Saint Patrick’s Day looms once again, and today’s show is Irish themed. But Jack begins the program with a poem for Oakland’s courageous mayor, Libby Schaff, who defied the current miscreant in the White House:
For Libby Schaff
On behalf
Of all those
Whom POTUS would remove
For Libby Schaff
On behalf
Of all those
Who dream of country, love
For Libby Schaff
On behalf
Of all those
Whom POTUS hates and would make “disappear”
For Libby Schaff
Who bore the Wrath
Of POTUS
And answered it with eloquence, passion, intelligence—
And the great power of laughter
*
King Liar sits in a house of White
King Liar visits the land with Blight
Unevenly does this man dispense
And by his side is the foul fool Pence
Chaos, says Liar, is what I am
A man of business, my business Sham
I say I’m an ordinary guy like you
But even the dogs know it isn’t true
My orange hair feels the lack of Hope
Sometimes I flatter sometimes I grope
I have a wife and a son in law
Who drinks Russian vodka and flouts the law
The law, c’est moi, says busy Liar
Watch me burn with my pants on fire,
I know for what you fools are yearning
But look, the country is burning. Burning!
The Irish portion of the show begins with the great Irish singing group, The Clancy Brothers (“Ar ya in the mood for singin’?”) and concludes with James Joyce’s 1929 recording of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake, made at the insistence of Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia Beach writes of it:
“How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is, and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue! This is a treasure we owe to C. K. Ogden and Basic English. Joyce, with his famous memory, must have known ‘Anna Livia’ by heart. Nevertheless, he faltered at one place and, as in the Ulysses recording, they had to begin again. Ogden gave me both the first and second versions. Joyce gave me the immense sheets on which Ogden had had ‘Anna Livia’ printed in huge type so that the author—his sight was growing dimmer—could read it without effort. I wondered where Mr. Ogden had got hold of such big type, until my friend Maurice Saillet, examining it, told me that the corresponding pages in the book had been photographed and much enlarged.”
The Clancys sing, among others, this song, written, says Liam Clancy, “by a young Jewish lad,” Fred Geis. The song is “Lament for Brendan Behan” (1923-1964), Ireland’s “sweet angry singer”:
Word has come from Dublin City
Word has come to our town
Word has come from Dublin City
They tell me bold Brendan is dead
Born in ’twenty three in a slum in Dublin
With a tenement over his head
Born with a spirit his flesh could not contain
They tell me bold Brendan is dead
He died at the Meath in far off Dublin
In a cold white hospital bed
In the Georgian tenements the children hushed their singing
They know that bold Brendan is dead
No stranger to life, he lived right enough
No stranger to the glass in his hand
No stranger to the cause he fought all his life for
Yet they tell me bold Brendan is dead
Ireland has lost her sweet angry singer
No longer his poems of fine design
Ring out in Gaelic or sound through the lanes
For alas! bold Brendan is dead