The flight to Ireland was one of the shorter hops of the trip only 800 miles and three and a half hours flying time. A typical North Sea storm had blown through the day before but weather was predicted good for the trip. I might run into a little turbulence near Ireland, but no other pilots were reporting bad air.
Iceland quickly fell behind me as I reached cruising altitude and settled in. There were scattered clouds above and below me. I avoided the big ones along my flight path since clouds can be turbulent and have lightning.
My mood was, well, I’m not sure what it was. Part of me was happy to back doing what I had set out to do. Part was morose as I had left a beautiful woman behind. I had already sworn an oath to myself that I was going back and finding out if Lilja was really the love of my life. In a way, that made the separation easier.
Lilja had watched as I prepped the plane. Once it was ready I walked over to her. She put on a smile, but I could tell it was a little forced. “Lilja, I am coming back.”
“Of course,” she threw her arms round my neck and kissed me hard. “Now, you go. Fly around the world.”
I was nearly torn in half as I turned back to the plane. Our fingers were the last thing touching, and as they parted I felt tears start. I had to rush to the plane so she wouldn’t see them. The Corsair started right up, to my disappointment. I had this thought as I engaged the starter that it wouldn’t start and I’d have to spend time while it was fixed. No such luck.
I waved and she waved back as I taxied off to the runway. You know, you can do an awful lot of thinking in 800 miles.
The flight across the North Sea was bumpy, typical North Sea weather. As I approached Ireland I began to see the emerald green of the island. I was used to the western US where the land is all brown from the air. Ireland really is incredibly green from the air. I coasted in over Northern Ireland and headed down the center of the island.
Looking down at the lovely land of my ancestors I started pondering what would have happened had not the British stole the island and tried to run all of the Catholic natives out of Ireland? The reason my ancestors came to America was to escape the oppression of the British. Hell, most of the English speaking world was invaded by the Irish as they escaped the persecution of the Brits.
I suspect most Americans think that the British Government is like the American, with their Mother of Parliaments, but it isn’t and hasn’t ever been. The reason we have the Bill of Rights is exactly because such rights didn’t and don’t exist under the British system.
Freedoms that we take for granted as guaranteed in the Constitution aren’t guaranteed in Britain. In fact, Britain doesn’t have a written constitution. The Magna Carta only guaranteed rights to the Barons, the nobility. The commoners have never been guaranteed anything in a fundamental document. Their rights can be revoked at any time by an act of that same parliament. The Brits routinely censor ‘state secrets’ that aren’t really secrets but political speech that the government doesn’t want out in public. This lack of guaranteed basic rights is why the British colonies have always been raped for the good of Britain. It is why the US threw their asses out of America in 1783. Did you know that Concentration Camps weren’t invented by the Nazis? That’s right, they learned how to operate them from the Brits who used them against the Boers in the Boer War when they stole South Africa. So much for the freedom loving Brits.
At one time, Ireland was covered with forests of oak, the tree sacred to the Druids. But the British, as they did with all of their colonial possessions, raped the land. In this case, they cut down all of the old oaks to build British ships. The once great forests went to sea to expand the reach of the British Empire. And then they wondered why the Irish hated them. Lucky for America, we were so much further away that when we rebelled, as the Irish did from time to time, we were too far away to bring their entire military across the sea and too large to conquer.
The truth is, the British treated the native Irish worse than they would have treated rabid dogs. During the great famine there was actually plenty of food in Ireland, but the Brits sent the food out of Ireland trying to starve all the Catholics to death in their own country. Anything that Stalin or Hitler ever did, the Brits had done it before them, just without the modern efficiency, but with the same cruelty. There are more Irish people outside of Ireland than are left in the country because they were starved out of their own country by the British. As the now peaceful countryside rolled by under my plane, I thought of the millions of Irish killed by the British in that Emerald Isle. Never forget.
I had put Ireland on the course for two reasons: one, because that was the route WWII flyers took, and two, because I had never been to the Auld Sod, my ancestral homeland. I was already a couple days behind schedule, having stayed long in Iceland. I had planned to do some scouting and wenching in Dublin, hoping to find one of those freckled redheads, but my heart wouldn’t let me. Lilja occupied my conscious mind. Damn, but a conscience can ruin a lot of pleasant dreams.
I landed outside Dublin and had the plane prepped for the next day, then hit a pub. At least I could experience a little of the old country. Of course, it was nothing like I had imagined it would be. A damn TV blared out an American sitcom. The talk was mostly about how the ‘New Economy’ was driving prices too high. If it weren’t for the accents, I could have been in Boston or Philly. The beer wasn’t even that wonderful.
There are few moments in your life when some dream, some vision gets pricked like a balloon popping. That was one of those moments. Ireland, homeland, turned out to be no different than anyplace else. There were no Celtic gods, no freckled redheads, no leprechauns, no Barry Fitzgerald in his horse drawn trap taking John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara on their first date.
Back when I was an impressionable youth, our school had taken a trip down to Washington DC. We took in the Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington monuments. We went through part of the Smithsonian. Then, as a climax, we were ushered in to see a full session of the Senate. Imagine, we were going to see our government in action. They were debating the federal budget. Billions of dollars were at stake as these hundred people, then mostly old white men, carefully deliberated on the important issues of the budget.
Talk about disillusionment. There were four Senators in the building. One Republican and one Democrat making sure the other party didn’t pull a fast one, one old guy giving a speech to an empty room and one guy sitting up in the front looking bored. This, this was my government in action? Nobody was even paying attention? Sadly, it was.
When the first fellow left, I don’t even know who he had been; Strom Thurmond came in, talked for five minutes and left. In the meantime, Lloyd Benson had come in and gave his ten minute speech. He traded places with Proxmire up front, who left. The next fellow had come in on schedule and started talking to the empty chamber while the other three Senators read books. At the end of ten minutes, Benson hit his gavel, “Your ten minutes is up.”
The senator who had been talking held up a sheaf of paper the size of the New York phone book and said, “I move my speech be entered in the record as if read in full.”
Bang, Benson pounded the gavel and a page ran out and took the pile of paper and ran back to the front.
I realized that this whole dog and pony show was just to get their name in the Congressional Record, as if that speech even mattered, the speech no one listened to. All this stuff in public, the speeches the committee meetings, all of that was only for show. The real decisions were made behind closed doors. This was my government in action and it made me sick. It actually makes me feel sorry for the baseball players, dragged in front of Congress just so the congressman can have his face splashed on the news. Hell, most of those Senators couldn’t tell the difference between a home run and a field goal, and they prove it with their stupid questions. Nothing of importance will ever come out of public hearings. They are lies made by professional liars. There is no native American criminal class except Congress. Mark Twain. Then they prosecute the poor ball players for doing what Congress does professionally, lie.
Feeling the beer and my disappointment, I wandered away from the pub. Everywhere it looked the same as any place else, adverts, cars, people hurrying along. The only difference was the saps were driving on the wrong side of the road. The last straw was the damn McDonalds. This wasn’t Ireland; this was America east. I put my head down and went over to the airport hotel and collapsed in a room. At least I would be back on schedule if I left the next day.
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