Notapoppy

Ninety-eight years ago today at 11am GMT the guns fell silent and an Armistice was declared which effectively ended WWI.  It was exactly a week too late to save Wilfred Owen, the most anguished and anguishing poet of his generation, who was killed crossing a muddy stream on 4th November 1918. I was born less than ten years after the end of WWII and my parents must have still been raw from their experience in uniform during that conflict. All the veterans of WWI are all safely dead and no longer hirpling around the streets without legs or coughing up their lungs in bed in the spare room. Called the spare room to spare the rest of the family having to listen to Pa trying to accommodate to the effects of phosgene. We tend, therefore, to romanticise WWI on the one hand and 'like' the poems of Wilfred Owen; and on the other hand agree that it was a monstrous thing to unleash upon the planet. I was brought up on a revisionist history of that global conflict which took the 'lions led by donkeys' approach that it was all a horrible mistake, driven by a false sense of national interest and a willingness to over-react to perceived diplomatic slights.  Really, who gives a damn now about the Agadir Crisis? Was that a sufficient cause to lay down the keels of another half dozen battleships? My Grandfather lost a lung in WWI, frozen to necrosis above the North Sea, which seems a lot cleaner than chlorine and phosgene poisoning, but a rather brutal handicap nevertheless.

When I was growing up in England, everyone wore a poppy on Armistice Day and most people stopped what they were doing for 2 minutes on the knell of 1100hrs.  Arriving in Dublin in October 1973, the absence of poppies was conspicuous the following month. The Irish just didn't Do Remembrance Sunday. Poppy denial was part of the forging of a post-imperialist national identity.  I didn't miss the poppies. I was coming round to the idea that war was a mortal sin and wouldn't have worn one if I'd been back in England. The Vietnam War was in the news and being anti-war was a legitimate stance. From a distance, I get the idea that universal UK poppies are having a resurgence in the UK, which is a little worrying if true.

Today there are a couple of soccer matches going down Across the Water as part of the run up to the World Cup and the Scottish and English FAs have decided that their national teams will wear poppy arm-bands during their match this afternoon. FIFA doesn't think much of this because its rules forbid political or religious symbols on footballers' kit. Commercial symbols - Nike, Adidas etc. - are quite acceptable. The rhetoric of indignation about whether the English team should or may wear poppies sounds suspiciously like the shit-stirring bombast in the run-up to 1914.  Affront is only two short steps from a [Western] Front.

One footballer in the British FA leagues doesn't do poppies. James McClean hails from Derry and for him the poppy has strong associations with the British Army and the Army has strong associations with Bloody Sunday, a massacre in his community perpetrated by 1 Para, the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, in January 1972. His 2013 Open Letter to Dave Whelan his boss at Wigan Athletic explained why he wouldn't, couldn't, wear a poppy along with his team mates. Predictably, this stand is met with outrage and indignation. I don't think those reasons are particularly coherent - bloody Sunday went down 20 years before McClean was born -  but I'm all for him expressing them. His position gives us all a chance to reconsider our certainties about the matter of war and remembrance.

Whatever about poppies, in my head arm bands will forever be associated with brown shirts although I've never been to Nuremberg and was born 20 years after the Reichsparteitag der Einheit und Stärke rally at which Leni Riefenstahl shot her masterpiece of propaganda Triumph des Willens.

There, I don't feel clean any more. So let's read Rudyard Kipling's story of reconciliation The Gardener.  It will take ten minutes - dis al.

Something rotten in the state of Dance-mark

Our girls Dau.I and Dau.II grew up in the rural midlands and never went to school. Their education was very much on the unschooling end of the spectrum and they showed no interest in team sports - presumably taking a cue from the parents. But they spent a lot of time in the car [carbon footprint hadn't been discovered in the 00s] listening to audio-books, singing and wrangling [it all started when she hit me back] . . . while en route to events. Ballet, tin-whistle, flute, speech&drama, painting . . . one year they joined a local marching band, had rehearsals one evening a week, with parades on the weekend. The enterprise was run as a business, run by a family embedded in the community transitioning into its second generation of leadership. It was cliquey and incestuous; week after week our girls got to carry the effin' banner while the other kids played instruments. After a season of paying their dues and learning neither fife nor drum, they jacked it in.

In their other musical endeavours there was  a lot of pressure to sit exams. Music teachers are trying to make a living and there is high turnover in the clientele: mostly sub-teens before they discover sex, booze and rock&roll. Teachers need those exam results to establish their own street cred, any benefit for the examinees is incidental.

At least they never opted for Irish Dance where there is an additional burden of the fake hair, the fake tan, the bling of sequins on electric-coloured synthetic costumes, the bleeding toe-nails, the money it all costs. Modern dance-frocks cost as much as a wedding dress: comfortably into the $X,xxx range. A couple of days ago, an Irish Dance cheating scandal blew up. From the headlines it seemed equivalent to the competitive fishing fixing [covered in puns by MetaFilter] or chess cheating [Guardian] and I was all set to post it to MetaFilter as another example of how money and power corrupt every pastime they envelop: even had a clever title which I have recycled above. It's easy to play these things for larfs when a) nobody died and b) we can other the protagonists as bib-overalled rubes [competitive catfish fishers] or cerebral wonks [grandmaster chessters]

Someone else posted a MeFi link about the scandal so I didn't have to. I dithered because, as I read around the story, suddenly it wasn't fun, let alone funny, anymore. A series leaked txts mentioned "exchanging sexual favours for higher scores" which sounded like teachers whoring out their pupils and radio chat-show host Joe Duffy had a segment where the father a dead dancer called in to say that the community and culture of competitive Irish dancing hadn't helped his daughter's mental health. I learned later that the sexual favours were more about teacher taking one [up the oompah] for the team than pimping which brings it down to ordinary consenting adults levels of eeeuw.

Don't get me started on Michael Flatley's Riverdance fascist extravaganzas. Worryingly Lord of the Dance is performing [tix €50-€100] in Meistersingerhalle Nürnberg on 19th October 2022. Just 88 years and 880m from where Leni Riefenstahl shot Triumph des Willens.

Luz Long

Nobody would call me an athlete.  When I were a lad, I had to walk for a bit when halfway through any 800m race because I was seriously out of puff and could never be bothered to look for this second wind that sporty-types talked about.  I deplore how hard it is to find anything on the Irish wireless on Saturday or Sunday afternoons that isn't sports.  This obsession with competitive games worries me in its congruence with the chariot races of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  And yet . . . and yet . . . if Leni Riefenstahl's great propaganda film Triumph des Willens had been about the 1936 Berlin Olympics rather than the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, it would say all there was to say about great athletics in those three words - five in English: The Triumph of the Will.  In that line there's nothing for me that can beat Emil Zatopek.

In Berlin on this day in 1936 Jesse ( that's James Cleveland) Owens won his second Gold medal for Long Jump.  He'd won the 100m the day before and would win the 200m the day after.  He was having trouble in the heats for the long jump and fluffed his first two tries by trying too hard and putting his launching toe over the line to disqualify each attempt.  The local boy from Leipzig and European champion Luz Long  knew that Owens was well able to manage a qualifying jump and quietly advised his rival to ignore the inches and jump well back from the foul-line.  Owens was visibly more relaxed on his final jump and easily made it into the finals that afternoon, which he won.  Luz Long took silver and, sportsman that he was, became the first to give Owens a congratulatory hug before they walked off the field arm-in-arm, which earned him a reprimand from Nazi goon/loon/buffoon (your choice) Rudolf Hess. There is skepticism about the advice anecdote but the hug and the departure to the dressing-rooms are on film, as is the shot seen here of the two young men relaxing between events. Their fates diverged after Berlin. 

It is fairly clear that President Franklin Roosevelt avoided (being seen) shaking hands with Owens on his return to the US - it was an election year and FDR was counting on white Southern Democrats to vote for him.  It is much less clear that Hitler went out of his way to give the athletic god the same treatment.  It is almost certainly true that Owens rode a freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf -Astoria hotel in New York because blacks were not allowed in the gilt-plush front-of-house elevators.  And it is a matter of record that Owens spent the next 30 years struggling to make a living ". . . you can't eat four gold medals" filing for bankruptcy in 1939 and being prosecuted for tax-evasion in 1966.  Shortly after that, as sport started to replace religion as "the opium of the people", he got more recognition and was, for example, hired by the US State Department to tour Asia as a goodwill ambassador. He died in 1980, aged 67, from small-cell carcinoma of the lung almost certainly helped into that state by smoking 20 cigarettes a day for 35 years.  Richard Doll would have advised him not to do that.

And Luz Long?  A qualified lawyer with a bright future, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht at the outbreak of WWII and was killed-in-action in July 1943 when the Allies invaded Sicily.  "quem di diligunt, adulescens moritur".  Coincidentally, a week later, Charlie Paddock (USA - 100m Olympic Gold 1920 but no medal (placed 5th) for 100m four years later in Chariots of Fire) was killed in a military plane crash near Sitka, Alaska.