Tramps, hoboes, bums, gentlemen of the road….I suppose it starts right there. The differences in perspectives. I always thought of the “tramps” of the highway as the good guys in the story .Sure , they might be poor, smelly and ragged .They might be down on their luck in some way .They might have been dispossessed of their lands, homes, jobs or families .Their human relationships might have gone sour ,or mental illness might have led them to the wandering life .There was a time when every city or town might have a few of these characters around who had become part of the social furniture.
These were the tramps.
Jack Kerouac’s writings in “Dharma Bums”, “Desolation Angels ” and “On the Road “, set a generation of us out hitch-hiking the roads of the world , exploring and experiencing a form of this “tramping” ; bumming lifts in cars and lorries across America , Europe and the Middle East. I did a bit of that in my youthful adventuring and lived to tell the tale. I did experience first -hand some of the flavour of a life on the road with a rucksack on my back .If truth be told i couldn’t wait to get at it and was rewarded variously with adventure, danger and also bouts of boredom .I didn’t have to do it as a full-time vocation , of course, but it left me with a pre-disposition to be on the side of the “tramp”. I experienced a flavour of his existence.
I suppose there are some of us who see the tramp or hobo as the villain of society.It is usually when their professed morality or Christianity fails them in action or in speech.
Certain of our public figures have let themselves and their humanity down badly by insulting their fellows with the curse of being “tramps” …or in some cases “thramps”. I . on the other hand see it as a badge of honour to side with the underdog or the dispossessed…but then I’ve always been a fan of folk and blues music and the scribblings of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, who put it like this in “ONLY A HOBO”…
As I was out walking on a corner one day
I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay
His face was all grounded in the cold sidewalk floor
And I guess he’d been there for the whole night or more
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
A blanket of newspaper covered his head
As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed
One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come
And a fistful of coins showed the money he bummed
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground
To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Leavin’ nobody to sing his sad song
Leavin’ nobody to carry him home
Only a hobo, but one more is gone
Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music
Unlike the old stereotype of the “hobo” or “tramp”, hateful terms methinks, there is an ever growing real problem of homelessness, which has swelled the ranks of the few scattered street drinkers. In the Capital, it is galling, but Belfast is beginning to slowly catch up on this indictment of all Society.
Beds for those with episodically acute psychiatric conditions, have been axed ruthlessly….Always has it been, that those with mental health challenges were over represented among these Marginalized and vulnerable ranks. How now, when despite the “Consolidation” of Welfare “reform”(that little euphemism cracks me up, Call a spade a Spade,Call an Axe an Axe), have beds for vulnerable people continued to be chopped with Tory Zeal. All our communities across the north of the country are suffering as a result of this mass lack of resources, and sadly, our unionist brethren have no party adverse to the dire consequences which ensue among these, some of the most vulnerable in society.
Listening to an Eoin McNamee play on the Radio a few weeks back, and a fictivious exchange in this crime drama between a PSNI detective, and his undercharge. They were reluctant to move people along selling flowers on the lisburn rd, as they were doubtless “illegal” immigrants. The Geist of the times we live in through the prism of Art. McNamee could afford his characters generosity, as cossetted writers are wont to do. The reality mostly does not concur with this pastoral tolerance of these homeless, desperate people. They walk on egg shells, doubtless sometimes actual one while rummaging in the discarded from the affluent outside the back of hotels and restaurants,- Perhaps our ex mayor could address the business community he has great ties with, and ask them to stop calling the peelers when they gather!
Any society is measured by how they treat the impoverished, and marginalised from many quarters, is a well worn adage, and yet we are powerless to fracture this Milton Friedman, Thatcherite agenda as we wait for Osbourn, and Westminster to decree our allowance. A united country will see diversity among the two main traditions, which Will help the fostering of a real politics, protective of the Unionist minority, the poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and those from the Philippines, the Chisese, Gypsies, and indigenous Irish Travelling Community among others who are here also, well below the Radar, and deeper still below the absolute poverty line, not the relative one.
The charming, wistfully reflective era for the plight of the average Itinerant as karoac causally referred to in his casual refections, are not however a cogent appraisal of the contemporary mess that is growing steadily like a social cancer in our Country north and such. Unity, then reneging on the Troika and their draconian blackmail, is the only way forward in Ireland. Diversity is our strength, and the many of those from a traditionally unionist background, are left without hope as the Unionists are Tory to a man, or woman.
Sometimes reminiscences’ over the old fashioned Hobo on his liberated merry way can be indulged in the artistic bubble removed from the realities of contemporary itinerancy. But you appraisal Jude, perhaps would do well with your worded skills, to promote this scouge higher up the Agenda than it is being placed. The increase in the dispondent, homeless and impoverished, in a land which,- “Cherishes all the Children of the Nation”, now where did I read that? 1916 Centenary of the rising, and we need to get our priorities right.
totally agree francis,
homelessness is a rising problem all over developed countries
https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/this-is-the-usa-uk-ireland/
say thanks to the bankers and our imperial masters
GRMA, for the link