in pursuit of their goals (like the present administration is currently doing). The allure of the myth is so strong that even when the hideous nature of these actions comes out – waterboarding, anal rape, and torture via attack dogs – there will be segments of the population willing to rationalize the procedures.

“Our enemies have done worse,” they’ll argue, abandoning ideological pretexts in favor of a barbaric race to the bottom. National exceptionalism, that somnambulist sibling to conscientious patriotism, is the only justification they ever really need. America does no wrong, which is fortunate considering the damage it causes in doing "right".

Au Pairs – Armagh (from Playing With a Different Sex, 1981) – The title of this post comes from this track about the treatment of female IRA prisoners by the British authorities. The line has been stuck in my head since Bush made his announcements on secret prisons and torture earlier this week.

Dead Kennedys – Bleed For Me (from Plastic Surgery Disasters, 1981) –You know things have gotten bad when Jello Biafra’s lyrics are more relevant today than they were twenty five years ago. There’s an earlier version of this song, with Carter references instead of Reagan ones, featured in the 1981 film, Urgh! A Music War. You can watch the segment here. “There’s no punk rock in Argentina.”