Published at Grit Magazine, Front Porch Republic

 

Happy New Year, everyone! To all my American friends and family, I'm sorry about the current upheaval, and after everything we've been through, I hope we all get a lull in the Long Emergency to let us regroup and prepare for the next round.  

Ireland rang in the New Year by going back into its third total lockdown. On the good side, this monastic interlude has taught me to be grateful for my friends and family, and to find joy in simple moments, and to not forget them so easily; I walked around an empty Dublin this morning, watching the dawn light ripple across the river, listening to Haydn's magnificent 45th Symphony and the lovely prose of the book "My Father's Wake," both of which I recommend.

 I'm delighted to report that Grit Magazine has published my piece on St. Necklace Day, which you can see here. 

Also, the amazing publication Front Porch Republic, which you should really check out, has published my article on the end of children's games. Check it out here.

Twice now I've seen my old neighbourhood on the news

Of the planet’s 7,500 million, about one-thirty-seventh of one percent of one percent come from in or around Ferguson, Missouri, which saw massive riots six years ago as a result of police killing a black man. Only about a quarter of a percent of a percent come from in or around South Minneapolis, whic h saw the same thing happen a few weeks ago. I’m probably not the only person who has lived in both neighbourhoods, but I think I’m one of the few.

Twice now I’ve been in another country, watching violence break  out in peaceful neighbourhoods I knew well. Twice now I’ve had to call friends or family to make sure they’re not in the middle of it. And most people I know – already stressed because of the pandemic, the quarantine and the sudden blow to the economy – are feeling anger and despair like they’ve never felt before. 

So I want to speak carefully on this; of course I’m not there on the ground right now, and I’m not black, and I don’t pretend to speak for anyone else. But twice now I’ve received reports from friends and family on the ground as it happened, and it might not seem like it, but I think there’s a lot of good news here. 

Virtually everyone is united on this. I check out multiple news sources – what are considered far-left, far-right, and mostly people who go beyond the stereotypes of the political spectrum. Everyone agrees these police were terrible, and everyone is celebrating that they are going to prison. Think of any other issue that has so many people agreeing.

You got things done. In a lot of times and places people might have looked the other way or been afraid to speak up, and that’s still the case across much of the world today. But here, as a result  of the massive and immediate public outcry, these officers were fired almost immediately, charged swiftly, and are now in jail. I used to be part of the Minneapolis political scene, I can tell you that this response happened because people there are so politically active, and so prepared to take action. The famously scrappy French labour movement doesn’t have so many strikes and marches because conditions there are worse; rather, conditions there are better because they take to the streets.

The media is getting better. I’m seeing a lot of news outlets point out something very important, something that should have been talked about in Ferguson; the rioters are not the protesters. I knew some of the Ferguson protesters; they were locals. The Ferguson police were locals. But some of the rioters came from thousands of kilometres away. As a former newspaper reporter I was incensed by the news coverage, which neglected to make this the lead story, or ask questions about where these people came from.

I heard stories of protesters helping police protect businesses from rioters ... but most journalists didn’t make those important distinctions. In Minneapolis, I’m seeing news agencies make those distinctions. Business Insider – not a radical publication -- has run articles about this. That’s important.

We don’t see most of the good people are doing. For every tragedy highlighted by social media, there are tens of thousands of people not just protesting, but babysitting kids, looking after each other, helping clean up, donating to bring back the businesses that were destroyed, all volunteers. This is what happens in a crisis; people pull together. They won’t be on the news, but they are, in their own way, heroes.

Many cops are good. In a recent survey most Americans believed that a police officer fires their gun in the line of duty at least once, and 30% guessed they shoot someone a few times a year. In fact, it’s the opposite; three-quarters of US police have never fired a gun once in their careers. I’m not implying that shooting their gun is always bad, or that they can’t do wrong even without shooting – that negligent police officer didn’t need a gun to kill George Floyd. My point is that almost all the time, police defuse life-and-death situations peacefully.

If officers defuse violent situations, say, once a week – and for some it’s every day – that’s 200 violent situations over a career, and I don’t mean that 75% of those are defused without shooting. I’m saying that for 75% of officers, 100% were defused peacefully.

That doesn’t make the exceptions okay, or imply that there’s no problem with police in America. It does mean that police aren’t all one thing. A lot of news coverage depicts conflicts of police vs African-Americans, but it’s important to note that nine of ten African-Americans oppose even cutting the number of police, almost half rate their local police highly, and of course a lot of police – a third in my native St. Louis – are black themselves. 

That said, there are a few other things to remember:

Police are civillians. As more of our social fabric has broken down, as I hear more people talk about their neighbours with fear and loathing, we put more of a burden on police to take care of neighbourhood disputes, mental health crises, and all kinds of issues that aren’t their job.

Some activists are talking about “de-funding police,” which if they mean getting rid of all police, is idiotic. But in fairness, what a lot of them mean are taking some of the burden off police and passing it to people trained in family disputes, mental health, and so on. Depending on how it’s done, that has possibilities.

Most articles I read from the USA talk about police vs. civilians, and no one – not even the protesters I know – think this is strange. As far as I know, that’s not the language that was used in the USA decades ago, or in most Western countries today. Police are civilians. I cannot stress how important this is. If you think of them as soldiers, what country are they occupying, and what enemy are they fighting?

Anger makes you vulnerable. I keep seeing memes passed around that people should get angry. Anger is easy. I were one of the people in power, I’d want people to get angry; angry people are easier to manipulate. 

How many Americans would have accepted their government launching a war in the Middle East, had they not witnessed the middle of their greatest city levelled by a terrorist attack? The US government wasn’t attacking a country that was behind the 9-11 attacks, but it was difficult to say that at the time to people so filled with anger, however justifiable. If you want to defuse a situation, you calm people down enough to listen to the better angels of their nature. Angry people do stupid things that get everyone hurt.

Don’t pick a side. I see a lot of slogans about how everyone needs to pick a side, you’re either with us or you’re against us. I’ve heard that before, both in my own life and in history, and that’s when things really go south.

I hear more and more people talk gleefully about shutting down anyone who says anything they don’t like. But that’s not how people learn. That’s how civilisation breaks down.

I hear more and more people talk about doing anything to defeat hatred. But hatred is always other people; it’s never you.

This could get a lot worse. I see a lot of memes about how the people need to rise up, for they have nothing to lose. If you live in a modern Western country with ample food, relative safety, and some vestigal trappings of democracy, you have a lot to lose. Again, in movies like V for Vendetta or the Hunger Games, riots and insurrection are how you take down an authoritarian rule. In real life, they’re how you start authoritarian rule. And remember that these memes are started and spread by people with an agenda, some of whom might gain from violence breaking out.

Beneficial movements in the past succeeded, not by lashing out in anger, but by talking with neighbours, listening to each other, pooling resources, creating a logical plan, and negotiating practical solutions. The marching down the street? That’s the one percent that was filmed – most of it was behind the scenes, done by people you’ve never heard of. And things got better. It can happen again.

Epidemics in the old days

I talked to my neighbour, Angela, about what it was like during the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1950s.

Covid's Metamorphoses

A few weeks ago, I posted a video about the silver linings to this crisis and quarantine. Now that countries are either opening up or announcing plans to do so, I wanted to make another video looking back on what we've learned from this. Enjoy -- and if you do enjoy it, I'd appreciate it if you subscribed and shared it with all your friends. 

Remembering the pandemics that came before

Recently I was able to interview another one of my elderly neighbours -- by phone this time -- and he told me all about the dangers of tuberculosis in Ireland in the 1950s, along with the Spanish Flu of 1918. We forget how fortunate we are.

Relaxing during a pandemic

This covers some of the same ground as the article, but I'm hoping people find it useful. Stay safe everyone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCMXz8FXABU&t=5s

Article published in American Conservative

For those who haven't yet been informed, most of my articles are not moving to the new web site and host of my ongoing projects, Old School School. I'll continue to update this site periodically.

Also, the American Conservative published my breakdown of the Irish election and the rise of Sinn Fein as our newest political force - read all about it here.

I'm continuing to interview elderly Irish about traditional ways of life: you can read the latest part of my interview with Jack here, talking about keeping cows and horses. 

I've also published my interview with my neighbour Angela, talking about a traditional childhood -- you can watch it here.

Finally, Mother Earth News has published my piece on preserving butter in an Irish bog - you can read the article here, watch the video here, and see the piece about it on British television here. It's an hour long, but my piece is mentioned around the 5:45 mark.

Featured on QI

I think it turned out pretty well.

Bog butter

I have a new project I'll be announcing soon, but first: I mentioned a while ago that the BBC programme QI, former hosted by Stephen Fry and now by Sandi Toksvig, will be featuring my bog butter experiment on the show. With that in mind, I thought I'd rewrite and extend this piece a bit. 

When most people picture Ireland, they picture green fields and old stone walls, and that’s true of some places. Ireland also has lots of bog, though – the Bog of Allen, where we live, stretches almost a thousand square kilometres across several counties. Bogs are difficult to get through – they have few roads or villages even today – so they could be isolated, mysterious places, where characters in folktales met giants and fairies, a place where a starving and subjugated people could hide, or hide things.

A bog is a natural wetland, like a swamp or marsh – the difference is that the water is very acidic, so most kinds of plants can’t grow there – but peat moss does very well. Vast areas get covered in peat moss, and as layers of moss die off new layers grow over them, so you get gradually thickening layers of organic matter. In most circumstances it would just decay and become soil, like most things that die – but it’s soaking in dark, acidic water where fungi, insects, even most bacteria can’t survive, so it doesn’t decompose.

Over thousands of years it gets squeezed into a dark red solid called peat, or “turf” here in Ireland. For centuries this was the main fuel here, and kept many a potato farmer warm on a chill evening. That’s why this canal was built in the 1700s – turf was strip-mined from the bog, dried, loaded on carts, pulled by donkeys on these rails, and loaded here on barges to be brought to warm the houses of Dublin. The history and future of turf as a source of energy deserves its own video, but the point here is: Dead things buried in the bog don’t rot, so it’s an ideal place to store things.

People around here still fish out trees that fell in centuries ago and carve their wood into ornaments; the bog-water stained the wood almost black, but it’s still wood. Turf-cutters here find human bodies sacrificed by Druids thousands of years ago, their skins blackened and cured like leather but with their faces still recognisable. This might have been the inspiration for the dead marshes in Lord of the Rings, where you could still see the bodies of the dead under the water.

So people dig up many things from the past in the bog and meant to come back for -- necklaces, coins, tools, swords, 1,200-year-old prayer-books. And sometimes they find stores of food, up to 3,000 years old and not only intact, but edible. Specifically, they find butter.

Bizarre as that sounds, more than 430 caches of butter have been found in the bog, some small as fists, some big as barrels. The aforementioned 3,000-year-old butter weighed more than 35 kilos, the size of a child. And many of the apparently very adventurers discoverers any such discoveries have been eaten, and were reported to be delicious.

This doesn’t even count all the buried gastronomic treasure still waiting out there. Since we can suppose that people buried their butter to unearth and eat it later, and usually did so, these hundreds of finds must represent the small proportion of times that their owners died or the locations forgotten. This must have been a rather commonplace activity.

So why butter, you ask? A surprising number of foods around the world are preserved by being buried in the ground, but they are usually dried foods in arid climates (cheese in Italy), or sub-Arctic countries where the ground is freezing (salmon in Sweden), or where the food is meant to ferment in some way (eggs in China). In this case it’s waterlogged ground, it would probably disintegrate in the water over time unless it’s naturally waterproof, like fat.

This might have been done with meat as well; Archaeologist Daniel C. Fisher buried various meats in a frozen pond and a peat bog for comparison, and found that after a year, the meat buried in the bog had no more bacteria than the frozen meat. If this sounds gross, keep in mind that fast-food burger you last ate might have been more than a year old.  

Also, butter makes a valuable and high-calorie food for poor agrarian people; with it you can fry food or preserve things like potted meats. It was also taxed in medieval times, so burying it could have been a kind of tax evasion.

The constantly-cold Irish bog would keep the butter solid, and it would only age like cheese; in fact, the one taste-tested by Irish schoolchildren was said to taste like well-aged cheese. Some people might simply have liked the taste.

I like to experiment with old ways of preserving food; I learned how to preserve fruit over winter, how to preserve eggs in lime-water or isinglass, how to pickle vegetables or learn which mushrooms are edible. But in all those things I had people around to show me; lots of my older neighbours still make their own jam or wine. I don’t know of anyone who’s ever tried this who could show me how. Thankfully, it’s pretty straightforward – all you need is to access to one of the world’s peat bogs, and I happen to live in the middle of one.  

My daughter and I made some butter at home, which anyone can do; you just pour milk and cream into a jar, put on some music and start shaking. We couldn’t fill it more than a quarter full or we would just get whipped cream, so we had to do this many times to get the three pounds . At some point the sound of the sloshing changes, and you get a solid clump of butter in the middle of the liquid. Traditionally Irish housewives would pat the butter dry of its remaining liquids, but we simply clarified it. 

Then we froze it to keep it solid, wrapped it in cheesecloth and a rope, walked about ten minutes from our house into the bog. I paced the steps first in one direction and then another to make sure I would remember the spot, and tied the rope to a nearby tree to I could find it again.

Seventeen months later we dug up the butter, and while the picture looks pretty disgusting, once we washed it off and unwrapped it the butter looked much the same – a little darker yellow and with an earthy smell, but not rancid.  

The taste was similar – recognizably butter, with a slightly earthy, cheesy flavour a bit like parmesan; it was particularly good over popcorn. It wasn’t something most modern people would choose to eat regularly, but for people who faced periodic famines, it was an ideal store for lean times.

Of course, this butter was only in the bog for 17 months, and the effects are probably very different over 3,000 years. So I’m burying more butter for a longer period of time – dozens of kilos -- and planning to unearth it in about three to five years, some further down the road. If anyone wants to buy some in advance, you can be one of the few people in the world who can say they had this ancient food.

The last of his generation

It’s been an eventful few weeks, but before I wrote about anything else, I wanted to note the passing of my grandfather. A few years ago I wrote a piece commemorating my great-aunt Imy, leaving my grandfather the last of his generation. As much as I will miss him, I’m blessed to be one of the few men in their 40s who had a living grandfather – many of my peers don’t have living parents – and that he stayed with us into his mid-90s and passed quickly, surrounded by a large and loving family.

One of my first memories – I couldn’t have been more than four – was of fishing with my grandfather in a rowboat on a warm summer lake, catching bluegill and throwing them back. Then we were caught in a surprise shower, and I remember watching with alarm the water collecting around our boots, and the view of the distant shore disappearing around us, replaced on all sides by grey sheets of rain. My grandfather calmly rowed us to safety, and we trudged home.  

I remember staying at my grandparents’ house, watching him staying up late reading or laying out blueprints; I remember his voice carrying over the crowd as he played cards with cousins and neighbours; griping at recalcitrant vegetables that he grew in the backyard; taking part in his local library board or Kiwanis; meeting and becoming friends with his neighbours wherever he lived. He was the kind of civic American that Robert Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone, the kind we don't have enough of anymore. 

He grew up during the Great Depression, entered the Army in World War II, trained as a mechanic and repaired airplanes during the war. When the war ended he studied to be an engineer on the GI Bill, met my grandmother, married her and had my father, all in what must have been a whirlwind few years. 

They didn’t start out with much; he used to tell me how their low-rent neighbourhood flooded one summer, and their apartment was knee-deep in water. He had to keep the furniture raised on blocks and store his clothes on upper shelves, he said, and a neighbour with a boat came along every morning and took him to work, but he went to work all the same.

Eventually he founded his own surveying and engineering company, and surveyed the foundations for what would become Busch Stadium and the St. Louis Arch. He and my late grandmother had three more children -- my amazing aunts -- and the family eventually swelled with children and grandchildren.  

I came back to Ireland with a stack of things he left me – his slide rule, his pipe, his book of Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics, his Carl Sandburg biography of Lincoln. And a lot of memories. I couldn’t make it to America for the wake, but apparently hundreds of people came, including people who hadn’t seen him in many decades. He left quite an impression in this world, and his passing is the end of an era.