Crossposted from Nothing New - it is and it isn't a continuation of the Soylent Granny series.
"America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace.
(1997)
We are warlike in France, and we are citizens. Another reason to be proud, this being a citizen! For the poor it consists in sustaining and preserving the wealthy in their power and their laziness.
(1894)
Now, Mrs McGrath, the captain said,
Would you like to make a soldier out of your son Ted?
With a scarlet coat and a big cocked hat,
Now Mrs McGrath, wouldn't you like that?
(circa 1815)
Most of us only know one, tiny, decontextualized fragment about bridges from Anatole France...
...But here's the rest of it:
"...Nowadays it is a duty for a poor peasant to be a soldier. He is exiled from his house, the roof of which smokes in the silence of night; from the fat prairies where the oxen graze; from the fields and the paternal woods. He is taught how to kill men; he is threatened, insulted, put in prison and told that it is an honor; and, if he does not care for that sort of honor, he is fusilladed. He obeys because he is terrorized, and is of all domestic animals the gentlest and most docile. We are warlike in France, and we are citizens. Another reason to be proud, this being a citizen! For the poor it consists in sustaining and preserving the wealthy in their power and their laziness. The poor must work for this, in presence of the majestic quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread. That is one of the good effects of the Revolution. As this Revolution was made by fools and idiots for the benefit of those who acquired national lands, and resulted in nothing but making the fortune of crafty peasants and financiering bourgeois, the Revolution only made stronger, under the pretence of making all men equal, the empire of wealth. It has betrayed France into the hands of the men of wealth. They are masters and lords. The apparent government, composed of poor devils, is in the pay of the financiers. For one hundred years, in this poisoned country, whoever has loved the poor has been considered a traitor to society. A man is called dangerous when he says that there are wretched people. There are laws against indignation and pity, and what I say here could not go into print."
Anatole France, from The Red Lily, 1894
Which is what Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine said, twelve years ago:
"America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you've lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn't belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don't care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve."
And which ties into the healthcare debate rather handily via the medium of folksong:
Now, Mrs McGrath, the captain said,
Would you like to make a soldier out of your son Ted?
With a scarlet coat and a big cocked hat,
Now Mrs McGrath, wouldn't you like that?
Now Mrs McGrath lived on the seashore
For the space of seven long years or more,
Till she saw a ship sail into the bay,
Says, It's my son Ted, will you clear the way,
Oh captain, dear, where have you been,
Have you been sailing in the Meditereen,
And have you any news of my son Ted,
Is the poor boy alive or is he dead?
Well, up comes Ted, without any legs,
And in their place he's got two wooden pegs.
She kissed him a dozen times or two,
Saying, Holy God, it isn't you,
Now was you drunk, or was you blind,
When you left your two fine legs behind,
Or was it walking on the sea,
Wore your two fine legs from the knees away?
No, I wasn't drunk, and I wasn't blind
When I left my two fine legs behind,
But a big cannon ball on the fifth of May,
Took me two fine legs from the knees away,
Oh Teddy, my boy, the widow cried,
Your two fine legs were your mammy's pride.
The stumps of a tree won't do at all,
Why didn't you run from the big cannon ball?
All foreign wars, I do proclaim,
Between Don Juan and the King of Spain,
And I'll make them rue the time,
They took two legs from a child of mine,
Well then, if I had you back again,
I'd never let you go to fight the King of Spain,
For I'd rather have me Ted as he used to be,
Than the King of France and his whole navy.
- "Mrs. McGrath", Irish traditional
So I was looking for the words of the folksong "Mrs. McGrath" which is about what the PTB used when they could no longer get away with press gangs - which I've never heard performed at any venue, btw, which is really interesting; I have heard "Green Fields of France" played fiercely to great applause at our local Highland Games but never "Mrs. McGrath" tho' on paper it's an oft-referenced piece - and so of course I resorted to Google.
And google-dowsing brought me up short, because I also didn't know that Bruce Springsteen has started singing it (not being a Springsteen fan myself.) It's not on constant play nor has been on the radio, I can't imagine why (ahem) and I don't think it's because it's a cover of a folk song, really. I can't find it on the playlists of our local NPR station's folk show, either.
Mrs. McGrath, performed by The Boss and the Seeger Sessions Band
So here's a beautiful, furious version of a song that was used at the far edge of living memory, when Yeats wrote in memory of a dead friend: "Those that I fight I do not hate / Those that I guard I do not love / My country is Kiltartan Cross/My countrymen Kiltartan's poor /
No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before" by those who, finding no impulse of delight lonely or otherwise in the mud of Flanders bloodily resisted being manipulated into killing and dying for the sake of those who had exploited them for so long - but which as I may have mentioned before has been attributed back to the Napoleonic Wars* and in particular the horrific Peninsular Campaign which inspired some of Goya's most memorable - if least published - work (ah, for the Good Old Days!) but which is in a broader group of songs which go back even farther, forwards and backwards - I've tracked the Canadian version of "Twa Recruitin' Sergeants"** from the resurrection by Great Big Sea to its ostensible origin in the wake of Gallipoli to its "original" Scots version ("fra the Black Watch") to, through many twists and turns, the filked and counter-filed versions of the pop tune from the hit musical The Beggar's Opera of 1728. (Yes, "Two Recruiting Sergeants" is yet another port of "Over The Hills & Far Away," ultimately, though equally a mash-up with the original of which Gay's was a cover, from Irish playwright George Farquar's 1706 sex-romp comedy called...The Recruiting Officer-- a theme that never vanished from the boards, either.)
Visual rendering of the theme by a contemporary of Hogarth - illustrating not only the "scarlet coat" and cocked hat of he song but the explicit connection with the stock Appeal to Brittle Masculinity in the unavoidable phallic symbolism of the background vignette of the two children and the polearm.***
Pre-Raphaelite version of the theme with typical emphasis on the collective desperation of the tempted working-class families, a contemporary to the earliest preserved known copy of "Johnny I hardly knew ye"
Most Americans aren't aware of what a strong and angry anti-war movement there was in England against "The Revolution" - a phrase that makes no sense in the UK and only confuses Britons as I discovered, as there have been so many of them - at the time: I certainly wasn't until one day when I was supposed to be studying in the library between classes I started poking through art books instead and stumbled across a q-size volume of the sorts of engravings that Pratchett evokes in Monstrous Regiment - broadsides and self-published indy press illustrations as well as the mainstream press and other mouthpieces of officialdom coming down from the other side. --Nor how it fused with the fury at rampant unemployment and evictions in the wake of the rising Industrial Revolution and its sundry exploitations, far less how it ended up with blood in the streets of London and prisons and banks torn down and pogroms against religious minorities scapegoated as well, something that isn't taught in American schools at all for some reason - you have to be a pretty hardcore Dickens fan, to learn anything of that.
Political cartoons of the late 1770s and early 1880s made explicit the connection between the Highland Clearances and the American War, showing starving peasant families being offered gold by the agents of the British empire, in a visual depiction of the theme of "Mrs. McGrath" and all the rest. The only difference between then and now is that - mostly due to the efforts of champions like anti-war activist Gen. Smedley Butler against the redux et semper discarding of WWI returnees just as Ted McGrath and all the disabled pensioners of past wars were always discarded to beg for shillings once they were no longer useful - we have a very thin safety net which is as it was more promise than performance to the peasantry that rely on it - just ask Al Szekely about that.
That's what we're up against, what we've always been up against, what every country's reformers have always been up against for as long as we have written records of the underdogs so probably before that, too. Take hope or despair from that, or both: they don't want us to take that step that the archetypal Mrs. McGrath takes, belatedly, in the song, and they won't (because they never have) stoop at any tricks to keep the mill of fearmongering/war/profiteering/obedience going, because they never have.
"My Son John" - another, UK-sourced, abridged version of "Mrs McGrath" - points up the kinship with the Seven Nations' Gilded-Age-invoking workplace safety song "Crooked Jack" - the Hegemony hates OSHA, too, btw.
A timeless tune for a timeless theme - it's hard to have "courage equal to desire" when you're on the edge of losing the little you have, when you're always worn out with work and hunger and fear and illness, and when you're always outgunned and outspent if not outnumbered by the PTB. Which is why populism so easily turns to poision, too, because it hurts to go up against the Great Streets, as Umberto Eco depicted in his recounting of how peasants' revolts turned to pogroms, and as we have seen in our own national history often enough. We must always be vigilant against this flaw in our own species' nature - to choose the easy target, to side with the bully against the weaker, to become the oppressor instead of ending oppression.
--In the end, Mrs. McGrath gets mad at the right people - NOT at other victims of the same systems - and vows to get even.
That's what they're afraid of.
And they are fighting back. As always - and "all's fair," remember, when you see armed & organized authoritarians† shouting "Nazi!" and "diseased parasites!" and "gonna kill grandmas and babies" - nothing's ever new.
They have to do something with the out-of-work serfs, after all, lest we remember our ABCs.‡ We can fight strangers, or we can fight each other: it's all one to the oligarchs.
=======================================
--Yes, I footnote my articles.
* I am inclined - although I can't afford access to
John Scott's book to see his sourcing - to accept the earliest date not merely for sentimental reasons, and not just because the tune doesn't
feel Victorian to me, but because of internal textual reasons: although the invocation of the "cocked hat" could be a deliberately retro touch, the mention of "the Meditereen" and "Spain" could be ambiguous and refer to
later campaigns in which Irish volunteers took part but I think it unlikely given the tenor of the whole, the reference to "the 5th of May" piqued my neglected historical nerve and a bit of link-dowsing turned up a mention (in Youtube comments!) of the
Battle of Fuentes de Onoro, something I never learned about in any school neither. (There is also a connection via the
Bantry Girl's Lament which fits neatly between it & "Johnny I hardly knew ye") The "Don Juan" referenced might well be
Don Juan de la Cruz, mentioned in Wellington's dispatches.
** This is however an entirely different song if with a similar overall theme to the Irish song called "The Recruiting Sergeant" as sung by Bobby Clancy, The Pogues, &c.
It is apparently debated whether or not "Mrs. McGrath" is a variant of "The Wars of America", an Irish regimental lament collected in the New England end of the Appalachians during the 1930s, which melody I have not found to listen as yet.
*** A big chunk of this post has been kicking around for quite a long time now: I meant to do a version of it for last Veteran's Day, but the approach of Labor Day, which in this country has been moved to Autumn for the express purpose of mentally dividing it in the minds of the subject class from its Red roots in Spring as elsewhere, is a good enough fit for something that isn't by its very nature a date-specific topic - and as a result it is much richer, with "Mrs. McGrath," with Bruce Springsteen's return to the roots of rock in protest & social justice, and the complete, contextualizing quote of Anatole France's famous one-liner - nor should i have discovered the Renaissance revolutionary Reverend Juan de Mariana, with whom I am sure I will afflict you in days to come. Also googling for "Over The Hills" again led me to the hitherto-unknown-to-me "Nightwish's cover of a protest-rooted variant of "Long Black Veil"...round and round and round.
† The word is "Freikorps," btw, which is Hochdeutsch for "tool".
‡ Aux Barricades, Citoyen[ne]s!