Re: The recent tiff in Irish Traditional Music Circles over Seamus Tansey, the flutist, pulling a King Lear on a young woman melodeon player he was scheduled to play with, who 1) didn’t provide a mic for him 2) told him to tune up, twice declaring he was “flat” 3) had never heard of him. So he sent her family a letter in which he ratcheted up the bile to the extreme, calling her a conniving little “bitch”, ambitiously massacring Irish Traditional Music. The letter was private, but the response was not. Her family brought the letter to the airwaves, and on popular radio show both the young woman (Jenny Langston, or something like that) and Tansey had it out. She had righteous indignation on her side and scores of callers coming to her defense. Tansey was came off like a sputtering pompous id-jit. Nevertheless, the mob nature of the thing prompted me to write to ITRAD saying that in such a situation an individual was right to defend himself, whatever his flaws, against the levelling tribunal nature of such an arrangement, egged on by a venal radio host. To which I got a response from a guy named Jim Carroll saying basically, that Tansey represented the tradition and behaved like an asshole, therefore deserved his dressing down. To which I penned this response, but never it sent it, since frankly it’s not great and just further inflamed things. Nevertheless I’ll keep a record of it here:
“We have a man who’s done a shameful thing. And we have the aggrieved woman demanding justice. So far, so good. Then we have a third party, the radio personality, who eggs the man on, who prods the shameful thing be read in its entirety (listen to the prodding he does after the first paragraph is read). The man is then pilloried before the nation. Does the punishment fit the crime–a private feud of his own concocting, something stewed over, worked up to in an addled, self-amplified misdirected rage against impiety incarnate in this unwitting young female melodeon player? Call after call dresses the man down, a storm of righteousness and indignation. You can hear the crowd rising to its feed applauding the one who can brandish the word “asshole” with jus the right nuance. Oprah meets Irish Traditional Music. Thanks be to God the tradition is too wily to be “represented” by any one soul.”