The Atlantic Current, Ep. 63: Mayo For Sam, The New IRA, and Grilled Fauci
Tull and Vince go from Europe to the US — and from light to very dark
Mayo’s win in the All-Ireland Gaelic football final sparks a warm discussion on the joy of sports, curses, and a detour into the insanity of American amateur athletics.
But news elsewhere is more grim: renewed terrorist threats in the North, and a complete inability in the US (or anywhere else) to reckon with the damage caused by the global coronavirus pandemic. In both cases, Tull and Vince provide typically brilliant insight - but, in both cases, an easy answer is unfortunately impossible.
Episode Links:
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The Curse of the Billy Goat
Vince referenced the Chicago Cubs as an oft-cited counterpart to Mayo’s ‘Curse of ‘51’. And there are some similarities. As Tull noted, there is no comparison to Mayo’s 11 consecutive losses in the All-Ireland finals. But the Cubs, after winning the World Series in 1908, lost seven subsequent appearances in the sport’s final across the next thirty-seven years. (Incredibly, that’s actually a worse pace than Mayo’s.)
But the catch is that the Cubs’ curse — known as the Curse of the Billy Goat — didn’t arrive until that last loss, in 1945. The owner of a local (and still-standing) pub, the Billy Goat Tavern, brought his pet goat (also the pub’s mascot) to the game. Patrons near the goat complained about the smell; both the animal and its the owner, William Sianis, were asked to leave. Sianis promptly told the Cubs’ owner that the Cubs would never play in another World Series.
And, for 71 years, he was right. The Cubs did not make the World Series again until 2016. There were excruciating collapses, including a loss in 2003 often blamed on a Cubs fan named Steve Bartman who tried to catch a ball that proved to be in play. In 1969, during a crucial game, a black cat walked past the Cubs’ best player while he was awaiting his turn at bat. (The Cubs lost the game and once again missed the Series.) But for the most part, the Cubs were just bad, to the point that they were often called the “lovable losers”. It was not until 2016 that the label was finally removed.
Other Fun Sports Curses
Stolen mostly from this Wikipedia page, albeit with some additional research:
The Curse of Tilcara is a famous Argentine football myth alleging that the 1986 World Cup-winning squad broke a sacred promise to the Virgin of Copacabana, causing a 36-year major title drought. Some members of the 1986 team traveled back to Tilcara in 2018 to pay their respects and appease local folklore. Believers note that subsequent trophy wins—including the 2021 Copa América and the 2022 FIFA World Cup—only arrived after the supposed curse was lifted.
The GAA has another curse: the Curse of Biddy Early. Early was an Irish folk healer who allegedly cursed the County Clare GAA hurling team. Skeptics point out that Early died ten years before the GAA even existed, but those skeptics are likely underestimating Early’s power and thus risking their own futures in the process.
Multiple football teams in the United Kingdom — including Birmingham City FC and Derby County FC — have curses associated with alleged thefts from Romani people to build their stadiums.
The F-Bomb on Fox News
Note, too, the three videos above the article all center on “election integrity”. Fox News doing the Lord’s work again.
What, Exactly, Did Anthony Fauci Do?
Shortly after recording, the X algorithm pushed across a Tweet that perfectly encapsulates Vince’s point from the pod about Dr. Anthony Fauci as an outlet for people’s anger about the pandemic more broadly (if you’re wondering, no, Lysander Spoonerd is not a real name, but a play on Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century anarchist philospher):
The story here is awful, no doubt. But the obvious question is: why, exactly, is Fauci the villain here? One answer from the right is that Fauci gave the guidelines that hospitals were following in late 2020, and so his guidelines are to blame for the horrible circumstances surrounding this death.
But were there doctors, in December 2020, who were allowing visitors in to emergency rooms to visit people dying of COVID-19? Are there reputable doctors now arguing that such a policy would have been acceptable — or that the policy was unconscionable given what Fauci’s diaries say or what medical professionals do at the time?
Again, it’s impossible to argue there were not mistakes made. But government officials are not supposed to be threatened with jail time over mistakes. And the sheer lack of grace given over those mistakes seems a direct reflection of just how many people have forgotten what an insane, uncertain, jumbled, nearly impossible time the first twelve months of the pandemic truly were.
(It Was Donald J. Trump, in 2022)
The Rand Paul Conspiracy Theory
It was about a month ago that Vince and Tull tried and failed to record a section about Sen. Rand Paul’s obsession with Anthony Fauci. It didn’t work as a podcast, but we did add analysis and links to the show notes from that episode, for readers looking for background on Paul’s multi-year quest:
Anthony Fauci Needs Security Lessons From Teenagers
Vince referenced this excellent article from The Atlantic, in which Gal Beckerman writes, “But now that I’ve seen his diary, I’m convinced that my daughter has a more secure way of expressing her most private thoughts.”
And Beckerman too makes the case that Fauci’s language was at worst concerning, correctly noting:
What we know right now is that during months when the country shut down, when panic and death dominated, Fauci was spending part of his time cataloging his own growing fame with the excitement of a child star who had been asked to sign an autograph for the first time.
As Tull pointed out, there is some naivete at work here. But, it has to be said, there is some ego too.
Tull’s Money Quotes
On the romanticization of the Troubles:
There’s a whole generation of morons, Vincent — they are morons. They’ve been radicalized by TikTok, radicalized by social media. And they have no memory of how terrible life was on this island before the peace process.
On why we all need to offer grace when looking back on the pandemic:
We were in unprecedented times there. There was no blueprint, there was no road map, there was nothing you could look back on and say, “Well, we did this before, so let’s try something different.”
Vince’s Money Quote
On Mayo’s 11 straight All-Ireland Final losses before Sunday:
Even if you assume they were an underdog every time, the odds of losing eleven in a row just randomly are like one in three hundred. Which is mathematical proof, I think, that the curse is real, that everything happened. There’s absolutely no chance that that story was made up like in 1990 after they lost for a few years.
On why the Fauci ‘diaries’ may do more harm than good:
This is the problem with right wing media. They are going to pull the passage out that they want and the sentence six lines down gets cut from the Twitter post. And if it gets cut from the Twitter post, then it doesn’t make it into all the right wing websites and then it doesn’t make it onto Fox News.