Irish Avatar

 Seeing the reports of the race riots in Northern Ireland yesterday—in which gangs of masked men burned Black and immigrant families out of their homes, like something out of a turn-of-the-century pogrom, or the 1921 Tulsa massacre—I thought of John Berryman's words: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery."

There's something particularly heartbreaking about seeing this evil in Northern Ireland, which has known its share of violence, persecution, and oppression before, and ought to make common cause with its victims. Byron wrote in his poem "The Irish Avatar" that he could only be glad that the heroes of Ireland's freedom struggle past were no longer alive to see what the country had come to. 

We say the same today. 

For happy are they now reposing afar,

Thy Grattan, thy Curran, thy Sheridan, all [...]

Yes, happy are they in their cold English graves!

Their shades cannot start to thy shouts of today–

Nor the steps of enslavers and chain-kissing slaves

Be, stamp’d in the turf o’er their fetter­less clay.

But let it be said too that we can't just blame this violence on the Irish "mob." This was not just some spontaneous outpouring of populist fury. It was deliberately cultivated by the powerful and rich, in their bottomless cynicism. 

Elon Musk—the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday—"reposted a video of the attack in Northern Ireland and called for protests. He also reposted a message on X about the Belfast attack by the leader of the far-right British political party Restore Britain who said 'Millions and millions need to leave or be made to leave.'"

This is the same man that investors, the NASDAQ, and pension and index funds are set to transform into the world's first trillionaire, if all goes according to plan with his highly-anticipated SpaceX IPO tomorrow. The world's richest man is spending his free time encouraging violence against Black asylum-seeking families just trying to survive. 

This is who is leading the lynch mobs of our time. 

As Wendell Phillips wrote: "It is not the masses who have most disgraced our political annals. I have seen many mobs between the seaboard and the Mississippi. I never saw or heard of any but well-dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced, if not always led in person, by respectability and what called itself education."

Assembled and countenanced, in this case, by the world's first soon-to-be trillionaire.