Conor McGregor, as seen in central Derry, May 2025.
What’s going on here?
Conor McGregor, the former cage-fighting champion and Irish whiskey entrepreneur, has become de facto leader of an Irish anti-immigrant campaign with strong echoes of the U.S. MAGA movement. Further MAGA parallels: McGregor, who lost a civil suit alleging sexual assault earlier this year, has announced he’ll run for the Irish presidency. See: “Conor McGregor, MMA fighter, alleged rapist, Ireland’s next president?“
The first day of our trip to Ireland, back in late April, we ran into the aftermath of a McGregorite anti-immigrant rally in Dublin. It was staged just two days after the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which opened Irish nationalists’ initially failed, ultimately victorious effort to end British rule. Rally participants wrapped themselves, literally, in the Irish tricolor, and some chanted slogans like “Ireland for the Irish.” In Trumpian fashion, McGregor claimed a vast throng of more than 100,000 people turned out. Having been in the area where the rally was held, there ain’t no way a crowd anywhere near that size was present. Most sources estimated it at about 5,000.
The anti-immigrant gathering was followed immediately afterward by a smaller anti-racist rally and march that began in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, hallowed ground in modern Irish history as the site where the Easter Rising of April 1916 began. We walked alongside the march a few blocks to its end point outside the Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to the memory “of all those who gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom.”
Why were we seeing a sign mocking Conor McGregor and his followers in Derry, a place where he won’t be running for anything? I think it’s because McGregor’s rhetoric touches a nerve in a place that at least outwardly is still closely linked to the struggle for Irish independence and the associated fight to achieve civil rights for the minority Catholic population.
The city is part of the six counties partitioned from the rest of Ireland in the early 1920s, which remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. The very name of the place is contested; in United Kingdom parlance, the town is called Londonderry. It’s famously divided along sectarian and the associated political lines, Protestant/Loyalist and Catholic/Republican. In Catholic/Republican parts neighborhoods, which is mostly what we saw, the ideology expressed in street art is still strongly, even radically, Republican, and embraces other liberation causes (Palestinian nationalism, for instance) and rejects McGregor’s narrow, reactionary, anti-immigrant nationalism.
Newly painted Palestinian nationalist/Irish Republican mural in Derry’s Bogside neighborhood, May 2025.
Hussey’s Folly, Dingle Bay, County Kerry, Ireland. May 2025.
“If you ever find yourself in Dingle” sounds like the start of a joke. I don’t know what the rest of it would be, but if you do ever find yourself there, there’s a beautiful walk out from the town’s harbor, past this tower, and then to the cliffs beyond.
The date given for the tower, called Hussey’s Folly, is 1845. That was the first of Ireland’s devastating famine years. The construction was a make-work project, something devised by a local landholder for the poor and hungry to do in return for wages or food. Similar projects, often involving exhausting physical labor like road-building, were carried out all over Ireland as the country starved. Here’s a decent writeup on the “famine roads,” some of which are still used as part of the national road network: www.frrandp.com/2025/01/famine-roads.html.
What I really wish I had right now was a picture of 19-year-old me getting ready for my very first airplane flight, O’Hare to JFK, on the first leg of a trip to Ireland, my first time out of the country. But no picture from that day in September 1973 exists, so I’ll have to content myself with the memory of my excitement as the plane left the ground — I was actually whooping as the plane made a big turn to head east toward New York. Flying really was pretty cool.
That trip lasted three months. I left Chicago with two friends, Dan Shepley and Gerry Valenti. Dan peeled off for Germany and Oktoberfest a few days into the trip. Gerry and I spent the rest of September, all of October and November and most of December hiking and hitch-hiking around the country, mostly on the western coast. The centerpiece of the trip was a visit to Clare Island, at the mouth of Clew Bay off County Mayo. It was home to part of my mom’s family, O’Malleys and Morans, who had left for Chicago in the 1880s and ’90s.
We stayed with a second cousin of mom’s, Michael Joe O’Malley, for several weeks, getting more of a glimpse of what island life was really like than we had bargained for. There is a lot more to be said about Michael Joe and that stay, which I’ll try to do in the coming days. But the reason for remembering all of that today is that Kate, our son Thom and I are flying to Dublin in just a few hours for three weeks in Ireland. It’s my first time back since that trip I made as a teenager.
(And why haven’t I returned before? Maybe that’s something I’ll explore, too — an interior travelogue.)
We’re staying tonight in Independence, the seat of Inyo County, along U.S. 395 near all sorts of history. Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp for Japanese-Americans, is just to the south. We’re in the middle of the Owens Valley, a place defined in modern times by the loss of its water to sharp operators from Los Angeles.
More immediately, one thing that strikes me about staying along U.S. 395 is the all-night truck traffic. It’s not a constant, relentless parade. But every few minutes or so, an eighteen-wheeler rolls through, either headed north to connect with Interstate 80 in Reno or south toward Los Angeles or maybe the desert routes to Phoenix.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS seen from Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Nevada.
We started the day by driving down to O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the facilities that impound the Tuolumne River in a once pristine Sierra valley and bring water to 2.5 million people in the Bay Area (and as part of a larger system including hydroelectric facilities also supply power to some city operations in San Francisco and elsewhere). I hadn’t intended to spend much time there, but we got to walking the trail on the north side of the reservoir and pretty soon it was early afternoon.
We took our time driving over Tioga Pass and down to Lee Vining and checked into a motel and had dinner at the local Mobil gas station — it’s actually a well-known eatery and just what you need if you’ve spent a long day hiking or driving or both. Then we headed to the south shore olf Mono Lake to see whether we could sight Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS again. There was a nearly full moon lighting up the tufa formations along the shoreline, but yes, the comet was still clearly visible naked-eyewise and more so with any kind of camera. I didn’t bring a tripod on this trip, so I have to resort to handheld phone-camera shots. There were several guys along the lakeshore shooting the spectacle with professional gear — I imagine we’ll see some of those shots soon.
Along the road to Hetch Hetchy, snags still stand eleven years after the Rim Fire swept through Stanislaus National Forest and parts of Yosemite National Park.
To keep it short and sweet: We’re taking a quick trip over to the Eastern Sierra. The past few years, this has involved a drive from Berkeley and a sunset stop along the road near Tioga Pass. This time we splurged and stopped at one of the lodges west of the park. We got here in time to take a quick before-dinner walk — a walk, not a hike, since it was along the road toward the long-drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (drowned by San Francisco, but that’s another story).
Highway 120, the main road into the park from the Bay Area, goes through part of the area that burned during the Rim Fire in 2013. Much can be said about that — I happened to be up in Yosemite on a quick trip with my nephew Sean the day the fire really blew up, and we had to get home by way of Fresno. The fire burned for a very long time and at the time became the third largest fire by area in California history. It was an epic. Just eleven years later, it ranks as the state’s twelfth largest fire — nine bigger ones, including a couple about four times as large, have occurred since 2017. The point of mentioning that is that even though the Rim Fire has probably faded from most people’s memory in the wake of all the large, destructive and deadly fires that have occurred since, the evidence of the blaze is all around us in this area.
After our walk and before dinner, we went out to try to find evidence of another spectacle, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. I was really kind of blown away by it.. Reasonably bright as the dusk deepened, with a fantastically long “tail” (or so it appeared to me). Looking forward to more sightings.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over the Tuolumne River canyon, October 14, 2024.
If Charles O. Finley had gotten his way, the A’s might never have come to Oakland.
From the moment he gained complete ownership of the Kansas City Athletics in early 1961, he began trying to move the team. He explored taking the A’s to Dallas-Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Louisville, Atlanta, San Diego, New Orleans and Seattle before settling on Oakland and its brand-new Coliseum as the team’s new home.
When the American League approved the move in October 1967, Kansas City had seen enough. The contempt local fans and officials felt for Finley when he left town is often summed up in an outraged (and outrageous) quote attributed to — but apparently never uttered by — the late Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington.
The day after the American League approved the A’s move, later accounts insist, Symington went to the Senate floor to denounce Finley and declared, “Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
It’s such an over-the-top line — and all the better for being delivered by a U.S. senator in the august chamber of “the world’s greatest deliberative body” — that writers to this day are still quoting it. Someone out there has even updated it: With the A’s and current owner John Fisher on the way to Nevada, it’s now Las Vegas that’s the luckiest city since Hiroshima.
My first impulse when I came across the quote in a Ron Fimrite Sports Illustrated feature on Oakland’s especially dreadful 1979 season was to look up the 1967 news stories recounting Symington’s sensational statement. It must have made a splash, and I wouldn’t be above using it myself for a piece I was writing on the history of the A’s.
But it turns out there is no record of the quote being attributed to Symington until years after his actual 1967 remarks — or at least no record that someone going through online databases can find.
With that caveat – that we’re depending on what we can mine from an imperfectly preserved record – here’s a summary of how the quote evolved and was eventually placed in Sen. Symington’s mouth:
The Congressional Record for Oct. 19, 1967, reprints Symington’s brief remarks on the floor, which he made after participating in negotiations with the American League about the A’s status.
Symington made no mention of Hiroshima, according to the Record. But neither did he hold back from blasting Finley, calling him “one of the most disreputable characters ever to enter the American sports scene.” He added that while it hurt to lose major league baseball in Kansas City, it was a pleasure to get rid of the team’s owner.
The resulting news accounts, including a front-page story from the Kansas City Star’s Washington bureau and an Associated Press story carried all over the country, match the Record’s account and quote Symington’s description of Finley as “disreputable.” The stories are very specific. The Star mentions that Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse yielded the floor in the middle of a speech to allow Symington to deliver his statement about Finley. The AP notes Symington’s speech took two minutes. Neither account includes the purported (and irresistibly quotable) “Hiroshima” comment.
The Kansas City Times, sister paper of the Kansas City Star, published an account of Symington’s Senate speech on Oct. 20, 1967. Neither the story nor any other source at the time suggested Symington mentioned Hiroshima.
But if Symington didn’t say anything about Finley and Hiroshima on the Senate floor, where did the phrase come from and how was it eventually credited to him? There are a couple of clues about the origin that show up in printed sources.
In the weeks before Finley’s move to Oakland became official, many thought the A’s were headed to Seattle. A few days before the American League’s decision, Dick Young, a New York Daily News columnist, wrote in the nationally distributed Sporting News, “It looks like Seattle is the lucky city. The last city with that kind of luck was Hiroshima.”
Young’s column ran in The Sporting News’ Oct. 14 edition. On Oct. 16, the Kansas City Star reported the proceedings of a City Council meeting that included this nugget:
“Turning his sarcastic talents on Charles O. Finley, Athletics owner, Councilman John Maguire remarked: ‘No other city but Hiroshima has been so blessed.'” The metropolis Maguire appears to be referring to in that account is Kansas City itself, not Oakland or Seattle.
Yes, comparing the impact of a reviled team owner to a nuclear attack that had killed tens of thousands of people was memorable because it was ironic, insensitive and bitterly funny. The appearance of these statements so close together suggests the birth of what a later generation would call a meme.
Then came the American League vote on Oct. 18 — Councilman Maguire was part of the city’s delegation to the league meeting. On Oct. 19, Symington made his apparently Hiroshima-free speech on the Senate floor. Then, in the days immediately following the news the A’s were California-bound, variations on the Hiroshima line began showing up in papers around the country.
The earliest example that I’ve turned up — “by getting Finley, Oakland became the luckiest city since Hiroshima” — appeared in the Oakland Tribune on Oct. 22. The quote was attributed only to “one quipster.”
On Oct. 25, Los Angeles Times columnist John Hall wrote, “Somebody else said it first. With Charlie Finley and the A’s on the way, Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
Two days later, the San Diego Union’s Jack Murphy followed with this: “Oakland doubtless regards the arrival of Finley with emotions ranging from delight to despair. To borrow a line from John Hall, Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.”
In the following weeks, months and years, the quote was attributed to sportswriters in Chicago, Kansas City, “the Midwest,” California, Wisconsin and Texas. In some cases, it was said to be the wit of some unnamed Kansas Citian. Sometimes it was not attributed at all and was reprinted as a recently overheard wisecrack.
The quote never completely fell from circulation, but in 1973, six years after its first appearance, its author finally got a name when The New York Times Magazine credited it to Kansas City Star sports editor Joe McGuff.
That attribution was apparently based on an interview with sportswriter Wells Twombly, who wrote a feature on Finley and the A’s for the magazine. Here’s the passage:
“If you try to figure Finley out, you’ll only succeed in confusing yourself,” says Kansas City Star sports editor Joe McGuff, who called Oakland the luckiest city since Hiroshima when Finley took the Athletics there. “His capacity for turmoil is incredible. He thrives on it. He enjoys tough times so he can work his way out of them and give himself credit.”
Perhaps McGuff, a legendary Kansas City journalist who eventually became the Star’s editor in chief, did say something like that. But scouring his stories and columns on the A’s departure from Kansas City doesn’t turn up the Hiroshima bon mot.
Also in 1973, Ron Bergman, an A’s beat writer for the Oakland Tribune, published “The Mustache Gang,” an account of the team’s first world championship season. Bergman had written about Oakland’s welcome for Charlie Finley for The Sporting News in 1967. That piece used the quote and attributed it to “a Midwest sportswriter.” His 1973 tome ascribes the words to Symington.
Two popular books that came out shortly afterward did the same.
“Charlie O.,” published in 1975 by Sacramento Bee writer Herb Michelson, used the quote, attributed to Symington, for book-jacket copy. That guaranteed it would get attention and many reviews quoted the line and its attribution.
“Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley’s A’s,” by Berkeley poet and jack of all literary trades Tom Clark, appeared in 1976. Clark goes out of his way to say Symington’s Hiroshima one-liner could be found in the Congressional Record. That was untrue, but Clark’s use of the quote attracted the attention of New York Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt:
“Still, for all that Finley’s threat to the national moral fabric has been pumped out of proportion, one has to admit that his presence on the scene has inspired some amusing rhetoric. …
“When, in 1967, Finley moved the A’s from Kansas City to Oakland, Senator Stuart Symington sputtered, ‘Oakland is the luckiest city since Hiroshima.’ ”
Those two books and their reviews appear to have settled the matter: Writers ever since have repeated that Symington compared the Finley effect to the A-bomb. That spurious attribution has been especially popular this year, with the quote appearing in many accounts of the A’s imminent departure from Oakland.
At the end of the day, and at the close of the Athletics’ era in yet another bruised and sorrowful hometown, the evidence shows the “HIroshima” idea started with someone else — New York columnist Dick Young — and that the quote was passed around for years before it became the too-good-not-to-be-true declaration of an important public figure who, based on his actual words, really did detest Charlie Finley.
Published by the Oakland Tribune late in the summer of 1917 after the American Expeditionary Forces had landed in France to join the war against Germany. It’s a weird combination of nationalistic pride and fantasy: the war as a game in which baseball-playing Americans would enjoy a peculiar advantage in slinging “chunks of death” (grenades) at the enemy. (And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.)
The text:
That American Base Ball Arm
“They say the French poilus stared when they saw how the Americans could throw a bomb, and no wonder. Who should be able to throw if not the Americans? What was all that baseball for if not to teach the youngsters of the United States how to hurl a missile straight and true? Of course we can’t all be pitchers. The real pitcher will be the star bomber wherever he is placed. But any ball-playing American lad will be able to give a good account of himself when it comes to one of those dramatic crises when a chunk of death must be planted, and planted quickly and accurately, in the enemy’s midst. A world is in the bleachers to watch the fateful game. And what a shout will go up when all “our boys” make their home run!”
Container ship headed into Port of New York, July 1, 2024.
Among the many ways to categorize most air travelers is their choice between aisle seat and window seat. (No, I don’t think anyone really chooses a middle seat).
Aisle-seat travelers are focused on convenience. They can get up any time they want without climbing over someone or making everyone else in their row move. The freedom that convenience wins is the ability to walk to the back of the plane to use the tiny restrooms and maybe get a nice leg-stretch. Aisle-sitters see flying as a chore, something to endure.
Window-seat fliers are people who, despite suffering the many large and small inconveniences of modern air travel and getting crammed into smaller and smaller spaces on-board, still see a little adventure in the flight experience. At least that’s my take, as someone who chooses a window seat 100 percent of the time. The adventure comes in witnessing the dramatic moments of takeoff and landing and watching the country and shy reveal themselves in the hours in between.
Yes, you might nod off occasionally as you wonder which river, lake, town or highway that is sliding by miles below you. But for every instance your attention wanders, there’s another where you’re surprised by the chance appearance of something happening in the sky around you — thunderheads building up in the distance — or down there on the surface.
Maybe, after a long landing approach over the sea, on a coast far from your own, a freighter will glide beneath you amid infinitely scalloped waters, churning toward port, its bow wake creating a perfect chevroned symmetry in the last light of the evening.
Brightline Holdings, a company developing high-speed train service from Las Vegas to the L.A. area, broke ground the other day on a system it says will cost $12 billion. The 218-mile route will include four stations. The company says it will begin service in 2028, in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
We’ll see how credible those estimates and promises are, but in a state notorious for obscene infrastructure cost overruns and project delays, the promise of a working train system from scratch in four years seems miraculous. (Yes, hear a voice says, “If it sounds too good to be true. …”)
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation’s Authority’s project to extend BART six miles through downtown San Jose currently carries a price tag of $12.7 billion. Given the project’s shocking recent price escalation, no one will be too surprised to see the cost rise further. And as the price goes up, the VTA keeps pushing the extension’s forecast opening date further into the future. Once upon a time, the agency talked about the line opening by the end of this decade. Now it’s scheduled to start carrying paying passengers in around 2037.
No particular point here — the facts alluded to above are well known. But no one I know has called out the similar cost estimates for the two projects, which are very different in almost every other way. Brightline will run down a highway median on the surface, for instance. The BART route through downtown San Jose involves a deep, five-mile-long tunnel, construction beneath an urban center, and working in a region where property acquisition costs are extreme, among other differences.
But even given all that, you naturally wonder whether one of the projects here is exceedingly skillful at stretching dollars and the other, not so much.
