Back to A Place of Safety

 I've submitted both Porno Manifesto and Find Ray T to c a couple of places, to see what happens. Just a start. FRT is my mainstream piece while PM is my fuck you piece, and I'm having fun with it. The response will say a lot about how I should proceed.

So now I'm back to working on APoS. First plan is to finish Eamonn McCann's book while on my trip to Portland, then dig back into The Battle of Bogside by Russell Stetler. I really should get a Brodart cover for the latter book; the dust jacket is very worn.

One interesting aspect of having taken some time away from the first book is, getting back into it I'm beginning to take a different view of Ian Paisley, the man who led the intransigent Orange Men/Protestants against the Catholic push for civil rights. I'd viewed him as a demagogue, a radical sociopath in the manner of Mussolini, more than Hitler or Stalin...but I'm beginning to see that isn't exactly accurate.

Paisley gave voice to a group of people who'd been told all their lives, and all during their parents' and grandparents' lives, that they were the true owners of Ulster. They'd been given deference and bribed with homes and jobs for generations, to the point it wan't so much expected as just the way things always were and should be. It wasn't even habit; it was their world, and Catholics wanting to share in it was seen as an attack on the very fabric of their society.

Which is part of the reason they did so much to actually hurt their chances for peace by toppling one centrist Unionist leader after another, and why they felt it was all right to attack a group of peaceful kids walking down a country road. They saw them as a danger to all they held dear. Giving even an inch would have been unthinkable to them...and so they destroyed everything they thought they were protecting. It wasn't until both sides were worn out by the death and destruction that they came to terms with the new reality. Only took 30 years.

We can see the exact same thing happening here, with the former guy (I will not use his name) tapping into the same sense of fear and frustration in too many people in the US. Mostly white, but not all. Mostly poor and ill-educated, but not all. And you can see it building to the same conclusion -- violence and death, thanks to ineffectual leaders and the conniving politics of too many in state legislatures and Washington.

To my horror, this should prove quite interesting...