SOME musicians have really shone in recent times, haven’t they?
Eric Clapton, an old rock God, recently joined forces with Van Morrison in releasing some anti-lockdown music and declaring he would not play to ‘discriminated’ audiences.
That is audiences who are required to show proof of vaccination against Covid-19.
Despite the fact he took the vaccination himself, almost as if he did not wish to catch a deadly disease.
Hypocrisy, how are ya?
It might be worth remembering at this point that this close friend of Van Morrison is also the very man whose self-confessed ‘full-tilt racist’ tendencies of the 1970s are claimed to have directly led to the setting up of Rock Against Racism.
That’s some claim to fame.
Van Morrison himself, of course, has provided one of the enduring images of lockdown on this island.
Amidst all of the death and the pain and the suffering, Van Morrison spoke out.
He called out ‘Junior, come up here’, to Ian Paisley Jr, in a display of familiarity that was quite startling.
We were then treated to the sight of the blues-music rebel and the arch conservative and reactionary politician chanting that the elected Health Minister in the North was ‘dangerous’.
Van Morrison, who never took a stand against any kind of violence or injustice in his native North during the entirety of the Troubles, finally cracking because he couldn’t play any gigs.
A man worth around 90 million euro. God love him.
Now I don’t know about you, but my experience of the pandemic has included the realisation that the anti-vaccine brigade are not simply wild hippies or harmless conspiracy eccentrics. They are dangerous.
They are dangerous and they are despicable.
For them commitment to society is as nothing compared to their individual ‘rights’.
For them an understandable critique and awareness of the failings and cynicism of the pharmaceutical industry becomes an excuse for behaviour that puts others at risk.
They are in thrall not to knowledge and understanding but to the grand catch-all of the totally without logic conspiracy.
In the early days it was 5G that was spreading the ‘virus’ and now it’s simply that the government and the vast, vast majority of the world’s medics and scientists want to control us.
Why that is is never clear, but facts aren’t important if you can extrapolate from inefficient governance that we are under totalitarian rule.
Anti-vaxxers, you see, can get from the Rock of Cashel to a rocket ship in jig time because theirs is a zone where intellect is absent.
But not only are they dangerous because of the threat to societal intelligence that they pose, they are dangerous because the link between them and the far right is not even open to dispute.
It is not only in the subterranean world of Twitter, Facebook and assorted social media platforms, where these supposedly earth loving citizens seem to spend an inordinate amount of time, that this is evident.
What of the Irish Freedom Party, the National Party, Yellow Vest Ireland, Dolores Cahill, Gemma O’Doherty, and John Waters?
You can’t, in all honesty, cavort with the far right, with the homophobic and the racist, and say you only agree with them on some things.
Unless your still happy concocting that rocket ship where your intellect should be.
If you march next to the tricolour-wrapped far right don’t be surprised if people assume you’re far right.
Independent TD Mattie McGrath, a big fan of Viktor Orban’s Hungarian government that has been sharply criticised by the EU for attacks on human rights and the LBGT community, has been showing his anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown credentials recently.
He compared government-imposed lockdown restrictions to living under Nazi rule in Germany.
The response from the Auschwitz Museum to McGrath might well serve as a response to all the anti-vaxxers.
‘Instrumentalization of the tragedy of all people who between 1933-45 suffered, were humiliated, tortured and murdered by the hateful totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.’
Unless you think they are in on the conspiracy too. After all the Nazis thought the Jews were.
