New Year’s Day by U2—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival 2024-‘25

 

                         

                                                                    New Years's Day from U2's third album War in 1983.

I watched Irish band U2 be presented with the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2022 on the annual CBS TV broadcast with some mixed feelings.  On one hand, the super group has a long history of churning out compelling rock anthems for almost every unjust conflict, social justice and human rights crisis, and international cause of the last 40 years, almost always on the right side if sometimes fuzzy about holding some powerful interests personally responsible for the suffering they decry.  On the other hand, the smugness, preening, and self-congratulations of the band’s leaders and main writers Bono and The Edge is more than a little off-putting.  

U2 on the red carpet for the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors.

But it is natural to present today their first big international hit New Year’s Day from their third album War in 1983.  The album had an extended anti-war and pacifist theme while the song was inspired the Solidarity movement rising against Soviet domination in Poland and local Polish Communist leadership.

The band came together as students at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, a secondary public school operated by the Church of Ireland (Anglican) in Dublin when 14-year-old drummer Larry Mullen Jr. posted a notice looking for fellow musicians to form a new band.  Five students responded, none of them very accomplished on their instruments.  Three of them—Paul Hewson (Bono) on lead vocals, David Evans (The Edge) on lead guitar and back-up vocals, and Adam Clayton on bass guitar—and Mullen have remained together as the band finally named U2 in 1978 ever since.  

As a post-punk high school band, the lads posed with fire arms for a publicity shot--pretending to be revolutionaries.   

Originally inspired by English post-punk, they have evolved and re-invented themselves several times while honing their musical abilities and songwriting skills with the assistance of producers like Steve Lillywhite, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Nellee Hooper, Flood, Howie B, and others.

Over the course of their spectacular career U2 have released 14 studio albums and are one of the world’s best-selling music acts, selling an estimated 150–170 million records worldwide.  They have won 22 Grammy Awards, more than any other band, and in 2005, they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility.  Rolling Stone ranked U2 at # 22 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.  Throughout their career, as a band and as individuals, they have campaigned for human rights and social justice causes, including Amnesty International, Jubilee 2000, the ONE/DATA campaigns, Product Red, War Child, and Music Rising.

Despite proudly proclaiming their Irish identity and supporting the Catholic minority in Ulster—Sunday Bloody Sunday was another track on the War album—and supporting Irish re-unification, they have stirred anger and resentment in Eire for sheltering their enormous income in a Dutch corporation.  Threatened with prosecution in the Republic for tax evasion, Bono and the Edge live together with their families in a Swiss castle and cannot safely return again to Dublin.

New Year's Day and Sunday Bloody Sunday were significant anthems on U2's War album.

They have also been criticized for lucrative corporate deals with iTunes, Apple, Bank of America, and others, as well as for sucking up to some powerful global oligarchs and unsavory national leaders for support of the One campaign and other global charities.

But on the whole, their body of work and real world positive impact are beyond quibbling.

Happy New Year’s Day!

Commemorating That Dreaded Anniversary Again—Murfin Rants and Poetry

Note—Re-posting an almost annual blog post.

There is no escaping it.  A scab is pulled off a barely healed wound.  Opportunists and con men scramble to once again jump to wrong conclusions, scapegoat strawmen, and bend the occasion to serve their ambitions and blood lust.

I dread it every year.  But it will not leave me or, I suspect, any of us alone.

But as horrible as those images etched indelibly in my mind are, is it wrong to say that I miss the days just after?  Remember?  For a little while Americans loved each other, found comfort in each other’s arms.  Divisions melted.  We were united by grief, and yes, even some righteous anger.  Even the world mourned for us.  Some of us even dared hope that the sense of oneness, community, and solidarity could change us.  Maybe even last.

Of course, it didn’t.  Weeks went by and we went charging off in different directions—drumming up wars on people who had nothing to do with the attack, cooking up wild conspiracy theories that confirmed our own personal demons and loathing’s, scapegoating the convenient and the weak, attacking the patriotism of anyone who did not wear a flag pin 24 hours a day.

And now, multiple wars later, a Depression, the election of a Black President then his replacement with a malignant narcissist and common charlatan, the ascent of a kind of political madness, the rise of entitled oligarchy, immigration panic and the rise of fascist White nationalism Americans hate each other.  Really hate.  Can’t stand to talk with each other, be in the same room, breathe the same air.  Rage is the order of the day.  White men strut through malls and fast food emporiums with military style weapons slung over their shoulder daring anyone to look cross eyed at them and in their heart of hearts hoping that someone will challenge them.  Looking for any spark to set off a Civil War.

22 years later America is shattered and American despise each other.

Black kids who look like they could be trouble are pumped full of holes with monotonous regularity.  Half-starved immigrant children are torn from their parents, caged, and brutalized. In some churches, mosques, and temples hate thy neighbor is the daily message.  We are sliced and diced apart every which way—by race, language, religion, politics, age, gender, and who we choose to love.

The once revered first responder heroes of 9/11 have been transformed into greedy union thugs by politicians.  Police departments have been transformed from serve and protect into little armies to quash the slightest suggestion of unrest or dissent.

Women and their health have become more than ever political plaything, and the objects of Great Lie campaigns worthy of anything by Goebbels.   Transgender humans have become prey righteous hunters.

And guns still don’t kill people—the increasing mounds of bodies are felled by some kind of mysterious magic.

So much for my rant.

Looking back, I have grappled with 9/11 in my poetry more than any other single subject.  And how that poetry evolved speaks to what has happened to us. 

The first one was written for a one year anniversary program and was included in my collection We Build Temples in the Heart in 2004.

 

Photos of the dead and missing in New York posted on a makeshift memorial wall.

The Dead of 9/11 Leave a Message on George W’s Voice Mail

 

The Dead cry out—

 

It is not lonely here!

            They come by the scores

                        and by the thousands

                        every day,

                        as they have always come,

                        each arrival here

                        a wrenching loss below.

            They come as they have always come,

                        each death the completion of a journey,

                        the closing of a hoop of life.

            And we welcome each of them.

 

But we are not lonely here.

            We do not wander silent corridors

                        our footsteps echoing,

                        yearning for a voice.

            We are not lonely

                        for we are the Dead

                        and we are everywhere

                        united in that last breath

                        and in eternity.

 

But You—

 

You make haste to fill the unfillable,

            to send us more,

            many more,

            out of their own time

            as we were out of ours,

            yanked here in violence and hatred.

 

Let them be.

They will come in their own time.

 

We who know death

            do not cry out for revenge.

 

We are not lonely here.

 

—Patrick Murfin 

 

 

                              "If I wore stars on a pointed hat."

 

In 2007 came one of those serendipitous coming together of calendar occasions

 

September 12, 2007

The Day After 9/11—Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah

 

Wheels turning within wheels—

     an astrolabe,

          Tycho’s observatory,

               gears in some fantastic machine,

                    electrons—atoms—molecules,

                        moons—planets—stars—galaxies—universes.

 

Today, just today—

     Point A on Wheel X, spinning urgently,

     comes to kiss Point B on Wheel Y,

     rotating on its own good time,

     for just a nano-second

     having just brushed by

     Point C on cog Z.

 

These precise events will come again,

    I suppose—

     you do the math if you wish.

 

But if I wore stars on a pointed hat,

    I might conclude that there was something

    beyond mere physics at work here.

 

Call it an omen, if you wish,

     or the flat hand of something Greater

     slapping us upside our

     merely mortal heads

     and scolding us—

               “Spin as you will,

                you spin not alone.”

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

 

The cloud of ash envelops Manhattan.

 

On the tenth anniversary I was moved by reading that the dust from the Twin Towers was still orbiting the stratosphere and slowly, year by year, falling to earth.

 

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

September 9, 2011, Crystal Lake, Illinois

 

The ash and dust, they say,

rose as high as the skirts

of the ionosphere.

Prevailing winds pushed it

            across oceans and around the world.

 

Most has sifted by now to the earth.

Some orbits still,

La Moneda, the Presidential Palace in Santiago, under attack during the U.S. sponsored Chilean coup on 9/11 1973.  In the wake of the coup thousands were killed or disappeared.

 

Ten years ago, I recalled that 9/11 was etched in the memories of Chileans as the date of their own national catastrophe—the 1973 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and ushered in a brutal dictatorship.  The United States government was more than just complicit in that.

 

Two Anniversaries

September 11, 2013

 

I’ll ante my 3,000 vaporized on a crystal morning.

You’ll see me your 3,000 homeless ghosts.

I’ll give you my crumbling Towers and billowing ash.

You will call with the bombed rubble of La Moneda .

 

I’ll throw in a stack of terrorists with beards and turbans.

You’ll count out freckled faces, crew cuts, and black fedoras.

 

Let’s show our cards and see who loses.

 

—Patrick Murfin