The passing of the recent healthcare legislation and the arrest of nutcase Christian militia members have served as striking examples of how we are a divided country. No doubt we are at a very divisive point in our country’s history, but we are not on the brink of a civil war. To hear commentators in the supposedly mainstream media tell it, we are either under siege from communist infiltrators or a fifth column of right wing lunatics is plotting to murder everyone who voted Democratic in 2008.
Calling Obama a socialist is making his opponents look like buffoons. A socialist wouldn’t raise more than $750 million from corporate donors and forgo public campaign financing. A socialist would not have made attempts to attract Republican support or sign what is at its core a moderate bill. A socialist would have insisted on a government-run healthcare system as exists in most Western democracies. I hate to break this to my conservative friends, but Canada, England, Norway and Spain are not communist countries. There are no “death panels” ordering elderly people to be euthanized in Sweden or France.
The recent health care plan may be a fiscally irresponsible boondoggle full of accounting tricks and underfunded mandates, but it is not a communist blueprint. Calling Obama a socialist is idiotic (double idiot points for denouncing Obama’s so-called socialist policies while quoting George Orwell, who actually was a socialist).
It’s the same brand of idiocy to claim that the opposition to the Obama administration is born out of latent racism or that conservatives are calling for wholesale murder of Democrats.
Obama supporters know that the stigma of racism (a word so overused and abused it ought to be in quotes in most cases) can condemn a political opponent to the humiliating and irrelevant margins of society. The easiest way to deflect blame and anger from the first black president is to somehow portray criticism of his administration as racist. Therefore, people angry at the healthcare bill aren’t really upset over cuts to their or their parents’ Medicare coverage or taxes on their healthcare benefits, they must be closet racists angry that ‘Hail to the Chief’ is played for a black man. Look for more accusations of “racism” when Democrats move to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.
Likewise, Sarah Palin is not endorsing murder when she uses firearms metaphors in her messages to her supporters. She’s the same kind of corporate water-carrier the Republicans have been pushing our way for decades. She may be an idiot, but she’s not trying to inspire a right wing coup. The same goes for other Republican Party blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck etc.
Republicans and Democrats are painting one another as extremists in an attempt to stigmatize their opponents and stifle debate. They’re both wrong.
I’m going to do something that some may think is heretical. I’m going to not drink on St. Patrick’s Day.
I’m taking a break from drinking for a while for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the patron saint of Ireland. But even if I was in full drinking mode right now, I’d still be putting away the alcohol on St. Patrick’s Day.
Let’s face an ugly fact: for most Americans on St. Patrick’s Day, even most Americans of Irish heritage, St. Patrick’s Day is little more than an excuse to be drunk and stupid. I have nothing against wanting to be drunk and stupid; it’s good and natural to want that. But let’s quit pretending we’re really celebrating Irish heritage.
The Irish embrace the ugliest stereotypes about themselves and hold them up for celebration. I can think of no other race of people on earth so enamored with their own weaknesses. I’m glad that the Irish have not given themselves over to wholesale professional victimhood (though that may be on its way), but the green beer and jokes about being drunk are little more than blandly accepted ethnic slurs. Frankly speaking, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by drinking beer is like celebrating Martin Luther King Day by smoking crack.
I don’t rightly expect to do away with St. Patrick’s Day parades, the fighting Irishman, or even green beer (though you should have more respect for beer than to drink it). And I’d be the biggest hypocrite on earth to tell people to avoid drinking and good times.
But maybe, just maybe consider doing something that celebrates Irish culture and history in its own right.
Here are some good alternative drinking holidays:
January 26 – General Andrew Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans on this date in 1815. Americans in New Orleans from that point forward would be free to drink themselves into a coma and bare their breasts for beads without interference from the British crown.
January 29 – On this day in 1880, W.C. Fields was born. The actor was famous for his drinking and once said, “A woman drove me to drink, and I never had the decency to thank her for it.”
March 22 – Celebrate the beginning of the end of Prohibition. On this date in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed the sale of beer for the first time since the start of Prohibition. The 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition, was fully ratified on December 5.
July 21 – Birthday of Ernest Hemingway (1899), great American writer and also prolific drinker. It would be easier to name the non-drinking writers, but some other famous drinking writers’ birthdays include Jack Kerouac (March 12), Charles Bukowski (August 16) and Hunter S. Thompson (July 18).
And here are some alternative Irish holidays to celebrate:
March 4 – Birthday of Robert Emmet, Irish rebel born in 1778 and executed by the British on September 20, 1804. His rebellion began July 23, 1803, if you’d rather celebrate his legacy in July. He gave a famous Speech from the Dock at his trial.
April 24: April 24, 1916 was the start of the Easter Rising, the rebellion in Ireland against the government of the United Kingdom that set in motion the events that eventually led to Ireland’s freedom (most of Ireland anyway, there are six counties in the North that are still part of the U.K.). The rebels were a small group of brave Irishmen and Irishwomen. Most of the leaders were executed.
June 16 – June 16 is Bloomsday, the day in 1904 in which the James Joyce novel Ulysses takes place. Leopold Bloom travels about Dublin, drinks, eats gorgonzola sandwiches, masturbates during a fireworks show, and does other stuff that sound a lot more fun than slogging your way through Ulysses (which you should totally do; I’ll go back and finish reading it … some day).
The most fascinating news story to me so far this year that I’ve been following intently is that of the assassination of Hamas figure Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai in late January. Police officials in Dubai have provided names and photos of those they believe were involved, and the pool of suspects now includes nearly 30 people.
The more I learned about this killing, the more I became convinced that the Israeli government was not responsible.
First, it appears that the team was sloppy. Suspects are caught on surveillance video immediately before and after disguising themselves and are easily identifiable. Almost all of their movements were captured on surveillance video; some of the suspects are even caught looking right at surveillance cameras. Some of the forged passports used by the suspects do not bear the required numbers of letters or numbers in their serial numbers; governments like Israel have regular access to foreign documents in order to detect fraud, and getting the specs on a real Irish or French passport would be easy for a security-conscious country like Israel.
I don’t think that if the Mossad had pulled this off, that they would have done so using the forged identities of actual Israeli citizens. These European immigrants to Israel are now in fear for their lives since their names are connected to this killing, and to put them in that kind of danger undermines the whole mission of the Mossad, which is to make the world safer for Jews.
Also, Israel does a lot of business with Dubai, and pulling off an operation like this in Dubai puts that at risk. Why risk all that when there are better locations to kill this guy. Large teams of Israeli agents are regularly able to penetrate the West Bank and Gaza, why go through the trouble of sending a bit hit team to Dubai, where they know there are video cameras everywhere.
Anther development that points away from the Israeli government: Dubai officials said they detained two Palestinians in connection with the killing. Those Palestinians are apparently connected to Fatah, the PLO faction that rules the West Bank and is kind of a civil war with Hamas. It would certainly be in the PLO’s interest to take out a Hamas rival while pointing the finger at Israel.
The biggest question for me is this then: who are the people on this hit squad, if not Israeli agents? They certainly copied Israeli tactics and did everything to point the finger at Israel, but they were not Palestinians. They are Caucasians who can pass for European travelers. Is this some kind of Blackwater-type company that hires itself out to state sponsors of assassination? And if so, are they hiring?
I first saw Scott M.X. Turner perform outside the British Consulate in July of 1998. I went there and joined a group of Irish Americans protesting the treatment of Irish nationalists in the North of Ireland under British government rule. This was during the contentious summer “marching season” that involved the pro-British loyalist Orange Order marching through largely Irish nationalist areas, and there had been many loyalist riots that year, mostly centered around the town of Portadown. Scott and his wife Diane—appearing as the United 32s, with Scott on guitar and Diane on the whistle—performed a cover of Paddy McGuigan’s “The Men Behind the Wire.”
Several months later, since Scott and I were involved with some of the same Irish groups, I wound up engaging in an online debate with him over the case of Amadou Diallo, a street vendor shot to death by plainclothes police officers in the Bronx in early 1999. Scott was participating in protests against the police, who he thought shot Diallo as a result of racial profiling and systemic police abuse, and thought that Irish activists should be right there with him, since nationalists in the North of Ireland were subject to a brutal and sectarian police force. I was of the opinion that while the shooting of Diallo was terrible, the police thought Diallo was pulling a gun on them and that the murder charges against the officers were excessive and politically motivated. Our online debate was spirited but always respectful.
I got to know him better mostly through the Irish causes with which we were both involved. We both agreed that Irish groups are way too divided over everything, and that no group that fights for a united Ireland should be shunned by any other.
We would often debate the issues of the day through his Web site’s forum. We actually agreed on a lot of issues, but what fun is agreeing with someone all the time? Some of the most memorable exchanges occurred between me, Scott and Scott’s friend from the Rockaways, Jim McDowell.
What may surprise you to learn about Scott is that even though he is a lifelong punk rocker who wears a mohawk and is an avid political leftist, he is one of the biggest sports fans you will ever meet. I have lots of friends who are very much into sports and know all manner of sports history, statistics, trivia and minutiae, and I’d put Scott’s sports knowledge against any of them.
Scott taught me a lot about the more funny, outlandish and controversial side of sports. He regaled me with tales of Bill Veeck, a famous baseball owner who was known for his colorful publicity stunts, and Bill “The Spaceman” Lee, a Red Sox pitcher known for outlandish costumes, left-wing politics and unique ideas. We debated whether or not the black power salute protest of U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics was appropriate. Scott pointed out that their white companion on the podium, Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, supported their protest and was pilloried in the Australian media and kept off the 1972 Australian Olympic team in return.
Both being fans of Rocky Sullivan’s, a great Irish bar formerly located on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, we wound up being regulars on a pub quiz team there every Thursday. Unlike the other regular teams there, we changed our name at every pub quiz.
After Rocky Sullivan’s found itself priced out of Manhattan and relocated to Red Hook, Brooklyn, it was Scott who picked up the pub quiz mantle and became Rocky’s new quizmaster. In a short amount of time, Scott grew the quiz at the new location to equal and then surpass the popularity of the old location. He added his own new twists to the pub quiz traditions and earned a devoted following.
Scott told me about the Spunk Lads, one of the great punk bands that started punk music in the late 1970s in England that was then reforming in Brooklyn. I was fortunate enough to be hired as a roadie for the Lads, and it was the best job I ever had. Scott (a.k.a. Bloody Dick, the Spunk Lads’ guitar player) insisted I get an equal cut of whatever money the Lads made at shows. Often, at the end of a show, Scott would load up his van with the band’s equipment, the rest of the band, me and whatever fans could fit. It was a cramped arrangement that I dubbed “Spunk Taxi.” It became a running joke that I would ask Scott to drop me off at the Dyckman Street A train stop, which is the stop I normally exit the train to get home late at night.
It was so much fun being a roadie for the Spunk Lads that I decided I really wanted to start my own band, and a few years later it finally came together. My band was lucky enough to play some shows with the Spunk Lads.
Scott’s involvement with music goes back to when he was driving in North Carolina and he first heard The Clash’s “London Calling” on the radio. He pulled his car over and finished listening to the song, then drove straight to the nearest record store and bought the record. For years he was primarily a drummer. In the early 1980s, he played drums in a band called The Service. Once night, when the Spunk Lads played CBGB in 2002, Scott showed me a sticker from The Service that was still on the wall in one of the back rooms after more than 20 years. For many years, he fronted a band called The Devil’s Advocates. He and his wife Diane would perform as the United 32s, a reference to the total number of counties in Ireland (and how they should be united into one undivided nation).
When The Clash’s Joe Strummer died in December of 2002, Scott and Diane performed an acoustic version of “Garageland” at a Devil’s Advocates show at Manitoba’s. It was an excellent tribute to the late Clash front man that people who were there still talked about years afterward.
More recently, Scott has been performing and writing music as RebelMart, a one-man band who sings about everything from the slow demise of Brooklyn (“Brooklyn is Dying”) to a moving tribute to his friend Jimmy McDowell, who passed away a few years ago (“Jimmy of the Rockaways”) to France’s stealing of a World Cup spot from Ireland (“Robbery Henry”).
For the last few years, Scott, along with many other Brooklynites, has been fighting against an unlawful, amoral and unconstitutional land grab in downtown Brooklyn by real estate developer Bruce Ratner. Using—or rather, abusing—the government’s power of eminent domain, the development corporation is seizing people’s property in order to put up condominiums and an arena for the NBA’s New Jersey Nets. The basketball arena is simply bait to get political cover for the luxury condominium development. It is as clear abuse of eminent domain as can be imagined, yet the politically connected developers have gotten their way. In their way, among other holdouts, is Freddy’s Bar. Scott’s been busy doing walkathons, holding benefit concerts and doing whatever else he can to support Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. Being a sports fan, he even started his own group called Fans for Fair Play to protest the scheme and others like it.
At the end of January, Rocky Sullivan’s Pub Quiz enthusiasts got an email message from Scott they’d never expected. “My last Rocky Sullivan's Pub Quiz will be Thursday,February 4,” it said in the message. “I'm heading to Seattle, Washington, home of corporations that make jets, sell books, brew coffee, book travel and record rock bands. Also, the home of Ebbets Field Flannels, a company that researches, designs, manufactures and sells historic sports clothing. I'll be working there doing everything under the vintage sun. It's sorta right down one of my two alleys. The other alley is music. Seattle's a good place for me to get back into writing, producing and playing the songs I've put aside for the last several years.”
I went to Scott’s last show at Freddy’s, a site of many of his finest shows both as a solo artist and as a member of the Spunk Lads. It was much fun, with Scott playing some songs with opening act Neil deMause, including a funny song about baseball legend Doc Ellis. As always, it was great fun, but it was also sad. This was Scott’s last time playing music in a place that was full of great memories. Everyone there was a better person for having known him, and we all knew we could never repay him.
Scott’s last night in Brooklyn was spent doing what he loves best: making music and visiting with friends. Rocky Sullivan’s, where Scott had served as quizmaster and had performed as a musician, hosted a farewell party for him. Scott played as part of a traditional Irish music trio and then played a few of his own songs. He also kept busy saying goodbye to well wishers. It was a night of long goodbyes.
At the end of the night, he was good enough to give me a lift to the A train, one last time. “People need to have more adventure,” he told me. “And I don’t mean the Errol Flynn swashbuckling type. I mean getting out of your own skin, going for things.” Scott has made his life an adventure. While his friends in New York miss him already, we’re comforted in the knowledge that we are all richer for knowing him.
I write a column called 'Notes from a Polite New Yorker' as well as short stories and poems. My writing has appeared in Ask A New Yorker, GetUnderground.com, Knot Magazine, The Black Table, Too Square, and other web sites and print publications.
