Garry Potter And The Same Old Nonsense, David Backhim [the mitten read aloud txt] 📗

It is hugely ironic, but working-class protestants were badly neglected by the Ulster unionist bourgeois patricians in ‘bygone days of yore’, who failed to improve their standards of living, preferring instead to hoodwink them with the consolation that ‘at least you’re better than the fenians’. However, now that the ‘fenians’ have all the rights that they have yearned for, the increasingly neglected loyalists realise that the Orange card is not what it was cracked up to be. After all, what good is there in playing in a so-called ‘Kick The Pope’ band, if you are struggling to put dinner on the table for your children?

POLITICS IN NORTHERN IRELAND
The political squabbling in Norn Iron has been described accurately as ‘the dialogue of the deaf’, in which various parties and politicians simply wish to get their points across whilst refusing to hear their opponents’ arguments and reasoning. A good friend of mine once said that it was no accident that God gave us two ears, but only one mouth, as listening is more important than talking. It is impossible to understand anything and anyone, especially your political opponents, if you do not listen. The day that Northern Ireland’s motley crew of politicians choose to listen to one another’s hopes and fears, or at least to respect one another’s electoral mandate, is the day that the six counties joins the rest of the twenty-first century world.
Until that happy day, I would urge the struggling Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP to consider a re-alignment with the Alliance Party in Stormont at least so as to ensure that they are the largest designated bloc. Of course, these parties have major differences over parades and post-primary selection for schoolchildren, but a Stormont coalition would allow these parties to out-flank the rejectionists and vetoists in the DUP and Sinn Fein.

CHRISTIANITY
Most young people would do very well to discard their posters and adulation of flawed, unreliable heroes, pin-ups, and ‘stars’, and focus on the flawless, totally reliable saviour Jesus Christ. While we all let people down at various times of our lives, without necessarily meaning to do so, the Messiah fails nobody. Christianity is a good thing. What spoils it is Christians. Like many people, when I hear someone with a Northern Irish accent starting to rant about God, I want to run for cover.

IN THE NAME OF GOD
One of the massive ironies of human history during the last two millennia is that such phenomena as the Crusades, the thoroughly unpleasant Spanish Inquisition, the religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth century, the English Civil War, the religious conflict in Ireland and Scotland in the seventeenth century, to name but a few, were all perpetrated in the name of God. The participants in all this bloodshed along with the noble savages who drove the Africans, the Aboriginies, and the Red Indians off their native territories will be perhaps shocked to discover on Judgment Day that their Creator is far from happy with the blood, misery, pain, and torture inflicted apparently in His name. I have been reliably informed that the last act of violence that was acceptable to God was the sacrifice of His son on the cross in AD30. Those Christian, Jewish, or Muslim ‘fanatics’ who have subsequent to this date attempted to justify their murders as being God-sponsored are sadly mistaken.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Did you know that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany used to wear a glove on one hand and carry a glove in the other hand in a vain attempt to conceal the fact that one of his arms was considerably shorter than the other? Did you also know that the Kaiser was Queen Victoria ’s favourite grandson, and that he was present at her bedside when the Empress of India breathed her last in January 1901? Are you also aware that the German emperor rode at the head of the procession alongside his cousin King George V at the funeral of his disapproving uncle, King Edward VII, in 1910?
Bob Dylan once sang of the ‘Great War’ in ‘With God On Our Side’ that “ the reason for fighting, I never did get”. The tragedy of the First World War is that the massive carnage in the mud and trenches of both western and eastern Europe was the result of a family ‘tiff’ between cousins Wilhelm II, King George V, and the Russian Tsar, Nicholas III. What was even more tragic was that the likes of Adolf Hitler stepped in to the void to denounce the ‘November criminals’ for allegedly stabbing the undefeated army in the back. The little Austrian corporal went on to persecute Germany ’s Jews, many of whom had served alongside the Viennese tramp in the cause of the Kaiser. The rest is history.

THE MYTH OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
We like to congratulate ourselves that the eventual victory of Britain (the United States and several other countries helped a bit too) prevented the absolute annihilation of European Jewry in the Second World War. However, British national governments barely registered a whimper when the Nazis started persecuting German and Austrian Jews long before the outbreak of the global conflict. Britain was even most reluctant to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror. Yes, the Allies belatedly liberated the death camps, but not before an approximate six million wretches had perished. However, what prompted Britain ’s reluctant participation in the hostilities in September 1939 was Germany ’s violation of Poland ’s sovereignty. The irony was that at the ‘successful’ conclusion of the bloodshed six years later, Poland was forced to surrender her independence to the equally villainous Soviet Union .

THE MYTH OF ANNE BOLEYN
Good old ‘Harry of England’, Henry VIII, was a fat, horrible hypocrite. Like many a noble monarch, Henry liked to sleep around, whilst demanding that his spouses be devoted to him alone. Two ‘unfortunate’ souls, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, failed to live by the tyrant’s rules, and lost their heads – literally. Catherine’s crime was that she had an appetite for members of the opposite sex as many other healthy teenage girls would have.
Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn has remarkably been treated even more kindly by history. True, it was tragic that she should be cruelly taken from her infant daughter, the future Elizabeth I. However, what few people seem to realise is that Anne was public enemy one, a conniving, manipulative, and scheming individual, whose affair with the king had wrecked his marriage to the long-suffering, but hugely popular Catherine of Aragon. There was also the small matter of incurring the wrath of the Pope with the result that the king was excommunicated, and obliged to form his own church of England. Anne Boleyn would probably have made very good tabloid fodder – such was the resentment that she aroused. Perhaps her untimely death and martyrdom was a good career move.

THE MYTH OF SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
I remain amazed that so many self-appointed expert commentators, not to mention our Mums and Dads, regard Sergeant Pepper (1967) as the greatest album of all time. For a start, it is not even The Beatles’ best album. Some people prefer its’ predecessors, Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), but this young man believes that the so-called White Album (1968) and Abbey Road (1969) are the Fab Four’s best album offerings. Furthermore, Pepper was not even the best album to emerge from EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios in 1967. That distinction belongs with Pink Floyd’s debut long-player ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’.
Furthermore, as an exercise in psychedelia, Sergeant Pepper is hardly choc full of mind-expanding material. Commentators will predictably point to Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, but Paul McCartney’s products such as Lovely Rita, Getting Better, and When I’m Sixty-Four are about as ‘far out, man’ as a Max Bygraves album.
Of course the album’s cover and montage of assorted heroes and anti-heroes merit much praise, but as an exercise in hype and myth, Pepper is the ultimate let-down. True, there are musical highlights, such as George Harrison ’s ‘Within You, Without You’, which sounded absolutely nothing like anything that had been inserted on a pop album before. Similarly, ‘A Day In The Life’ is an equally unique track that sounds like nothing recorded before or in four decades since. The greatest tragedy of Sergeant Pepper is that the outstanding double A-side,Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane , were omitted from the album. Pepper is yet another good record from an excellent group of musicians, nothing more, nothing less.

YOU CAN’T SEE THE WOOD FOR THE TREES
Dear reader, you know that you are a bandwagon-jumper, who can’t see the wood for the trees if you think that Elton John’s ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ or ‘Candle In The Wind’ is better than the hugely under-rated ‘I’ve Seen That Movie Too’ (from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ). Furthermore, you can’t see the wood for the trees if you think that Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ is a superior love song to the ace guitarist’s ‘Let It Grow’. Similarly, you can’t see the wood for the trees if you think that’Wonderwall’ or ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ are better Oasis tracks than the sorely under-rated ‘Columbia’ (which is infinitely better than anything The Beatles ever did). Finally, you definitely cannot see the wood for the trees if you think that ‘Nowhere To Run’ by Martha Reeves and The Vandellas is a more appropriate Vietnam War track than The Byrds’ ‘Draft Morning’, from their outstanding Notorious Byrd Brothers album.
Yes I know that tastes differ and beauty is in the eye of the beholder,but judging by how so many sheep shuffle in behind the ‘humble’ views of one or two critics, it is clear that a lot of people can’t see the wood for the trees. There is a whole host of outstanding records out there that didn’t get the credit that they deserve, while others are hyped beyond their worth. Perhaps the best examples are the tracks ‘The Last Resort’ and ‘Pretty Maids All In A Row’ which are considerably superior to The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’, while Simon And Garfunkel’s ‘The Only Living Boy In New