Posted on 03/16/2006 4:40:06 PM PST by SJackson
For as long as I can remember, all I've ever heard about the Irish in general or the Irish in America or the meaning behind St. Patrick's Day was ... drink, drank, drunk. That's it. And I'm not alone.
Back in 2001, social activist Tom Hayden published a stunning book entitled "Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America"; it's a memoir-social history-travelogue combined.
In a chapter called "Drinking, Sexuality, and Assimilation," Hayden writes: "Drinking was the only Irish legacy passed along to me. You drink because you're Irish, I learned, which soon became you're Irish because you drink. Writ large, it was a coping mechanism for the Irish as a whole."
Much of Hayden's book sharply examines how the catastrophe of the Great Potato Famine of the 1800s led to the exodus of millions from Ireland. After more than 150 years, the episode of the Great Hunger is emerging from the shadows of history. It's a long-overdue subject for study.
Hayden sums up this epoch: "It was the Great Hunger that created Irish America, or at least Catholic Irish America, as 2 million people began a forced exodus in the 1840s that did not abate for decades. According to one famine expert, 'in no other famine in the world was the proportion of people killed as large as in the Irish famines of the 1840s.'"
The disastrous effects and aftereffects of the Great Hunger were never merely a matter of any so-called natural disaster. In every social, economic and political way, the starvation, humiliation and shaming of the Irish in the era of the potato blight derived from the cruel and unusual policies of the brutal English colonial powers who had grotesquely exploited the Irish for many centuries.
And in every revolting manner possible, those same English colonial masters found ways to profit from the suffering and misery that impelled millions of ill-kempt, starved and poverty-stricken Irish to board the verminous Famine ships (aptly dubbed "coffin ships"), thus inducing an Irish Diaspora.
And yet, as a rule, those of us who grew up in Irish-American families learned little (if anything) about our history of oppression and persecution. Hayden is eloquent on this subject as well:
"Experiencing amnesia as a coping mechanism is not unique to the Irish. To my surprise, in the immediate years after World War II many Jewish Americans experienced a similar reluctance to face the trauma of the Holocaust. And, according to the historian Charles Johnson, 'in the black communities for many years after the emancipation there was great shame and embarrassment about the memory of enslavement.'"
So to paraphrase novelist Mario "The Godfather" Puzo, I'd like to make you a drink that you can't refuse. Alcohol-free, that is. It's high time we celebrated the true essence of the Irish.
What's that, you ask? Well, this St. Patrick's Day we could start by celebrating the exquisite use of Nobel-winning Irish poet W.B. Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree" as a motif in Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby." And three cheers to Clint for making "Mo Cuishle" (Gaelic for "pulse of my heart" or "my darling; my blood") an internationally revered expression.
This year, in fact, I suggest that we inaugurate a new annual pattern: On St. Patrick's Day let's shine a light on a sample of Irish or Irish-American literary achievement. That's where you'll find the "deep heart's core" of the Irish persona. And if Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is too heavy for you, then you can opt for the Celtic wordplay and pugnacious ridicule on display in Pulitzer winner Maureen Dowd's twice-weekly New York Times columns.
If reading isn't your thing, then indulge in some music by the Chieftains or Mary Black. If you require visual splendor, you're in luck. There's a handful of "Riverdance" videos and DVDs, and about this mythopoeic dance phenomenon, Tom Hayden is also historically instructive: "The fabled Irish step dance was a legacy of post-Famine church sexual morality that insisted on limiting the body's movement to below the knees. 'Riverdance' unveiled and unbottled the sexual energy locked within the dance step, and freed an uninhibited dimension of the Irish soul."
Instead of yielding to the Leprechaun-soaked-in-ale stereotype, I'll binge on a slew of Irishman Jim Sheridan's best films ("My Left Foot," "In the Name of the Father," "The Boxer," "In America").
St. Patrick's Day should be about overcoming amnesia, not perpetuating it by getting drunk.
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I'll tell you a true story that is absolutely no reflection on your Grandmother but is about the way the Lace-Curtain Irish viewed Philadelphia at that time....
My Grand-Parents were both the children of immigrants from Ireland (Mayo and Donegal). They were born in Manhattan and Brooklyn of middle-class families.
During the mid twenties my Grandfather had to move the family to Philly for a job. Gramdma was pregnant with their third. A month before she was due she demanded that my Grandfather get her back to NYC so that she would never have to say that a child of hers was born in "shanty Philadelphia'.
Interesting! When my Grandmother married my Grandfather they settled in Phila. After my Mom was born (2nd of 3 kids) they moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn. Grandpa was a machinist with Con-Ed. They stayed there until the neighborhood went bad, in 1968.
They might have had the same impression of Philly as your Grandma, though no one ever mentioned it.
"The french were not Brits..."
Some are, in the province of Brittany. They speak Breton, a celtic tongue, as did the original Britons of olde.
The Brits are the same people refered to by the Romans as Picts.
Of course the Romanized Picts (Brits) were driven out of England by the Angles and Saxons, to become the Welch.
Note the C in Welch.
Yoo-hoo, you, could I be added? Thanks!
That the Science of Cartography Is Limited
Eavan Boland
—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
No problem - we had fun on the Paddy's Day thread, welcome to my ping!!
They vote for slimy Democrats over and over yet wonder why their middle class lifestyle seems in jeopardy. They color everything in victimization and are so thick headed, you can break a dozen Shillelaghs over their noggin and still not enlighten them.
unfortunately the most anit-american country in europe is Ireland, not France
We share some musical tastes.
I'm guessing you like Christy Moore also?
"The Boys of Bar na Shraidah(?)..(hunting for the wren)"
Dolores Keane, "Paddy's Green Shamrock Shore"
They sound like their liberal cousins on this side of The Atlantic!!
I resent that statement.
sorry it is a fact...
the French arent pro-terrorist, they just think the best way to deal with terrrorism is appeasement or in their words "to manage" the problem..The irish on the other hand actually identify with terrorists and their causes.
BTW when Hitler comitted suicide, Emon de Vallera went to the German embassy to express his condolences and proclaimed a day of mourning in Ireland
Because there are so many american of irish decent and so few of french decent, it is easy for us to identify with the irish as a culture.
Aren't you the same person supporting McCain for President?
What a LOAD!
never said that...i said McCain is hated here and that hatred blinds people to see that while on domestic (fiscal mostly)issues he is a liberal, he has been 100% on the WOT
happens to be the truth....the an irish crowd at a concert actually cheered when it was announced that Ronald Reagan died....the irish were awol during histories two greatest moral crisis, the fight against nazism and communism...dont bother telling me 60,000 irishmen joined the british army...that was the actions of individuals, not the whole of irish society any more than 10,000 canadians joining the US army and volunteering to go to Vietnam was a Canadian endoresement of that war.
How dare you!! I oppose the IRA!! The majority of people in this country oppose the IRA!! What do you mean we identify with terrorist causes?
And you use the inexcusable actions of Eamon De Valera as an example of how the rest of Ireland is - Dev was a Fianna Fail bastard!!!!
We are pro-American, we allow US military planes to refuel in Shannon Airport!!!
i am not anti-irish but I would like to point out the Ireland for all its popularity in the USA, is the most anti-american foreign policy nation in europe
""How dare you!! I oppose the IRA!! The majority of people in this country oppose the IRA!! What do you mean we identify with terrorist causes?""
Because of their treatment at the hands of the english over the centuries, most irish identify with the PLO and Hamas...just ask any israeli who has visited ireland and how theyve been welcomed
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