The Town I Loved So Well

Derry Girls, President Clinton, and a familiar yearning

I’ve been listening to old records, watching movies and TV shows, and reading books in an effort to blot out the unspeakable hypocrisy of Trump, the GOP, and their minions in the media.

On Sunday night I gleefully poured over stories of Trump’s taxes, not because I think it will make a difference in the election—it won’t—but because the aftermath is going to be incendiary. That high, if you want to call it that, lasted until Monday and then something like regret sank in. After being blindsided by the 2016 election I resolved not to fall into the trap of reading articles of the “Look at this asshole” variety. I wasted so many hours reading about the spectacle of Trump’s campaign during the run-up to the election, and I’m not going to do it again.

(I used to do the same thing when I was obsessed with sports. I’d read everything I could get my hands on about my team leading up to a big game. Each victory renewed my obsession, but if my team lost, I’d immediately get back to work as if to make up for lost time.)

The stakes are so much higher now and I don’t have nearly as much time as I did back then. None of us do.

When I started this newsletter I imagined part of its appeal would be writing about the different places my writing took me and the people I met along the way; but now we’re all stuck on the same awful Zoom call with a madman impersonating the President of the United States.

Back in March, April, and May I was terrified of Covid-19 to a degree that I was afraid to leave my home. For a while I even stopped exercising. I took lockdowns literally and didn’t leave except to go to the grocery store or pick up my daughter. The idea of traveling freaked me out. Travel where? Travel how?

Here we are on the cusp of October and nothing has changed. The spread of the coronavirus has slowed in some places and accelerated in others. American life is still very much on hold. A United States passport is pretty much useless at this point.

What’s changed? Now I think about travel every single day. Not just nostalgia for a great meal in Barcelona or a staggering seascape in Sligo or exploring Mayan ruins in Yucatan. I read the emails I get from travel sites offering ridiculously low fares on trips to countries I can’t get into. I marvel at cheap roundtrip flights to germ factories like Las Vegas. I even read the copy about destinations I don’t know much about—precisely the kind of fluff I used to write for Hilton, United, and Expedia when I worked at the old ad factory.

It’s all so pointless, but the yearning is real. Do you feel it too?

This week Nuvia and I watched the second season of Derry Girls. I’ve only been to Derry once, but I’ve spent more time in Northern Ireland than any other country except possibly Mexico. Watching Derry Girls teleports me into Northern Ireland and makes me gloriously happy. Derry Girls, if you haven’t seen it, is about the misadventures of four Catholic schoolgirls during the Troubles. It’s a raunchier, funnier version of Heaven Help Us set in the mid 1990s but feels timeless.

Most Irish-Americans of the late 20th century knew Derry as the birthplace of the Troubles, the sectarian strife between Protestants who remained loyal to the Queen and Catholics in favor of a united Ireland—a catastrophic mix of politics and religion. If you grew up in an intensely Irish household like I did, you knew Derry as the setting of Paddy Reilly’s “The Town I Loved So Well,” which is one of the saddest songs ever written.

In the first half of the song, Reilly describes the town where he grew up. He leaves his hometown as so many people in Ireland and Northern Ireland did, and returns after the Troubles have started, horrified by all the changes.

What makes the song so powerful is that Derry doesn’t sound all that great. There’s not much food, the shirt factory horn calls women away from their families to work, and gas from the gasworks hangs on to everything. Not exactly a pretty picture. So you can imagine how much worse it gets after the English army occupies the town with armored cars and tanks and guns.

Why Derry, you may be wondering? On January 30, 1972, during a civil rights march that brought 15,000 peaceful protestors to the predominantly Catholic part of Derry known as Bogside, the Army opened fire, killing 13 and wounding 15. That was Bloody Sunday. (Yes, the one U2 sang about.) Incredibly the victims are still seeking justice for the bloodshed the Army inflicted on innocent civilians that terrible day.

The comic misadventures of teenage girls from a tiny European country was an unlikely subject for a Netflix series. Setting it during a period of intense sectarian strife seems like the kiss of death, but Derry Girls was a hit.

I watched Season One with Annie in Belfast last summer. I forget which episode it was, but the girls were cracking on Giant’s Causeway: “Foreigners love Giants Causeway” and we all laughed because our friend Tom had taken us there that very day.

Season Two ends with an episode built around the IRA’s cease fire and President Clinton’s historic visit to Derry in 1995. The show includes a brief clip of Clinton’s address to the people:

Watching the clip above and the one used during the show I was struck by a number of feelings. It was a historic moment for a nation that after decades of horrific sectarian violence was on the path to peace, and I remember feeling something like pride that an American president had played role in it, a largely symbolic role, but a role nonetheless. Just by going to Derry he’d made a statement to the vast majority of Americans who’d only ever seen Northern Ireland on the news when something terrible had happened.

I visited Dublin for the first time in 1992 and Belfast in 1999, not long after the Good Friday Agreement, and watching Derry Girls brought back a twinge of nostalgia for those days.

But mostly what I felt was sadness. Can you imagine Trump making a speech like that? Of course not. The corpulent brute would make the situation worse within sixty seconds of opening his hole. But the flipside of this particular sadness is hope, because as bad as things have gotten in this country, they aren’t as bad as they were in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I don’t say that to minimize the severity of the situation, but to celebrate the progress in Northern Ireland. I spent a month in Northern Ireland last summer and fall and I can say without hesitation that I could live there happily ever after, a fact that no one thought possible when I was my daughter’s age. I also say it as an affirmation: I believe that in a few short months Trump will be gone and we will get to the work of making things better than they were before he was installed. It will require enormous empathy and good will and unity of purpose, but we will do it.

Here’s Something You Can Do Right Now

Last week many of you replied to let me know you donated to Mark Kelly’s campaign. Thank you! Let’s do it again. In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison is neck-and-neck with that chickenshit hypocrite Lindsay Graham who has been going on Hannity’s show to beg for money. Well fuck that guy. Let’s vote him out!

Do What You Want Updates

This week I’ve got not one, not two, but three updates about the book I wrote with Bad Religion.

1. Check out this excellent interview lead vocalist Greg Graffin did with Derek Scancarelli for Forbes. I don’t think Graffin talks about the book that much (if at all) but his answers are deep and thought provoking. If you don’t know Bad Religion’s music all that well and are curious as to what makes the band unique, this is a great place to start. And if you are a Bad Religion fan, how refreshing is it to see a musician provide such earnest answers to an interviewer’s questions?

2. I was on a podcast! Last month I was on a guest of That One Time On Tour hosted by Christopher Swinney and we talked about all kinds of things related to Do What You Want. What kinds of things? I really don’t remember, but it’s a safe bet I talked about the Navy, Keith Morris, and following Bad Religion around Europe. The time flew by, I had a blast talking with the host, and I saw some people I don’t know on Instagram recommending the podcast so I’m taking that as a sign that it isn’t terrible.

3. Way back in January of 2018 I drove from Brooklyn, New York, to Ithaca to interview Greg Graffin at his house. I spent two nights with Greg and his family and we talked for hours and hours. We took a break from the interviews to visit the Punk Rock Archive at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection at Cornell University, and it was as insane as it sounds. I wrote about my wild weekend with Greg for the latest issue of Razorcake. It’s not online, but you can (and should) subscribe to America’s only non-profit punk rock zine. But if you’ve read this far and would like a copy I will send one out to the first person that replies.

Stay safe, be well, and vote like hell.

It’s true; we do love Giant’s Causeway.