MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: Travel Journal – No. 1

One typical headline from the Irish Daily Mirron in 2024 is shown above.

Travel, if one is fortunate to be able to do it, is liberating, humbling, informing. You can learn a great deal about your own country, your own little corner of the world, by leaving it for a while.

It’s simply good to travel to see how other people live.

As the author and traveler Mark Twain famously said:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

So, I’m away. On travel. Seeing the world. Wandering. Trying at an advancing age to learn something new, experience something different, escape my world that frequently feels more foreign than any new place I’ve ever been.

And what better place to come for a fresh perspective but Ireland, clothed in all that history can teach us, the land, as Nora Roberts wrote:

… of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.

Walking in the heart of Dublin we (almost) literally stumbled upon the Bank of Ireland’s Cultural and Heritage Center’s Seamus Heaney exhibition. It was as marvelous as the poet’s life and work.

Heaney, the fourth Irish Nobel Prize winner, is revered in the land of poets and legends, and for good reason:

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave,

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

But Ireland isn’t all mere poetry and misty bog.

I asked a Dublin taxi driver, who said he was headed for a round of golf after dropping us at the train station, what his mates made of “our man Trump showing up for the recent Irish Open golf tournament?”

“Not much,” was his uncharacteristically short response.

But then he elaborated just a bit:

“I drive Americans every day,” he said, “and I have yet to find a single one who likes the guy.”

Score a point for discerning American travelers to Ireland.

At dinner we sat near two young women, both working in health care, who eagerly gave us advice and recommendations about a visit to Galway where both were born. Of course, the conversation eventually turned to American politics.

Utterly flabbergasted was their reaction to what has happened on our side of the Atlantic. One of the young women repeated three times that she simply could not believe that Americans had voted for him … twice. It’s baffling to them.

Trump was on the front page of the Irish Times Friday morning shown welcoming the world’s Number One Communist to a state visit at the White House, complete with the red carpet and tech bros in attendance at the dinner. Remarkably the photographer captured Melinia with her eyes closed, perhaps dreaming about finishing up that big ballroom.

Trump’s first visit with new British prime minister Andy Burnham was also big news in Europe with most accounts saying the easy going man from Manchester had acquitted himself well face-to-face with the Lyin’ King who had just left the UN podium after threatening – again – to destroy Iran.

The Guardian’s Emma Brockes said, “The PM’s shiny newness could explain the easy ride he got this time. But who would dare predict the ever-shifting weather in the president’s head?”

Other factors in play: it seems ridiculous to mention, but knowing how superficial Trump is, it seems to me that Burnham’s extremely impressive coiffure for a man of his age – which appears to exist without augmentation – won’t have been missed by a US president who spends an awful lot of time on his hair.

The Irish have a word for everything, or maybe two or three. The word most easily employed with regard to Trump is a “Gobshite,” a definite cut below an “Eejet.”

One definition of Gobshite seems to comfortably cover the president’s personality rather completely: “a mean and contemptible person, especially a braggart, a stupid and incompetent person.”

The all-encompassing term often also refers to a person of uncommonly bad judgment.

The term was once considered taboo, but so few words truly fit the moment so it works now in polite company. By the way, “a shower of gobshites” is about as good a description of the totality of Trump’s government as we’re likely to get. Use it wisely.

While I’m trying not to spend too much time on American politics while in Europe – unlike the locals – it’s impossible not to miss the utter contempt many Europeans now feel for the United States and it’s “leader.”

The best example may be the subtle dissing of Donald Trump by the president of the Irish Republic, Catherine Connelly. Connelly, the former mayor of Galway, was a surprise victor in the presidential election in 2025. She’s a former clinical psychologist and a barrister. Both may help her understand Trump, and it seems clear she gets him.

In any event, it fell to Connelly to present Trump with a gift during his recent visit to Ireland and she found the perfect thing – a big, serious book.

As Ronan McGreevy wrote in the Irish Times:

US President Donald Trump is not known as a big reader. He says he prefers to digest things through bullet points. So just why did President Catherine Connelly give him as obscure medieval text on his visit to Dublin?

The book, six decades in the making, is a new edition of the Voyage of St. Brendan, an important but obscure, originally Latin text, that is thought to describe the great navigators seven-year voyage to what he called “the Isle of the Blessed.” Some believe that during his travels Brendan reached North America. Maybe not, but it’s a good story.

The new addition was launched last week in Ireland at an academic conference, just the kind of history and scholarship for which the American president has such deep respect.

McGreevy quotes a scholar of Celtic studies, David Shifter, as saying of the gift, “My first reaction was: Wow, are you serious?”

Why had Connelly presented this book in particular?

Shifter believes the book may be a “subtle form of trolling” as the island of whales in the Voyage of St. Brendan is often taken as a reference to Greenland.

The book is also set in “an era when the Irish were a people of departure,” perhaps a reference – lost on Trump, of course – to his broad and often brutal immigration crackdown.

You can be sure Trump didn’t know what he was receiving, Perhaps a young, blonde aide can explain it to him.

My travels help convince me anew that while Europeans deeply regret what has happened to a United States that they once relied upon as a (mostly) stable source of (mostly) common sense, they are also just profoundly tired of the nonsense, the chaos and the corruption that has engulfed American politics over the last decade.

Donald Trump has done so much damage in so many ways it will take years to measure and, one hopes, repair the ragged edges of American democracy. As much as many of us want it to start on election day in November, so many of America’s friends in Europe want it to begin there, as well.

And like so many of us they struggle to explain why a once great nation, with all its flaws and contradictions, fell into the tiny, corrupt hands of demagogue who is better recognized for what he is outside of the United States than he is by those who helped him launch and sustain his mission of destruction.

Baffling.