Letters From Lockdown 3 – In This Dark Future You Can’t Forget Your Past

(Please note due to a reluctance to push certain media for reasons you’ll see below, and their refusal to allow for any balance that doesn’t scare for sales, I’m doing this independently of them. Therefore if you find it interesting and think it has value, please feel free to share a coin or two at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ewanmackenna. Also please note that if you are going through a tough financial time as so many are, I don’t want a cent. I’ve always written primarily to help those worst off, not to profit from them. Thank you. Ewan.)

A little something about me.

For it might tell a little something about how you perceive and how you are perceived. Regardless of where you stand on what’s the all-consuming, multi-layered and highly complex issue of the present, and the issue that will define how life is way, way beyond.

When I was a young child I was raised a Quaker and had a fascination with, but little understanding of, World War II. On the morning of meetings, while the adults went upstairs, we had Sunday school and, given a pen and paper one time, I drew a swastika. The teacher in horror grabbed a marker, added four lines and announced, “There’s a nice window”. I’ve often wondered what shock therapy or social services intervention it would demand today.

I was a Rangers fan because I liked Ally McCoist and enjoyed listening to what seemed like exotic European runs on the crackling 909 or 693 medium wavelength – whichever was working best given cloud cover. Guilt by association saw many chalk me down as a sort of UVF member when the only membership was of the Broxi Bear Junior Supporters Club.

I was a Chelsea fan too purely because my father liked them and we even went to Stamford Bridge on the odd occasion. Guilt by association there meant I was anti-Irish long before I knew what the various strands, good and bad, that make up modern Irishness even were. In more recent years my interest has waned because of the soulless riches and triumphs.

When I was still in single digits I had a plate of liver before me when our parents told myself and my sister about their impending divorce. Pretending I was sneaking to the toilet to spit the ghastly meat out, I instead went in there and cried. I’ve a feeling they knew too well.

I once tried to attack a psychologist with a pillow as I didn’t like where his questions went. I once hit my grandfather across the head with a pillow and broke his glasses because he stopped the TV on Count Duckula long enough to give me hope, and then continued with the most annoying brand of channel surfing that didn’t follow any logical numerical path.

My first kiss wasn’t until 15 – it wasn’t good and that was probably all on me. Soon after, a classmate I’d an infatuation with had a boyfriend so I asked them both if it would be okay if she could accompany me to my debs. He laughed saying yes. Nothing happened that night.

Growing up in much-maligned Athy based on little more than class, I never understood why fights where we came from got us jail, but fights in other places still allowed them to become leaders. I’ve struggled to understand how suicides where we were made people selfish, but mental health discussion that has become the preserve of a celebrity having an off-day was hugely brave. I’ve wondered why we were thick based on leaving cert points but they’d take court cases when that system told them the same. I didn’t like that we had a drug problem and corpses, but they were socialising and had tragedies around pretty faces.

I once had a nap in the walk-in fridge of Abrakebabra on Baggot Street. Once walking to work in the Sunday Tribune there, I was so focused on my phone I fell straight into a fresh section of wet cement, the workers pulled me out, I lost my shoes, and a friend in the office had to go and buy me a new pair of trousers during his shift. Once, after a night out in Copper Face Jacks, I woke up on the Tube to Nunhill. Yet I despise not being taken seriously.

I once realised how fat I’d gotten when pulling on a t-shirt that tore, and was so upset I punched a hole in the wall. I joined a gym yet was so meek there I rarely went as the eastern European guys were lifting boulders and girls were pounding miles on treadmills.

When I won sports writer of the year so long ago that I barely remember it, it wasn’t the articles that swayed the judges I was most happy with, but another series about sport on the fringes of society that showed reality for kids and adults living in places like Neilstown and Ballyfermot and Moyross. That seemed far more important to me. It still does. The gong for that award that misspelled my name is now used as a door-stop in the garage lock-up.

I once made the stupid decision of going on holiday to Krakow with a girl I’d just met, quickly realised I couldn’t stand her (it was no doubt mutual) so crept out after dinner and got a train to Prague. Yet in a hotel in the Czech Republic I accidentally washed a spider down the drain and it was the first guilt I felt on that trip. It didn’t add up but it was how my brain worked.

Sometimes I’ve laughed at homophobic jokes.

Sometimes I haven’t stepped in during racist conversations.

I’ve been in a strip club. More than once. But long ago.

I always try write what I deeply believe in, but admit that my ego does enjoy the attention.

I dislike Dublin’s success based on it largely being bought. I dislike Manchester City’s success based on where and who the cash came from. I dislike Conor McGregor being held up as a working-class hero with wealth justifying all, as if that’s how all within that landscape think. I dislike the Irish rugby team because the old money that runs fast and flows deep allows them a pass for behaviour off the field and results on it. Many dislike me for all of those things.

I’ve walked by a streetlamp and wondered if I was a deity based on it turning on or switching off. I’m arrogant and deeply insecure. I have an unerring need to be right which is great as a journalist but painful at a dinner party. I’m working on self-awareness – slowly.

I burn the candle at both ends so that sometimes even the middle feels in flames.

I need to work out on weekdays to remove bad energy and drink at weekends to provide it.

I cannot stand authority. I cannot stand elitism. Therefore I cannot stand the status quo.

I believe peaceful but destructive forces are usually a good thing.

I think raising questions about highly accepted topics is always a good thing.

I’ve overreacted to gentle jibes and underreacted to abuse.

I regularly consider what it’ll be like to be on death’s door.

I wrote my wedding vows on the toilet as where better does a man get in touch with his heart. I believe – wait – I know my wife is too good for me but I’m glad she doesn’t think the same as I’d fall apart without her wisdom, her warnings and her kind words.

I wish I could play the guitar and still don’t know why I haven’t bothered learning.

There’s a mole on my arm I’ve been meaning to get looked at for years.

I spend hours being bothered by life admin that could and would take minutes.

Being away from home I’ve missed the parties my mother throws and wonder if they’ll be back when this ends as we all get old. I miss the bag of chips with the father as we overanalyse some O’Byrne Cup result after a freezing January on the far terrace in Newbridge.

Some nights I cannot sleep. Some days I just want to sleep.

Sometimes I want to scream. Sometimes I yearn for silence.

I believe nuance is dead and buried.

My favourite Irish sports story of recent times involves the medals won at the under-20 worlds by a relay team containing Patience Jumbo-Gula, Rhasidat Adeleke and Gina Akpe-Moses as I like the country that it promises. Yet I also get those with nothing that think they are being bypassed in the queue, and wish their anger could be quelled by taking care of everyone with money that is suddenly available when it comes to less caring issues.

I’m pro-abortion, think religion is an utter nonsense but respect those who think otherwise, and believe that transsexuals in women’s sport is the few unfairly dictating to the many.

I’ve even made that shocking modern mistake of evolving over time and via my experiences.

Ultimately I’m a deeply flawed human. But I believe, to be human, is to be deeply flawed.

Yet these days all of what makes up a person and creates their beliefs doesn’t matter. Instead it’s become about dehumanising others to a sort of sub-human status. Instead it’s about finding a taboo box to tick, ignoring the rest, and giving a nasty label.

The left who marched for what they believed in despite the slings and arrows ought to know exactly how such targeting felt as they endured it across the late 60s and 70s and even into the 1980s. But just as Iggy Pop became an insurance salesman, they sold out too. A group that when wanting more said there’s enough to share around, but when they got more took the lot. A group now largely beyond comfortable but who deny anyone else the basics.

Today they are the ones trying to make others’ lives miserable and they are doing it via the same methods that those they despised once used to keep them quiet and down.

So what creates, what contradicts and what’s complex has become a pesky irrelevance.

It’s about pigeon holing someone so they can silence, ignore, and throw them to the trash.

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For a decade I lived in Brazil and, beside every raging high that packed the eyes and ears and nostrils upon each turn, was a caveat.

It was a place to always look over your shoulder.

One night, for buying the wrong woman a drink in a bar as she happened to speak English, a drug dealer in the corner was less than happy, followed me home, floored me with a two-by-four to the head and proceeded to kick me in the face for the guts of 15 minutes until a shout came that they’d kill me if they kept going. Another night on a bus back from a match, a car rammed it, shots came through the windows, five masked men with sawn-off shot guns and the tell-tale amber eyes of a crack high entered, tied the driver in the toilet, drove us to the middle of nowhere and kept us captive for hours with the odd thumping given out.

It was and is that kind of place.

Yet against that backdrop of normality, the 2018 election was considered dangerous.

In the yellow corner was Jair Bolsonaro, clad in the country’s canary hue, a darling of the far-right – and not in the way we cheaply reduce the issue to now to disregard views we dislike.

A huge admirer of Augusto Pinochet, he was on record saying that “voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing. Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do. Killing some 30,000… If some innocents die, that’s just fine”. On homosexuality he had professed that gay children should be whipped straight, equated it to paedophilia, and noted if his own son was of that persuasion he’d be better off dead. He expressed that migrants were scum and hinted the army should deal with them. He called indigenous people leeches. He referred to black people as “fat and lazy” and said activists of that race should be in a zoo. Twice he told a congresswoman she was too ugly to deserve his rape, shoving her during the first instance.

His followers made the election even by Brazilian standards lethal but it was important to take a stand. With women beaten in the streets for wearing the red of the opposition socialist party, and swastikas carved into those planning to vote against him, it made that stand more important still. I went on the likes of Newstalk and wrote in papers like the Sunday Business Post and Irish Independent about it but was usually shot down as being hysterical while not one government politician replied when asked to perhaps speak up. Eventually I walked my wife nervously to the polls although it made no difference.

He won but it still needed highlighting.

Thus by the time of the 2019 Copa America, after Brazil had won and he’d used their trophy celebration as an on-field political billboard, I stood and asked their coach Tite in the press room under the Maracana about a Nazi hijacking football. There was a gasp. But that is my political stance for I’ve seen real fascism in places most haven’t dared step.

My father wears a Communist pin. I left the Labour Party as they weren’t left enough in my much younger mind. Pete Seeger was my godfather. A while back on a trip to look at the plight of the Palestinian people, waiting at a checkpoint near Ramallah, I saw a child shot at by laughing Israeli soldiers. I’ve been warned by aid agencies never to transit through the UAE and had attempts made at hacking my computer and phone by Abu Dhabi.

I get what the right wing is and I’ve always written and spoken and acted against it. I always will.

Yet none of that matters to those who hijacked the left without knowing what it’s about.

This past while I’ve been called both Gemma and/or a fascist and it’s interesting why.

Because I believe everyone should have a right to meander beyond 5,000 metres. Because I think the poor should have a right to work. Because I think immigrants should have a right to come and go without being thrown into a hotel room for a fortnight at gunpoint and told to hand over a couple of grand for it. Because I believe it’s time to stop the rich profiting massively from misery.

Compassion is now a fascist trait? Balance is now an extremist trait? Awkward conversation and difficult discussions are now worth bringing down democratic cornerstones for?

Sadly it’s modern-day and self-proclaimed socialists that are adding to this damage. For them words clearly matter, if only because actions involve getting up and doing something. We should have known for this is the woke crowd that for years have seen political activism as a hash-tag to clear their own conscience. Je Suis Charlie. Stop Kone. Free Our Girls. A French-flag filter on Facebook. A BLM pin on their suit.

And they are now deciding which diversity of views is allowed as their bellies are filled but their minds are starved. Maybe they’ve too much time to think. Maybe they’ve too much time so they haven’t thought. But their outcome has been a great cancel culture.

Except these people have now got it into their heads that they can cancel death and will stop civic society to achieve that.

The Dublin protest was the latest example of all of this.

There has been a massive push to discredit the majority based on the few, and to ignore the message because of that made-up and unattributed perception of the messenger. A few caused violence so everyone there was violent; a few belonged to far-right groups therefore everyone there is far right; by extension these people must be stopped and not heard.

But how about a slightly alternative view of what I believe left-wing politics to be about.

A right to freedom of speech regardless of what is being said. A right to peaceful protest regardless of what is being peacefully protested. A right for others’ concerns and issues to be heard and discussed even if they are not yours. A right not to be tarred by sharing a space but not actions in some modern-day McCarthyism.

As Noam Chomsky put it: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” It seems those behind the theft of the left disagree though. They find that box to tick so they can place these people beneath them. They find that reason to tarnish them. They find that excuse to walk away from their genuine desperation.

That isn’t the left to me yet I’m not the left to them. So how about we don’t talk right and left anymore as it no longer makes sense. How about we talk about basic right and wrong?

No? There’s a good reason for that.

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When it comes to lockdown, the traditional left-right divide does not work but it’s still used.

What this issue is about sits on a very different axis where people are separated by the opposites of authoritarianism and the classic liberalism around economic and personal freedoms. To use this far more apt separation of belief doesn’t happen though for two reasons. Firstly, it’s easier to silence those you categorise as right as opposed to libertarian. Secondly, those in so much media and politics responsible don’t want to be seen as authoritarian despite the fact they are pushing and defending these policies daily.

Just take Prime Time on Tuesday night.

Supposedly the zenith of Irish journalism.

Supposedly the search for truth and fairness.

Covering those Dublin protests that involved a very small minority of rioters, they latched onto solely that. Their five-minute intro was akin to the Simpson’s episode involving Homer and the sexual assault case that leads him onto the television show Rock Bottom. There were blurred faces, footage of the bottles wrongly thrown and a flare disgustingly fired, there was the music that accompanied danger in cheap 1980s horror flicks, there was a brief shot of a placard calling RTÉ liars, and there was a narrative about QAnon and the far-right based on some conversations between a handful online and some flyers being passed out.

That was it. The majority were ignored. Evidence didn’t matter.

They didn’t speak to a single person in attendance.

They didn’t try and talk to the actual organisers.

They didn’t even mention what the message of the masses was and is.

It got worse.

With John McGuirk being interviewed by host Louise Byrne, scare-words like anti-vaxxer were used (I’ll gladly get vaccinated but when did the choice of not taking a vaccination become some Hitler-esque trait), she suggested that with only thousands there it meant hundreds of thousands on PUP therefore didn’t go (Rosa Parks was the only black on the bus who didn’t offer her seat so were the rest racist?), and she pushed a line that there was manipulation of the weak-minded by dark forces that led them there.

That was her starting point and it was up to others to disprove such a brutal theory.

I’m not sure if the intellect or disconnect was more insulting.

For isn’t it possible that people forced from work for large chunks of the last year and that have been told this has a long way to run, who are concerned about not seeing their elderly parents, or their teenager’s education or their child’s development, that panic over mounting bills or even basic rights, decided to take part in a peaceful march to air their concerns in the hope they’d be heard? Isn’t it possible that people are troubled that this greatest intrusion into personal liberty is being ramped up rather than down despite a year of knowledge being gained around Covid and the vaccine programme being rolled out?

But those boxes don’t demonise people who clearly they want to demonise.

I know for a fact several journalists in national papers and a producer in a national broadcaster pitched ideas around the downside of lockdown but were told to back down. So ask, why is that the case? I don’t know that answer but the question needs exploring and our media no longer will. Then again, this is the same media that in part knew all about the evil of the church and did nothing but decades later fawn horror at it for sales. Why would this be any different?

That isn’t based on conspiracy but based on our history and their suitability.

This is a big problem in where we’ve reached though, for there are no groups less well equipped to talk about what’s going on than politicians, the mainstream media and celebrity academics/doctors/scientists for they are now the first-class citizens with unique rights. Perhaps it never occurred to Louise Byrne and others castigating the suffering that those people out marching quietly, rather than being linked to those who gassed Jews and gypsies, communists and gays, wanted the same rights she has in terms of income now, security into the future, ability to travel five kilometers, and the chance to interact? Is that such an absurd theory?

And why is marching for equal rights and basic liberties seen as radical anyway? Surely standing by and watching and accepting your ability to interact and work and move being drastically curtailed is what’s radical?

Byrne is far from alone for this has become common practice in the media. To advocate against democracy, to push back against freedom of speech, and to ignore genuine concerns of a populace with a different and lesser set of freedoms than they, and they do so by calling it far-right rather than looking in the mirror and seeing themselves as authoritarian.

They are even proud and flaming hypocrites on top of all this.

While fawning concern around disinformation, they’ve spent the last while pushing it.

Prime Time. The Irish Times. The Irish Independent. Newstalk. Today FM. The Sunday Times. The Journal. Every last one of them. For it’s been over a week now since we learnt the Zero Covid group were and are actively engaged in disinformation around when it was achievable and the deadliness of variants, were going to lie about the vaccines if needed, planned to increase anxiety to stop pushback, and when it came to harass individuals to quieten them.

A week in which not only have none of these outlets so concerned with disinformation not raised the issue, but in which all have given a platform to further spread it. So laughable is it that Prime Time who used the private messages of a few to tar thousands were given this information around Zero Covid and refused to run it as they were… private messages. I’ve asked several in these papers and stations about it and they simply won’t comment. I asked one advisor to NPHET who asked me to back down but when asked to condemn it said they are not making this political when it’s nothing to do with politics in the first place.

How far we can plummet is deep.

There is after all a growing attempt in the west to label all dissent as forms of radicalism.

Then again, why would anyone expect decisions by third parties who pay no price if they are wrong to show empathy for others?

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The other day the Labour man of many a march, Fergus Finlay, wrote in the Irish Examiner.

He said he knew what democratic protests looked like and this wasn’t it.

He like many in a comfortable space had decided he was judge and jury around protests, and those involving people with fewer rights than he were not entitled to them. We’ve been here in history. That’s a dangerous road to walk.

I asked Finlay about his column and he told me those liking my question showed me up. The go to of these people – death of conversation by contrived association.

I asked again and he asked to name two rights he has that those protesting don’t have. I mentioned a wage beyond the forced PUP and the ability to travel more than five kilometres. He said I was lying. I mentioned his column he is paid for, his role on the HSE board of directors, and how two day’s earlier he was free to travel to Newstalk’s studios.

He went silent. And yet he is concerned about disinformation.

Others are too of course. The ones who think it’s okay for a hairdresser to work in Montrose but not Balbriggan. And our media is full of those openly displaying this attitude. Thus it has failed in its duty at a pivotal moment in our history. As the great George Carlin put it, “They are almost literally exploding with bullshit. ‘Cause they’re located right at the crossroads of all the other bullshit. The media are made up of equal parts – Advertising, politics, business, public relations and show business. These people are sitting right at bullshit junction.”

So why is it that they so openly embrace the double standards and different rights?

Why is it that suits and blazers are nodded at but tracksuits are screamed at?

It’s beginning to feel so much of this comes back to Ireland’s old problem.

It’s clearly a class thing.

And what we’ve managed to achieve in recent weeks is remarkable for, after taking away what little some in society had, we’ve managed to find ways to take away still more.

Their dignity. Their perceived motivation. Their obvious worry.

In my life I’ve played on two football teams. One was at home in Athy, the other when I moved to Dublin was St James’ Gaels. Both areas are considered poor. Both areas saw me fortunate enough to meet some of the best people I’ve come across anywhere in the world. What I found in both was their concerns have long been ignored. And this is no different.

I remember one kid in Crumlin who felt the system that existed had shut every door on him, and with that system controlled by Fine Gael and Fianna Fail throughout our history he turned to Sinn Féin. When more joined him, a media that had previously supported those that kept him down got worried and started ridiculing what he saw as an escape.

He protested the other day as life is hard and now the media tar him for this plan to get away.

It’s the rat trap but what do those helping it in journalism think of themselves?

Whatever happened to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?

Besides, if shows like Prime Time and others that claim panic about radicalisation actually cared for a moment, they wouldn’t push the very climate that creates these radicals.

They plant the seed, they water the soil and they chop the head of whatever grows. They give you the poison to sell you the cure. They want your destiny to be based on your postcode.

As for me and the complexities and contradictions that create what each of us thinks and believes in? I’m still a hugely flawed person that’s done much wrong and always will. But I’m still human and try to see others that way also.

Therefore I’m tired of simple issues that hurt those worst off being described as complex, and issues that are complex but tar those worst off being accepted as completely binary.

I’m jaded as I don’t feel there’s a need for the pile on and roars for expulsion and ruination and jail because some 18-year-olds got drunk in Limerick. If anything I feel the real issue is the university and government not canceling classes until they’d handed over deposits to academics and landlords for accommodation they knew wouldn’t be needed all along.

I’m exhausted by the need to point and laugh and demean two women who spelt words wrong on their tops and talked nonsense about QAnon when we know nothing about their lives and what led them to what is the wrong place but may not be their fault.

I’m shattered at standing in a tiny minority and thinking that while the man who shot the firework was thuggish and deserves the full penalty for what he did, it’s also possible to cordon that off and feel empathy for a father of four who had a power-washing business that’s been shut for a year as he tries to make sure they all get by on a PUP payment. One that likely amounts to what those telling him what he can and cannot do legally would spend easily over a Monday lunch and laughter.

But that isn’t the black and white of today.

It’s not the good and evil of the here and now.

It’s not the left and right of this dismal present.

Then again none of this is really living – flawed or extremely flawed – anymore either.

5 March, 2021

Tags: Covid, Far Right, ISAG, John McGuirk, Louise Byrne, Nazi, Prime Time, RTE, Zero Covid