In Which I Dutifully Take My Lumps

There are a lot of ups and downs to blogging, and a lot of learning experiences. Here, for example, is a response to my “Short Disquisition on the London Derriere“:

I wrote that “Danny Boy” is a woman’s song and men have no business singing it. “It’s a song about loss,” I wrote. “It’s about finding love in a sad and sorry world and then some guy starts honking on a pigskin in the next glen over and the one you love is taken from you forever and all you have left is the love.” I was wrong as Anonymous points out:

“Danny Boy”,(writ by a Brit,man who knew it was-) an apellation never to be used by a lass (you ass), perhaps a mother, but certainly not a lover; more likely a father or other male kith or kin. The assumption has always been of a father or(Gran)singing to his son (you moron)-called to honorable service. It is the elder who fears he’ll not survive the interim.”

“And, sure, you are the rarest of things. A man that can be sweetly sentimental and wrong in all thought that has the misfortune of fortune passing ~effortlessly thru his mind. But pardon my assuption; I realize you may not be a man at all~so unlike those who’ve sacrificed so you can so smuggly embrace and expound your peevish ignorance.”

This was right after some US soldiers raped and murdered a young woman in Iraq after murdering her family before her eyes, so I referred to the US as a “godforsaken country which send soldiers to other countries to commit rape and murder.” I think that’s what he (or she) was mad about.

What I should have said was, I love to listen to and play The Londonderry Air. It reminds me of John F. Kennedy and the pride that everyone in Boston felt to have an Irish president.

“Like most people in America and nearly everyone in Ireland, I loved this bright young president who called on each of us to do what we could do for our country,” I wrote.

“And then he was shot dead in the street and no one in public life then or now seems to give a rat’s ass who did it. With him died his dream, and Washington’s dream and Lincoln’s dream, of America as a powerful force for good in this world.

“And all that’s left is the love.”

But thanks, Anonymous, for setting me straight about “Danny Boy.”