For St. Patrick's Day: Music and Mockery

We get our Irish up, with the Pogues and more, as Trump mocks the law (and cartoonists mock back).

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre.” Now watch trailer for acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: as @gregmitch. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE. Sustain this newsletter by ordering one of his books.

Of course, we have some tunes for St. Patrick’s Day, which we will scatter about, with cartoons below. First, from The Pogues (R.I.P. Shane), one of my faves, “Dirty Old Town,” live.

If you missed this morning, at the dirty old White House, Trump opened with a Truth Social rant, declaring that pardons by Biden (notably for those in Congress who probed Trump’s law-breaking) were now null and void and the pardoned were now subject to prosecution because Joe signed them…..with an autopen. We kid you not.

This follows the deportations to El Salvador ignoring the latest federal court ruling, with Trump’s press secretary announcing that in foreign policy he doesn’t have to obey any judge’s ruling any time—based on an 18th century law pertaining to wartime. More dictator-in-waiting. Or already here? From Timothy Snyder this morning:

The words ("foreign alien terrorists," "monsters") are doing the work. There are no procedures between the movement of mouths and the movement of bodies. If members of the executive branch are allowed to issue truth claims that have the consequence that human beings leave the United States, we are in a dictatorship.

What’s coming next?

Then there’s this headline which now tops the NYT home page:

DOGE Cuts Reach Key Nuclear Scientists, Bomb Engineers and Safety Experts

Firings and buyouts hit the top-secret National Nuclear Security Administration amid a major effort to upgrade America’s nuclear arsenal. Critics say it shows the consequences of heedlessly cutting the federal work force.

Okay, need to get our Irish up again.

It’s one of the greatest songs of the century—whichever century you want to choose. The exact title has variations, but often “She Moved Through the Fair.” The lyrics are pretty much from 1909 but versions of the melody date back decades before that, perhaps to “antiquity” as one expert puts it. (It is usually considered “Irish” but has also been traced to Scotland.) There are dozens of versions of it by well-known performers, including those who have “adapted” it and changed the title, such as unlikely candidates Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds.

To my mind, the finest “modern” version is from (no surprise) Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson back in Fairport Convention days. No less an “authority” than Charles P. Pierce once told me he agreed.

But allegedly the first recorded version by an Irishman was back in 1941 by the legendary Irish singer John McCormack.

Now back to an older Shane, with another of my favorites, singing with the great Christy Moore, “A Pair of Brown Eyes.”

Wrapping it up with Glen Hansard and an older classic, “Raglan Road.”

From Tunes to Toons

By Ann Telnaes:

Happy to discover recent work by well-known illustrator Cathy Hull, who I met in New York when I worked at Zygote magazine and she was our chief illustrator…in 1970 (ouch). She still remembers her take on Vonnegut that went with my interview….see new article about her by Steve Heller.

Homage to Banksy: