The Wallet Redux- Life and Times

Joe Buck's an Irish outlaw, an IRA man fine.

He stalks the streets of Belfast town with just one thing in mind:

To oust the English Army and end their dynasty, 

To give Ireland back to the Irish, yes, to set his homeland free.

Not a bad little ditty, if a bit trite; a lot in the style of other Irish Republican songs written either during the times of the Easter Rising in 1916, or the more recent work inspired by the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland.  Only the difference with this one is that I wrote it, in 1972, in response to the Bogside Massacre in Derry, Ireland, in January of 1972.  The event that engendered "Sunday Bloody Sunday," a somewhat more memorable ditty recorded by U2 (but not until 1983).

What inspired a tight-ass middle-class white boy from Massachusetts living in New Mexico to write a song romanticizing the activities of what many would (reasonably) classify as a terrorist organization?  True, I am Irish-American (half French-Canadian-American, but why quibble), and was brought up by me sainted Dad to believe that there were two kinds of people in the world, the Irish, and those that wish they were.  Still I look at my younger self and wonder.  

I don't claim any credentials or vast background in human motivation, just the benefit of age and a substantial amount of navel-gazing, which has led me to certain conclusions.  The first being the obvious: youth.  When I was twenty (or seventeen or twenty-four) most everyone I had ever known was still alive.  Even with the Viet Nam conflict going full bore, I had no family or friends that went or died.  My parents and all my siblings were all still around.  I was invincible, bullet-proof, and at times even able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.  Also, I was unafraid of dying.  Having had no particular association with death it was an interesting idea, but merely a theoretical concept like an omnipotent god, or bad drugs.

At that age, of course, I was trying desperately to cut the ties to my family and their belief structures, and head off in a direction of my own choosing.  I lost my religion and my virginity, flirted with socialism, buddhism, vegetarianism, tried on philosophical stances like new jeans until I found something where I liked the fit, some good old button-fly 501's that made me feel at home.  And whatever I chose, I chose sides, making myself part of a greater whole that necessarily differentiated me from some other.  That other was THEM, as opposed to US.  Which gave me plenty of ways to act out.  I was marching in the streets (against the war, against imperialism, against capitalism, against racism, against sexism), always clear in what I was against, if not so much about what I was for (pretty much sex, drugs and rock & roll, and, somehow, that seemed like enough).

Then there was the hidden benefit, that I can admit with the impunity of age and distance: women, particularly at that age, loved outlaws (I am not making this up).  They may not marry them, but they certainly dated them.  I mean, as I saw it, if you got involved with some fringe group, it gave you a certain cachet, a certain je ne sais quoi.  Talk was fine, but talk of violence was downright sexy.

Important rule: never underestimate the importance of sex to a twenty-year-old man in sexual flower, swept by uncontrolled hormonal fires.  Never.

Because I had shed so much, had given up so much of that protective cocoon in which I had been raised, I longed for a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging.  I wanted to be an identifiable part of a greater whole.  And then, the whole Irish thing, while I was sitting around my dorm room singing protest songs, reading Trinity and learning the words to "The Patriot Game."  Did I go to Ireland and join the IRA?  Hell, I didn't even have a passport.  But it sounded romantic and engaged.  Instead I wrote lyrics.

Just a tight-ass middle-class white boy from Massachusetts trying to get laid.  Who eventually went to Ireland as a tourist for his fiftieth birthday.