The saga of the lost guitar by FedEx has come to a sad end.

Well here we are having arrived at Southampton and after a few days in London we are in Suffolk ready to be off for Edinburgh tomorrow morning; the guitar did arrive, by the way, a few days ago and when I opened the parcel upon our arrival yesterday I found it was broken at the neck; so isn't that a pisser? The guitar you see above is no more.

I went out this morning to Bury St Edmunds, had a cup of coffee and a scone at Harriets, and bought another guitar. It cost $186 and now I have to try and get some kind of compensation from FedEx. I know it will be difficult as they are already asking whether the claim goes to International FedEx or National FedEx so we shall see.

The crack is right at the neck and the action is a little higher because of this. When I took it out I played an open chord and my daughter said 'that doesn't sound too good' and it didn't.

I tried to re-tune it and that's when I saw the crack.

It's a shame because I've had that guitar for about fifteen years; it belonged to a country singer and I really liked the sound.

So have a last look at that guitar above.

Apart from the claims form I have to obtain a PPL licence for my show. A PPL licence is when you use recorded music during the show and I plan to recite a poem by WB Yeats called The Song of Wandering Aengus to some music by Áine Minogue; it's beautiful Celtic music and the poetry of Yeats is superb – which leaves me to do the rest; here's hoping.

We open on August 9th so keep watching this space!!

Life on the Queen Mary 2 - and did Fed Ex lose my guitar?

I'm all at sea for this post; literally.. We are half way across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2 and it is truly the only way to fly.

It was a pain in the arse getting to Brooklyn to get the ship but since then all has been easy and slow cruising across on the same route the Titanic took only in reverse.

I would like to do this again as it's all so relaxing; maybe the next time I'll take the train across America to New York; we have excellent food, service and facilities and compared to a first class flight there is no comparison.

I saw the people getting on to the flight from Los Angeles on Sunday and, of course, the first class passengers got onto the plane first. One man stood at the front for a long time before the passengers were called; I presume he wanted to be on the plane first and we could all see him waiting there and we could see what kind of fella he was and we knew how lucky he was to be the first one on.

There was a piece of red carpet maybe about one yard by two yards which had a boundary rope across it and he and his fellow first class people duly stood behind it waiting for the magic word to go; as soon as it did the first class people showed their tickets to the United Airlines person and they were let passed the boundary rope and into the red carpet and they were away.
Then the United representative put the boundary rope back up so that the rest of us – the hoy-poloi – could get on the plane via the regular blue airport carpet.

But getting back to the Queen Mary 2: we have everything here from a casino to dog kennels from a theatre with a big show to a pianist/singer in a pub and in various places there are little bits of entertainment – there was a woman playing a harp in one place and a string quartet playing a classical version of the Billy Joel song Piano Man.

Of course we're off to Southampton as I am due to do my show at the Edinburgh Festival – A Bit of Irish – did I mention it before?

As we are sailing I have very little knowledge of what is going on in the world and what is going on with my guitar – didn't I tell you about that?

Well at the risk of boring my friends and relations, who have heard all about it, I will tell you:
I sing a song in my show about a building labourer with a sick note who tries to tell his boss why he can't come in to work; it seems he tried to move some bricks with a barrel from the 14th floor of a building and when he untied the rope the barrel fell like lead and he went up on the pulley rope and kept going up and down????

Well a similar tale may be in the offing; it just needs somebody to write the song.

United Airlines told me they wanted $200 just to ship my guitar to Brooklyn. So I went to Federal Express – FedEx - and asked them if I could send the guitar to one of their offices in Brooklyn and pick it up when they landed. Yes, they said, so I bought a big box and took it into their Los Angeles office for shipment.

They told me which address in Brooklyn to send it to and it cost me $51; I followed the progress of the guitar on the Internet and last Thursday it reached its Brooklyn destination. When I checked, the Internet told me that delivery had been refused and the box was being 'Returned to Sender.' The guitar had been sent to Maspeth in Queens - no I'd never heard of Maspeth either - so I called FedEx and they eventually put me through to that office where I spoke to a very nice woman who said that the particular FedEx office it had been sent to didn't accept things to be picked up; now they tell me, I thought. But she said all would be well if I picked it up from her office in Maspeth, Queens upon my arrival in New York.

I looked on the map and the journey from JFK Airport would mean taking two trains (the J train, the L train) and a number 59 bus; it would take an hour.

Would it be better to take a taxi to Maspeth, I thought, and back to the airport and then off to the Queen Mary, or would I take the one cab and be in it for maybe two hours and in any case should I leave my wife at JFK with the rest of the luggage; I slept on it. Next day I looked on the Internet and saw that the Guitar had been sent to New Jersey on its way back to Los Angeles.

I called the very nice woman at the Fed Ex Maspeth office, and she hadn't got a clue what happened. She said she had finished work the night before and when she came in to work again the next day the box had gone and was on its way to Phoenix Arizona but she said “we can stop it in Phoenix and get it back here to Maspeth by next week.”

“What day next week?” I asked and she said “Thursday.”

I'm supposed to be at sea on Thursday on the Queen Mary 2 so I asked them to send the guitar to my daughter's house in Suffolk as soon as it reaches Phoenix; they said they could do that but I seem to think I might be playing the air guitar in my show in Edinburgh!!

By the way Fed-Ex are charging me for the shipment to Suffolk; I had to agree to it but I will try and get a refund.

Whatever happens I won't know till the ship docks in Southampton on July 26th.

The First Day of Spring. Part 3

We are off on Monday to the UK where I do my show at the Edinburgh Festival and instead of flying we are going on the Queen Mary from New York to Southampton; it seems more civilised and we may arrive without any jet lag; the journey take seven days and I will try and post on this blog at least once.

I have sent my guitar, by the way, via fed-ex to New York as United Airlines, in their wisdom wanted to charge $200. So I sent it fed-ex to their Brooklyn office for me to pick up when I am there in Monday and I did everything they told me and when it got to Brooklyn the office there refused delivery and returned it.

So now it is on its way to Phoenix. I have put an order in for them to intercept it and send it to an address in the UK but watch this space – isn't it amazing how incompetent most things are these days?

Anyway part three of my novel; this is called Gertie:

Gertie
Eddie's mother didn’t like the fact that he lived in the flats; she told Eddie they were for the common people, and she never stopped telling him that even after he had taken up residence there with his bride. The phrase ‘the common people’ amused Eddie as he had always thought that they were all common people; they didn’t live too far from the centre of the city and their neighbours were working class so they were all common people.
They had very thick north Dublin working class accents and some of the so called common people, who lived in the flats, spoke a lot posher than his parents did; but to be fair to his parents at that time the prospect of living in a flat was new to the people of Dublin; it was new to the people of most places away from London and other world capitals.
Nuala’s mother left the west of Ireland and ended up in Dublin; the first person she met when she walked along the street, that day, was Eddie. He was standing outside Mulligan’s pub in Poolbeg Street having a cigarette. He took a huge pull of his Woodbine and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs and stared into space as he enjoyed the sensation. Then he leaned against the pub wall and blew smoke rings across the narrow street.
“Excuse me” she said.
He almost jumped to attention as she spoke: “What?”
“I need to get passed.”
“You need to get passed?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
“It’s only a little pavement.” she continued.
Of course it was a narrow pavement, just there, but she could easily have stepped into the road to get passed but as she had approached she saw his lovely black wavy hair, his beautiful blue eyes and his long black eye lashes so she decided to speak.
“Do you mind?”
“And what’s the matter with walking around?” he said.
“I don’t want to get walk around; I want to walk on the pavement where it’s safer.”
“Oh!” he said and stood up from the wall “Don’t want you to be getting run over.”
“Thank you” she said as she started to walk.
“Don’t want you to getting run over by the streams of bleedin’ cars that are rushing passed here all hours of the day and night.”
He squinted at her for some kind of response as there hadn’t been a car in Poolbeg Street for as long as he’d been standing there.
“You never know” she said then she turned and looked at him “are you waiting for the holy hour?”
“It is the holy hour so why would I be waiting for it?”
“Funny wonder” she said and she walked off.
In those days the Dublin pubs would close at two thirty for an hour; that hour was called the holy hour; it was also the hour when everybody wanted a drink; even though the licensing hours in Dublin were very generous, and the pubs seemed to be open all day, the hour between two thirty and three thirty was so much more attractive and dangerous, somehow, if you were drinking a pint of porter in a pub.
Nuala’s mother, or to be more precise, the future mother of Nuala, walked away from Eddie and Eddie looked at her and the way she walked; he loved the way she had given him a smart answer and the way she nearly glanced back at him, almost looking over her shoulder, and he was interested; interested in knowing what was going on in that mind.
She was dressed very differently from the other young girls of the day; she was wearing buttoned up shoes and a three quarters coat over a frilly dress, which showed below the hem of the coat, as she walked. Her hair was also quite short and she reminded him of a pixie.
He followed her up Corn Exchange Place; she could see him peripherally now and again, so she knew he was there, and she led him into George's Quay; she didn’t lead him there on purpose, as she didn’t know Dublin at all, and when she could see the River Liffey she stopped by the wall and gazed across.
He stopped and looked at her; she seemed like something from another age; a beautiful creature that had dropped out of the sky like an angel.
“It’s called the Liffey” he said stopping beside her.
“Aren’t you the clever one?” she said.
It was a nice day for March and Eddie leaned against the wall.
“Smoke?”
“I don’t mind.”
He opened his packet of Craven-A and offered it to her; she found it difficult to take one as she was wearing white gloves.
“Take one out for me” she said.
He handed her a cigarette then put the packet back into his pocket and pulled out the packet of Woodbines for himself.
“Prefer these” he said lighting her smoke “Don’t like the cork tips.”
“You carry the Craven-A for the girls?”
He winked and she leaned forward and took the light then took a deep drag of the cork tipped Craven A and went into a fit of coughing: “First one?” he said.
She nodded and he patted her back lightly.
“You’ll get used to it” he said.
After a few minutes her eyes stopped watering and she managed to clear her throat.
“Thanks very much” she said.
He took a deep pull on the Woodbine and said “Are you going to try another pull?”
“I don't think so” she said and put her foot on it.
“Where did you get the Craven A?” she said.
“England.”
“You in the British Army?”
“Go way” he said.
They talked till the end of the holy hour then Eddie had to go; he had to go back to his job at Mulligan’s and he told her all about it and how he was an apprentice barman; it was a trade to be proud of in Dublin where the Irish barmen led the world; by the time he had finished his time as an apprentice he would know everything from a Black Velvet to a Pink Gin and she was impressed by that; not that she knew what a pink gin was but it sounded interesting.
*******************************
Eddie arranged to meet the new girl the following day; he was to meet her at Nelson’s Pillar at two thirty, the holy hour, and he spent the entire morning trying to remember her name.
Was it Kitty or Grace? Something beginning with a ‘G’ maybe or was it Betty? It wasn’t Grace, he came to accept, and got to thinking about other names; he didn’t think it was Mary as he would have remembered that one easily enough.
He stood at the Pillar feeling as smart as he’d ever felt when he saw her approaching along O’Connell Street; she looked as beautiful as she had the previous day; he hadn’t noticed how blue her eyes were or how the sun reflected off her soft chestnut coloured hair and as soon as she got there he remembered her name – Gertie.
“Why did your mother call you Gertie?” was the first thing he said to her.
“How do you know it was my mother?”
“Well who was it?”
“I don’t know” she said.
A moment of silence; he didn’t know what to say to that so took the cigarettes out and offered her one.
“No thanks” she said “I just passed a shop near Parnell Street where they sell those.”
“You did?”
“Yes” she said – “it is Parnell Street with the big statue at the end?”
“It is” said Eddie lighting his cigarette.
“England!” she said.
“What?”
“England my arse! Where you ever there?”
He skulked a bit and turned to look towards the GPO.
“Here” he said “I brought you something.”
He took a palm from his pocket and gave it to her.
“Thanks; were you at mass?”
“Yes” he said “were you?”
She shook her head and put the palm into her pocket.
“Don't you have a bag?”
“No” she said.
“Well I'll get you one.”
She smiled.
“I'd like to go to England.”
“I'd like to live there” she said.
“Oh I don't know about that; I'd like to visit. I was reading about the Olympic Games there; I'd like to see them.”
“I never heard of it” she said.
“You never heard of the Olympic Games?”
“No.”
“Where have you been hiding?”
“I just dropped out of the sky” she said “what are they – the Olympic Games?”
“In the summer in London – they sound great; would you like to come across with me and see them?”
She laughed.
“I meet you one day and then next you want me to run away with you?”
“We don't have to run away – we just get in that bus and we're at the airport in no time.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette as the bus to the airport went passed; they both watched it disappear.
“Were you ever up in a plane?” he said.
“I wasn't even on a bus.”
They both laughed.
“You really did fall out of the sky - where do you want to go?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Up the Pillar” she said “I used to have a post card of it.”
He looked up at the height of the pillar and back at her ‘Are you sure?’
“Sure I’m sure.” she said.
“All right.” he said “If it's open.”
He’d lived in Dublin all his life but had never been up the pillar.
He took a deep pull of his woodbine, scratched his chin and they walked over; it didn’t cost very much and he paid for both of them as they went inside the archway entrance; somebody had once told him that the place stunk but he didn’t smell anything.
As they walked through the arch they had to go down a few steps then they had to climb a stone spiral staircase.
He wasn’t sure whether he should walk in front or not; if she walked first he might be accused of looking up at her arse and if he went first he might lose her; so he walked beside her.
It was a steady climb but not very hard; another thing he had heard was that it was exhausting which was also untrue; then about half way up he saw a woman who was exhausted so he gave that another thought.
The woman was with three young children; she was totally out of breath and one of the children was frightened to go any further; “I’ve had it” she said “I’m not going any higher.”
Gertie and Eddie walked passed them on the narrow staircase.
When they got to the top they could both feel the coolness of the air as it hit them and he could see Gertie shiver slightly.
He had a yearning to put his arm around her but it was too early; he wasn’t sure how she would take it so he stood there and put his hands in his pockets.
Gertie went to the edge and looked over the side at Dublin: first of all she looked down to the street down below where she had been standing a few minutes earlier; she thought she could see the cigarette he had put out on the pavement but it was her imagination; at around one hundred and twenty feet it was the highest building in Ireland and the highest she would ever be.
She looked ahead of her and could see a few cars in O'Connell Street below, parked in the middle of the street, a bus was below too and various people crossing over.
“There he is” said Eddie, looking up at the statue of Nelson, “the old bastard.”
A pigeon shit on the head of Nelson and she laughed.
In the distance she could see a church “What church is that?”
“That one . . now . .” said Eddie “that will be . .er Christchurch – a bleedin' good walk.”
“One little step” she said “and all my problems would disappear.”
She turned to him and smiled but there was no smile in her eyes; then she softened, twinkled and held on to his arm.
******************************

The First Day of Spring - next part.

I had a few requests from friends to read the rest of my novel and I sent it off to them; so bearing in mind that this is a first draft I am putting the next chapter here today.

If you would like to read it let me know and I'll send a PDF.

There are no chapter numbers; last week's chapter was called 'Eddie' and this week's is called 'Nuala.'

I will conclude next time with the next part called 'Gertie.'

THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING. FIRST DRAFT.
Nuala

Eddie's funeral took place at Fairview Church; the same place where he took his other sacraments: baptism, communion, confirmation and marriage.

“When Eddie was here just after Christmas attending his father's funeral he had no idea that his own demise would be so soon; he was here ten days ago and as usual, after mass, he lit a candle to his dearly beloved Gertie. After all these years he will be joining his beloved wife Gertie in the . . . . ”

As he spoke Nuala sat in the big church which was full as Eddie was very popular; she let her mind wander and thought about the mother she had never known, the father she had hardly known and her grandparents who had, more or less, brought her up.

She was sitting next to her grandmother, herself a new widow.

She followed the coffin, to Eddie's resting place in Glasnevin cemetery in the back of a hearse and she sat there as quiet as a mouse next to her grandmother, aunt and cousin; the only relatives, as far as she knew, that existed.

Nuala looked around her father's bedroom; his double bed was in the middle of the room underneath the window; it had been there for as long as she could remember. When she was little she would stand on the bed and see the River Tolka through the window.

On one side was a chest of drawers and on the other a small bedside table with a jewellery box on top; the jewellery box had been there forever but she had never opened it; it was time. In the tiny top drawer she found some brown necklaces and a turquoise bracelet; the second drawer had more necklaces and some rings and the bottom drawer had a small purse, a post card of Dublin and a soft brown feather.

The only thing in the purse was the stub for a ticket to a cinema in Sligo.

She turned the post card over and read it; it was signed by Gertie; her mother. Nuala had never met her mother and this was the first time she had seen her hand writing; she held the post card in her hand and stared at the words her mother had written; as she looked tears came into her eyes and one of them fell, just missing the card, as it dropped to hit her knee before splashing onto the floor.

The writing was fairly clear, although a little childish, and it was written in pencil. She put the card back into the drawer and looked out of the window at the Tolka; she must have stood there for at least half an hour staring at the river below; she didn't really see the river or the Fairview Strand as the thoughts were racing through her head.

She wasn't consciously collecting any of her thoughts, although some of them must have been going into her brain and being stored there as brains very cleverly do, as they were coming in and going out so fast she couldn't control them.

Her father had never told her anything about her mother and it was a shock to be so close to her; she had seen her mother's grave in Glasnevin Cemetery many times and was just there to bury her father; as the grave lay open awaiting her dad's body she felt a connection to what was under that ground; that was her mother down there; she couldn't see anything as she looked but she knew that if it were possible she would have opened the coffin and looked at her; nothing morbid but just to look at what clothes she was buried in. Her father said she had been buried in blue, as she was a child of Mary, and she often wondered how her father knew that as he had always said he didn't know anything about Gertie's family or her past and it seemed strange, to Nuala, that any of the conversation when they were courting would be about being a child of Mary.

Eventually she sat on the bed and closed the bottom drawer; then she opened the top one with the jewellery in it and ran her fingers through the necklaces; they felt smooth and clean and there was a very attractive smell from the drawer. She tried the turquoise bracelet on and it was a perfect fit. She knew she looked a lot like her mother, as she had seen the few photographs of her, but she hadn't known her size.

She put her fingers to the bottom of the small drawer and a pin pricked her finger; she took it out and fastened the clip at the back of the offending broach; it was about half an inch long and half of that wide and it was some kind of black stone surrounded by smaller stones; they might have been diamonds for all she knew. She put it back into the drawer and put the turquoise bracelet on top.

Nuala went out of the flat and into the Dublin air; as she walked towards the gates of the flats she could hear children playing and the sound of their play grew quieter as she walked up Poplar Row towards North Strand Road and into Fairview Park.

Being a Saturday there were plenty of people about; couples laying in the grass, some fella throwing a ball for his dog and the inevitable hurlers hitting their hurling ball a good hundred yards to each other; it's a wonder someone didn't end up with a cracked skull the way they hit it.
Something desperate was going on in Nuala's head as she walked. She was trying to plan what she would do with her life now that she was alone – totally alone in the world except for one cousin and an aunt in Finglas, who she had never felt close to for years, and her granny.

Her granny had been like a mother to her but, with her father's death, things were suddenly different. There were things she needed to know.

Was it time to go away and start a new life? She didn't know. What she did know was that somehow she needed to go west to where her mother came from; she wanted to find out who her mother was and more importantly who she, Nuala, was; where she came from.

Her grandmother lived a couple of miles away on Malahide Road and after wandering around Fairview Park, Nuala walked up to her flat; her granny knew that Nuala would be moving into Ballybough House and after a while Nuala left Malahide Road for her new home.

Nuala was still at school but she had a part time job visiting old people in their homes and helping them; she would sometimes cook a breakfast, cook some lunch – maybe do a bit of shopping for them and she would also help some of the really infirm people to get in and out of the bath tub or bed.

She had been doing this for a few years and had managed to put quite a bit of money away but now in the space of six months in her eighteenth year she lost both her father and grandfather; things were different.

In O'Connell Street there are lots of employment and temp agencies and Nuala had been in to every one; she was after a job in Sligo but the only jobs available were in Dublin.

She didn't tell anybody of her plans

Nuala was no stranger to her father's flat as she would see him there most days and many years earlier she had given up trying to shake him out of his mourning. She could see him serving customers at the pub with a smile on his face and a joke on his lips but as soon as he was alone with her he was miserable again; to her it was as if he blamed her for his misery.

Now that he was dead she decided to move into his bedroom and sleep in the bed he had shared with her mother; there was something spiritual about the experience and after the first night she couldn't wait to go to bed early.

The things she was learning about herself took her a few days to digest and she spent a lot of time alone in the flat thinking about them.

Her mother had mentioned someone called Sorcha as the post card read: 'Dear Sorcha; I fell in love in Dublin with the first man I bumped into; a beautiful blue eyed Dubliner. We went to the top of Nelson’s Pillar and he pointed out it was the first day of spring the twenty first of March; how romantic – I wish the circumstances were different and I wished I could give you my address but I can’t and I think you will know why. Lots of love; G.'

The post card didn't have a stamp and was addressed to Sorcha to an address in Sligo Town, Sligo. Who was Sorcha? She had never heard her father talk about her.

Red Channels and Brain Washing.

Red Channels; now what does that mean to you? It didn't mean anything to me till the other day when I heard a piece on the radio about the subject.

Red Channels started sixty years ago in the television industry; it was a booklet delivered to the desks of media executives in 1950 exposing writers, actors, journalists and directors as being soft on communism; 151 individuals in total.

The introduction to Red Channels, running just over six pages, was written by Vincent Hartnett, an employee of the Phillip H Lord agency, an independent radio-program production house, or "packager." Hartnett later founded the anti-Communist organization AWARE, Inc.

On the list were people like Orson Welles, Leonard Bernstein, Artie Shaw, Lena Horne, Marsha Hunt and many others.

This was separate from the House Unamerican Activities Committee and McCarthyism of the time and the executives that received the Red Channels pamphlets very rarely admitted to receiving them or even saying that such a thing as the Red Channels pamphlet even existed.

In 1950 Marsha Hunt's career was in the ascendancy with the three big television networks competing for her services but after a few months of waiting she called her agent and was told the news that she was on the Red Channels list.

Eventually she found what she was being accused of and it was because she had signed certain petitions, had said certain things, had attended certain meetings and was considered a Communist sympathiser.

On her own volition she wrote to the networks and told them that she was a 'good' American and not planning to overthrow the country but to no success.

Jean Muir was cast in a series for NBC called the Aldridge Family even though she was on the Red Channels list and even went into rehearsals and recording but so many protest letters went to the sponsors about her that, even though it was embarrassing, she was dropped before the first programme was broadcast.

The Red Channels blacklist was eventually broken by a 1962 lawsuit.

Now what does this have to do with the price of toast I hear you asking?

Since being here in America I have found only one person who agreed with the McCarthy witch hunts of the late forties early fifties; I must admit I have only known a few right wingers but fifty or sixty years later you would think there would have been more survivors of those sympathies; I have heard nobody being interviewed who sympathised with McCarthy although I'm sure that many still exist.

At the time of the McCarthy witch hunts Hollywood produced movies with titles such as I Married a Communist and I Was a Communist for the FBI in fact between the years 1948 and 1954 more than forty anti-Communist films came out of Hollywood.

In the 1951 Mickey Spillane novel One Lonely Night the hero, Mike Hammer, says “I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it . . . The were Commies . . .red sons-of-bitches who should have died long ago”
Liberals often criticised the committee, but in Congress, Liberals and Conservatives alike voted to fund it every year. By 1958, only one member of Congress (James Roosevelt) voted against giving it money.

The above information about Hollywood, Mickey Spillane and Congress I got from Howard Zinn's powerful book A People's History of the United States.

A wonderful book and in it are also facts about the early visitors to the Americas and how Christopher Columbus and his men ill treated the Indians here and in the West Indies.

In the West Indies they encountered a friendly people and abused them; all they wanted was gold for their King; the invaders would sharpen their knives and try them out on the natives. There was one case of a couple of Columbus's men encountering a pair of twin youths with a parrot who beheaded the twins and stole their parrot.

The incidents in the book are well researched and documented and I have to ask why men would do such things. Why would the whole nation believe McCarthy when he was obviously so evil?

Why would so many people follow Adolph Hitler? An unattractive monster who told the stock market and the ruling classes what they wanted to hear.

Isn't it very easy for me to look back with 20/20 hindsight and be so cute?

The people who came with Columbus knew no better but wouldn't you think they could have a modicum of empathy, sympathy or just a slight regard for their fellow man? Maybe they didn't think they were fellow men but a decent person wouldn't even do that to an animal.

And aren't we so clever looking back at the Communist witch hunts and saying that we wouldn't have had anything to do with it.

The people of the time were brainwashed with the continuous articles about Communism – I mean even Captain America was hunting Commies.

So what are we being brainwashed with these days?