IRISH EYES HAVE A REASON TO SMILE

The South Side Irish Parade, which had degenerated over its thirty year history from a march around one block in my old neighborhood on Chicago’s south side into what the Chicago Tribune described as “a massive street party filled with drunken brawlers and underage drinkers,” was finally, mercifully suspended indefinitely by its organizers after an especially raucous 2009 rendition of this yearly spectacle. Faux Irish Americans, with or without the appropriate surnames but with a fuzzy, at best, notion of what lies behind their heritage, decried the decision to effectively end what had become little more than a massive debauch. Proud Irish-Americans, ashamed and appalled at what the celebration of their mother country’s patron saint had become, and the residents of the neighborhood in which this abomination took place annually on the Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day, thanked God that this seemingly endless source of embarrassment had finally been terminated.

The ostensible reason for suspending the Parade was overcrowding and lawlessness. Beverly/Morgan Park, the neighborhood that is bisected by Western Avenue, the street that forms the Parade’s route, is a quiet residential neighborhood, similar to many found throughout Chicago. It is far removed from downtown both geographically and in its sense of proportion. Downtown Chicago features tall buildings, wide streets, and spacious sidewalks. Beverly/Morgan Park features single family homes, narrow streets, and tight sidewalks. Even Western Avenue, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, is small by comparison to, say, State Street or Michigan Avenue downtown. But the crowds at the South Side Irish Parade rival, and often surpass, those at the downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The neighborhood and its infrastructure were never designed to handle the 300,000 revelers that descended on it for this year’s Parade. The results of such a massive influx of revelers were predictable—traffic, both vehicular and foot, was gridlocked. Restroom facilities were in short supply, with predictable consequences. The neighborhood, and those surrounding it, was effectively shut down for the entire day of the Parade.

Even worse than the overcrowding was the general lawlessness that prevails on the day of the Parade. Perhaps lawlessness is too strong a word; no one gets killed, there aren’t any holdups or muggings per se, and people in the neighborhood are not physically threatened unless they willingly participate in one of the fights that break out along and adjoining the Parade’s route. But, this year, a not atypical year, several police officers were assaulted, local emergency rooms were occupied with minor injuries, such as broken teeth and concussions, and fifty three arrests were made, mostly for disorderly conduct, battery, public drinking, and underage drinking. At a church brunch the week following this year’s Parade, my wife and I were told by several residents of my old neighborhood tales of revelers’, many apparently underage, passing out on neighborhood front yards, kids’, and adults’, urinating, vomiting, or worse, in residents’ bushes or right out on their lawns, fights breaking out on the street or the sidewalk directly in front of people’s homes, and kids’ simply walking into fenced backyards and walking off with coolers filled with beer pop, and other essentials for the family picnics and gatherings that are a regular feature of what has become known as “Parade Day” in the neighborhood. Please be aware that Beverly/Morgan Park is not a prudish neighborhood that looks askance at drinking per se; its residents are, er, known to take a drink on occasion and beer is always a prominent, expected, and much indulged in feature at most family gatherings. The west side of Western Avenue (The east side of the street, in one of the most ironic manifestations of home rule in the history of municipal governance, is dry.) is probably more densely packed with bars and taverns than any neighborhood in the city. But the general consensus of neighborhood residents is that the Parade was descending deeper into debauchery each year and that they had simply had enough. The effective cancellation of the Parade was met with heavy sighs of relief, if not cheers, by the residents of Beverly/Morgan Park who have had to put up with the raucous, crude, and outright disgusting behavior, largely of outsiders, for years now.


There is something larger, though, that makes the end of the South Side Irish Parade such a happy outcome for my fellow Irish-Americans, and true South Side Irish, and it has to do with the way we have come to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, and our “Irishness,” in this country.

One reveler at the Parade, who hailed from Mt. Greenwood, a neighborhood just west of Beverly/Morgan Park, and at least as Irish-American, when told that organizers were considering canceling the Parade, stated, as quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, “I know some people complain about the drinking, but it’s a great celebration of being Irish. That’s what it’s all about.” Such woefully misinformed sentiments could not more perfectly encapsulate the problem manifested and symbolized by the Parade. At its beginnings some thirty years ago, the Parade was indeed a great celebration of being Irish, with a group of kids and their parents, led by a boy dressed as St. Patrick, marching around the block, dressed in their Celtic finery and pulling, or riding in, wagons festooned with green, orange, and white. But now the Parade has degenerated into a great celebration not of being Irish but of being a jackass. Television coverage and newspaper pictures of the Parade, while occasionally showing the pipe bands or the floats filled with waving, dancing children, feature primarily pictures of beer addled, loutish kids and, even more sadly, adults who should know better, hoisting beer cans, chugging beers, wearing idiotic hats designed to comically facilitate drinking, and sporting tee-shirts with inane phrases such as “I like beer.” Very clever.

None of these activities surrounding the parade requires any effort, exertion, or any activity of which one could justly be proud. As my father, as Irish-American as anyone but who wisely refrained from wearing his ethnicity on his sleeve, used to tell me, “Anyone can act like an a—hole. It doesn’t take any special talent and only shows people only one thing: that you’re an a—hole.” He usually made this observation while observing his fellow Irish-Americans, including his youngest son, reveling in what came to be misunderstood, even years ago, their “Irishness.” As an Irish-American who came from nothing, worked hard, provided a better future for his kids, and made the mother country proud, the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day had come to sicken him. Though, in my youth, I shrugged off his observations as those of a guy who simply didn’t understand how to have a good time or how to be Irish (as if I somehow knew either better than he), as I have grown older, raised my own family, and become more aware of my Irish heritage and what constitutes true pride and achievement, I understand the wisdom of his observations. They come to mind whenever I am confronted with images of a group of “Irishmen” celebrating their “Irishness” in what has become the accepted American way of manifesting what they falsely regard as Celtic culture.

The South Side Irish Parade had become merely the most glaring example of the defamation of the greatness of Ireland that has ironically come to constitute my ethnic group’s demonstration of its ethnic “pride.” What these revelers do not seem to understand, or willfully choose to ignore, is that being Irish-American and celebrating one’s Irishness does not mean getting drunk and acting like an idiot. While the stereotypical Irish-American is an earnest but besotted sort, drinking well beyond his limits at night and battling the shakes with Jameson’s in the morning before heading off to his blue collar job on the city payroll, the typical Irish-American is, or at least should be, nothing of the sort. The typical Irish-American is a hardworking, God-fearing, church-going family man (or woman) who works hard (often, but not always, at a blue collar job with the city), supports his family, and is proud of his old country but damn happy to be living on this side of the Atlantic. The Irish-American hero is not the besotted, obstreperous drunk bragging of the number of beers he had last night and his gargantuan hangover today. The Irish-American heroes are people like John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Gene Kelly, Georgia O’Keefe, Pat O’Brien, Jimmy Cagney, Michael Flatley, Herb Kelleher, Jack Ford, William Brennan, Patrick Fitzgerald, Fulton, Sheen, Eugene O’Neill, Tom Clancy, Jimmy Breslin, Tim Russert, Bill Buckley, John Barry, Cardinal O’Connor, Audie Murphy, George M. Cohan, Bing Crosby, Richard J. Daley, Jack Dempsey, Louis Sullivan, and, yes, Dick Quinn and the millions like him who, though not recorded in history, worked hard, behaved like gentlemen, and realized the American dream. Many, if not most, of the aforementioned enjoyed or enjoy a drink now and then, but they didn’t achieve what they achieved by equating the degree of their Irishness with the prodigiousness of their alcohol consumption.

It is especially ironic that we Irish-Americans have come to identify ourselves by the very activity that has wreaked such havoc on our mother country. As a straight from central casting Irish-American priest in my old neighborhood often said in his sermons some thirty years ago, before the Irish resurgence that has caused some to dub it the “Celtic Tiger,” (I will have to paraphrase here because thirty years clouds the memory), it is fashionable to argue that the British ruined Ireland, but, while the British certainly did their part, it wasn’t the British who ruined Ireland; it was the bottle that ruined Ireland. Yet, in our country, the descendants of Irish immigrants, many of whom came here to escape the tyranny of both the British and the bottle, equate the very thing that had so decimated their mother country with their ethnic identity. This is beyond strange; it is a perversion of Irish pride and identity.


One final irony of the St. Patrick’s Day is that St. Patrick himself, who was probably Welsh, may have been French, but definitely was not Irish, was an abstemious, serious, some might even say stern man who would have had no part of the silliness and shallowness that has come to characterize his feast day. I can’t put it any better than did Father Dan Brandt of Nativity of Our Lord Parish in Bridgeport, the ancestral parish of the Daley family, who said “I think St. Patrick would be rolling over in his grave if he saw the way his feast day was being bastardized.” One should remind the revelers on St. Patrick’s Day and at the South Side Irish Parade that the holiday they are ostensibly celebrating is SAINT Patrick’s Day, a day on the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. While no one expects the day to be celebrated strictly with fasting, prayer, and contemplation, would it hurt to at least pay some small tribute to the true nature of the holiday? Going to Mass on St. Patrick’s Day, and on the day of the Parade (The Parade did take place on Sunday, after all!), was once a big part of these annual celebrations, and remains a small part of both. But if even a quarter of the Parade attendees attended the special pre-Parade Mass at St. Cajetan, Morgan Park’s largest and most prominent parish, every parish in the neighborhood, and on the whole south side of Chicago, would have to have a special Mass to accommodate the crowds. That, of course, has never happened. Getting into any Mass on Parade morning, even the special pre-Parade Mass at St. Cajetan, is no problem. Getting into one of the bars on Western Avenue, however, takes a great deal of effort.


The residents of Beverly/Morgan Park, and all proud Irish-Americans, are not shedding tears at the passing of the South Side Irish Parade. We have finally made a small step toward not having to endure the embarrassment of the annual display of foolish, sloppy, shameless drunkenness that the Parade had become. And perhaps the day will come when we no longer have to explain to people that such displays of manifest ignorance and irresponsibility are not proper reflections of either our neighborhood or our Irish-American heritage.