BUT YOU CAN STILL WISH ME A HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY

3/17/11

Since I don’t, thank God and St. Patrick himself, have the South Side Irish Parade to kick around any more, I may as well take the opportunity to tee off on the whole day, or at least the way we celebrate it in this country.

Why, oh why, have we decided, as a collective “culture,” that a day, a holy day originally designated to honor a holy, courageous and somewhat stern and austere man, became an excuse to make drunken idiots out of ourselves? And why, by extension, have we come to equate being Irish and celebrating our Irishness with getting drunk? Just listen and watch the advertising, look at all the “wink wink” “have a great St. Paddy’s Day” wishes, and just observe Western Avenue and its consanguineous Irish-American thoroughfares throughout the country to learn that we Irish, and Irish Americans, are just a pack of purblind and potvaliant palookas packing away pints in the puerile pursuit of a pathetic manifestation of patriotism for the auld sod. It was summed up well in WBBM Newsradio 78’s coverage of last Saturday’s (last Saturday’s! Can you imagine the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Chicago taking place on March 12 when Richard J. Daley was mayor? Saints preserve us!) St. Patrick’s Day Parade when the interviewer asked a parade observer what she was going to do after the parade. This deep thinking suburbanite laughingly proclaimed that she was going to be “a little Irish” after the parade. The interviewer chuckled “We can only imagine what that means!” (Wink, wink) Thanks a lot.

As my Irish-American father used to remind me on the numerous opportunities for such admonition I presented him in the wastrel years of my youth, “It doesn’t take any special talent or ability to be a drunken a—hole.” But people have been conditioned, especially on this day, to think that being a drunken a—hole is the only ability my people have developed We don’t consider the legions of ordinary Irish people who have worked hard to raise their families, follow their God, and make their country the Celtic Tiger it once was and could quickly become again. We don’t remember the millions of Irish who left that land to dig the canals, build the railroads, work in the stockyards, and participate in our country’s peculiar form of self-government so that their kids could have a better life than the old country could afford them. We don’t think of (love or hate anybody on this list, you have to admit they were or are all people of accomplishment and intellect who were not most notable for the number of shots and beers they could consumer before, or after regurgitating in the bathroom, if they are lucky enough to make it, of a watering hole on Western Avenue) Dick Daley, Joe Kennedy, Jim Tyree, Eugene O’Neil, Jimmy Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Maureen O’Hara, Eamon DeValera, Michael Collins, St. Brendan, St. Bridget, Art Carney, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gene Kelly, Andrew Jackson, Sister Monica O'Finnegan, Ronald Reagan, Henry Ford, Tom Monaghan, Jack Ford, Walt Disney, Cyrus McCormick, Robert Fulton, William Brennan, Tip O’Neil, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James T. Farrell, Cardinal O’Connor, James Joyce, Edwin O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Father Michael O’Keefe, Dick Quinn, Jimmy Breslin, Ben Hogan, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, Audie Murphy, George M. Cohan, Rosemary Clooney, George Clooney, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or even St. Patrick himself on this day. Instead, we celebrate the Irish and pseudo-Irish whose most salient characteristics are a self-imagined immense capacity for alcohol and an utter lack of shame.

It would be nice to think that the crude portrayal of the Irish and Irish-Americans to which we are especially subjected on this holy day is an insidious media plot perpetrated by outsiders on the noble Celts on both sides of the Atlantic. But when I hear such protestations, I remember a homily delivered by one of my favorite priests, Father Gallagher, who could have come right out of central casting, many years ago at Sacred Heart when I was still young and doing my part to contribute to the negative stereotype that I so heartily protest today. He said that while the Irish like to blame the British for all their problems, we have to admit that it wasn’t only the British who wreaked such havoc on Ireland; the bottle had its role to play as well. Similarly, the asinine image of the Irish portrayed in the popular culture has at least some of its roots in the behavior of many Irish-Americans, disturbingly, of late, among the younger generations, who have bought into the scurrilous notion that to be Irish is to be a besotted bozo. One would think that, with all that is going on in Ireland right now economically and politically, most Irish-Americans would at least make some effort to be aware of the current travails of the auld sod: inter alia, the efforts of Fine Gael and Labor to form a viable government, the impact of the worldwide financial crisis on the only recently emergent Ireland, and the European pressure to have Ireland ditch one of its most business friendly attributes, the 12.5% corporate tax rate that has attracted so much investment to the Emerald Isle. (Perhaps I digress.) But, no, many of our compatriots just ask for another Guinness, or Old Style, sing about how Ireland must be heaven because that’s where mother was born, and start effecting fake brogues that increase in intensity in direct proportion to the volume of alcohol they pour down their never closed gullets.

I am proud to be Irish-American, happy to have roots in the old country but delighted that my ancestors made the decision to get on the boat and come over here. As a people, we have contributed mightily to this country and to the old country. We have a lot of which to be proud. Why do we, and America and perhaps the world insist on celebrating the things of which we should be ashamed?