Talking politics

Since the Tosser-in-Chief, accompanied by his adult family of grifters, is strutting around London and enjoying all the attention of the state visit Brexit Babe Theresa May scuttled over here to offer him in January 2017, it seems like an appropriate time to post about the conversations I had with various people while I was in Dublin and Belfast last month.

I’ll preface this by stating that I know for a fact that there are greedy, racist, misogynistic right-wing nut jobs in Ireland, but I did not run into any of them.

Thank God.

Stevie, my sectarian guide in Belfast, was justifiably proud of the progress made in terms of the civic comity and economic growth since the Good Friday Agreement. I told him that I was really heartened to see the changes since my last visit, but I was concerned about the cataclysm that is Brexit. He was, too. It’s not just the danger that a hard border between Ulster and the Republic could reignite the civil war, especially with all the Faragian hate rhetoric. It’s that pulling out of the Euro Zone and deporting all the European workers who fuel the economy could cripple the economy.

From my own observation, most of the people in service jobs—hotel staff, restaurant servers, retail clerks—were, from their accents, Eastern European, both north and south. In addition, a lot of construction, plumbing, electrical and the like is being done by people from Poland, Rumania, Czechia, Serbia, Estonia and the Slovak Republic. Come Brexit, the ones in Eireann will be fine—they’ll still be working and contributing to the nation. The ones in Ulster—not so much. What do you do when your hospitality industry collapses?

I’m not even going to talk about the National Health Service in Ulster, but they’re screwed royally.

Walking down Dublin’s O’Connell Street, I got to chatting with a Nigerian guy named Favour (yes), who asked if I’d sign a petition Oxfam was putting together on the catastrophe in Yemen. After inquiring where I’d been while in Ireland (“You must go to the country, it is beautiful.”) and how long he’s been there (18 months), we got back to the logistics of the petition. It was going to the Tánaiste (the deputy to the Taoiseach, and hearing Favor use the Irish terms was a treat), “Who’s like your Mike Pence.”

“Well, I hope he’s much better than Mike Pence.”

That brought a wry face.

“But he’s also our Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, so he’s like Rex Tillerson.”

I busted out laughing. “Oh, Tillerson is so last year, hon. At least this week it’s the very robust Mike Pompeo, but who knows for how long?”

Favour was also concerned about the lunacy of Brexit, and the rise of the RWNJs around the world (although he was more tactful in his terminology) who have been emboldened by the slug in the White House.

Then I spent two hours talking with a Twitter acquaintance about the dangers we see ahead. She has two children under the age of 10, whom she’s been able to give a good life partly because of the social support system Ireland has put in place. That would be the kind of social support system that Republicans in the US and Tories in the UK want to dismantle.

As with all my conversations, I prefaced every pronouncement with the disclaimer, “Considering what we in America have let loose on the world, I have no right to claim the moral high ground…” But Theresa May is a self-aggrandizing twit, Nigel Farage is a fascist lunatic and Boris Johnson is the Kleptocrat with a posh accent and apparently undiseased grey matter. Ireland has come so far in the past 30 years, shaking off its religious shackles (the special position of the Catholic Church was written into the Irish constitution in the 1920s; thanks, Dev) and cultivating an educated, innovative, humanistic populace. Reinstituting a hard border with Ulster is part and parcel of the long history of Britain crapping on its neighbors.

And the taxi driver who drove me to Dublin airport flat out said of the stable genius, “If he gets re-elected, I got no sympat’y for yez.” To which I replied, “And you’d be entirely correct.” He wondered how any woman or any person of color could have voted for him. To which I added any serving military or veteran. Or, indeed, any sentient human. He, too, felt that burgeoning racism in Britain is encouraged by the hatemongering emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and amplified by the likes of Farage.

All of this made me sad. As I told Stevie, I’d actually thought we’d made progress here in the States since the days of Sheriff Clark with his cattle prod, Watergate, the Vietnam War—but here we are, like Groundhog Day, living it all over again. Maybe it’s good that the veneer of advancing has been stripped away and we can look at how little we’ve moved forward in reality. And seeing it, we can change it. I hope so.

But it’s going to take a long time and a whole lot of work.