The Salon Interview Gabriel Byrne
Celtic kitsch
The new Dublin
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BY BOB CALLAHAN | As an Irish-American writer concerned for the peculiarities of my own heritage, I feel an ancient, seasonal need to declare once again that I am repulsed by the shenanigans that go on in America, in the name of the Irish, on St. Patrick's Day. To paraphrase the great Baltimore Irishman H.L. Mencken -- just because you have discovered a million cowboys willing to throw up on their shoes in the name of some distant and foreign patron saint doesn't mean you have discovered an actual culture. And how did this madness get started in the first place? In America, it seems to go back to what I am almost reluctant to call "our monkey problem." A century or so ago, in most major American urban centers, your average newly arrived Hibernian hod carrier might very well have awakened to find one of his next-door neighbors being lampooned in the morning newspaper as a small, green, pipe-smoking and bewhiskered monkey. That of course was a hundred years ago. Today, the great granddaughter or grandson of that very same hod carrier -- now, possibly, a legal counsel down at the local corporation -- could still wake up to find the very same monkey painted on the face of a St. Patrick's Day marcher; or far more commonly, glaring back at her from a row of greeting cards down at the local stationery store. Either climbing up the hill to political power in this country or meeting themselves again on the decline, the Irish in America have found that the monkey on the back of their experience in this country has remained more or less constant over time. Although the prototype can be traced back to a whole army of ghouls and sprites at the dawn of Irish history, the famous Irish monkey of record -- the leprechaun, to give him his generic name -- seems to have been largely an American invention. His origins are understandable enough. He begins to appear in our literature with some frequency back in the 1870s. At some point during that decade, the ideas of Charles Darwin arrived in New York Harbor almost simultaneously with about 10,000 starving immigrants from the peat bogs of central Ireland -- a coincidence observed rather shrewdly by at least one enterprising young Yankee newspaper editor. In no time at all, Irish leprechaun cartoons -- featuring a rather friendly looking baboon with whiskers all over his face and a shovel in his hand -- could be found on newsstands all across the USA. After the Native American, and about the same time as the black African, the new Irish in America also found themselves cast as figures of comic relief. To this very day, to be Irish in America is to be regarded as if you live certain important aspects of your life while inside the body of a cartoon. For all ethnic Americans who've been assigned a similar fate, this is no easy role to play. In addition to our monkey problem, Irish-Americans have also inherited the very tricky business of the St. Patrick's Day Parade. St. Paddy's Day probably originated as some kind of prehistoric Celtic ritual, but it has passed into America as a reflection of the living history of British divide-and-conquer imperialism in Ireland. Religious differences have long functioned in Ireland much as race does in the United States. It makes no more sense to discriminate against people because of their religious practices than it does because of the color of their faces, yet there are of course important social and economic reasons why these differences continue to be exploited all around the world. In America, the St. Patrick's Day Parade was first introduced as a kind of magic shield behind which the Catholic Irish mustered up the social courage to stand up and be counted in what was then -- in terms of the controlling institutions at least -- still very much a bigoted and defiant Protestant nation. The first generation of parades thus had an integrity that has more or less been lost today. Indeed, the sight of parade officials today bashing certain marchers because they are gay can only be considered a historically blind and hideous form of irony. To understand those first parades, imagine, if you will, an entire early army of largely homeless European peasants as they line up in the streets of New York or Savannah, Ga., or San Francisco, in the frightening dawn of, say, 1854. You would know these people on sight, for they might have been street people right out of the pages of Charles Dickens. A generation of massive street brawlers. They were also political revolutionaries -- part of a worldwide army of the underclass who just then had started to rise. Around the world they would speak many languages. In America, you would know them by the roar of their brogues. You see, in those days the Irish were not considered White Men either. Color them Kelly green. In those days, the Irish would have to be considered founding members of the original rainbow coalition. In the confusion of American history, it also seems important to point out that the first Irish to have an impact on the New World were Orangemen, not Roman Catholics. These were men and women of Northern Irish Protestant stock rushing into the New World to escape the dictates of a Puritan English monarchy. Orange was once the color of revolution as well. By the end of the 17th century, the strength behind the democratic movement in both Ireland and America came from the Protestant, not the Catholic Irish, community. When the forces of democracy were crushed in Ireland and a rebel organization called the United Irishman splintered into so many pieces, and its largely Protestant leadership was banished into exile, some of the best of those leaders picked up their rifles and headed for the American wilderness. Some of those first Irish Protestants found a home among the Yankee power brokers of the Eastern seaboard, but the more restless followed the Appalachian trail west, southwest, past the old Indian frontiers. Indeed, some direct descendants of these frontier people can still be found in the hollers and back vales of those mountains to this very day. It is once again a matter of blind historic irony to note that some of these descendants today provide core support for many of the more right-wing, fundamentalist movements that have violently attempted to purge the South of the influence of later immigrant groups like the Jews, the Catholic Irish and of course those African-Americans who were dragged to these shores in chains. Ian Paisley, for example, the leading Protestant demagogue of contemporary Northern Ireland, took his preaching degree from Bob Jones University in the Carolinas. When Paisley visits the South these days -- as he has done a number of times during the past decade to raise money -- the people he finds there, he is fond of saying, are not a whole lot different from the people he left behind back in Antrim. This is not Paisley metaphor. The preacher is talking here of actual kin. N E X T+P A G E: American culture's green heart
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