Let me be clear about something. I celebrate St. Patrick's every year. I love St. Patrick's Day. My family is Irish-American Catholic. Mom brought us up to be proud of our heritage (on her side, French and Irish). I celebrate the same way every year. I have a party for the people here who are like my family. I make boiled dinner and raise a glass to my maternal grandmother and my mother. I remember the people in my life I have loved who have passed. God knows I consume a little bit too much of everything from bread pudding to whiskey and have been known to belt out Molly Malone at the top of my lungs.
I still get pissy when, at 8:00am on a Monday I'm accosted by drunks on my way into work. Drunks who are slammed just because, you know, it's St. Patrick's Day.
And everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day.
***
My favorite moments in world history are bloody revolutions in service of freedom and self-determination. Being of aforementioned Irish and French descent, when a useless royal gets their head lopped off in the process I tend to buck up quite a bit. Throw in a little class warfare and I'm probably swooning a little bit.
There's neither enough guillotining nor class war in American History.
When I say these are my favorite moments in world history, what I mean is that they're the moment I find most fascinating and most horrifying. On the fascinating side of things, you have ostensibly ordinary people pushed to extraordinary measures. They're motivated by concrete concerns (food, shelter, the distribution of wealth) but also by, well, intangible ideals. The desire to determine your own destiny is no small thing.
On the horrifying side you have the wholesale slaughter of individuals. You have casualties of war. You have the systematic rape and prostitution of women and girls. You have the inevitable inequality that springs up in the wake of a movement based on lofty principles.
***
I've been feeling fussier about St. Patrick's Day than normal this year.
It could be a result of living two blocks down from a college and having drunk students wandering past my window starting at about 7:00 this morning and lasting, I'm sure, until unbelievably late tonight. Perhaps it's that I work right off of the parade route and traffic was already hopelessly snarled when I went into the office. It could be the drunk guy who tried to grab my ass while I waited to cross the street today. I'm almost positive that the sheer cultural incompetence belied by drinking green beer to celebrate a culture where people died with their mouths dyed green from eating grass because they were starving really gets me riled up.
Regardless of the reason, I spent most of today pretty pissed off.
***
In Ulysses James Joyce writes "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
You and me both, Joyce.
The study of history regularly makes me cry. On my bucket list is seeing how many different major historical sites I can visit without crying (to date, zero). It's not the dry name/date/diagram flanking maneuvers that I grew up with, but a snapshot of (for lack of a better way to put it) real human lives. I can't think of the French Revolution without imagining the poor old priest who was guillotined or the students who were gunned down in the June Rebellion.
The study of history is also something I just can't quit. It's an obsession in the same way that lock-picking, cryptography, and bee-keeping are obsessions. It's something at which I want need to excel. I (with complete, horrifying earnestness) believe that people who don't study the past are doomed to repeat it.
But regardless of the number of first-hand accounts I read about Gettysburg or Japanese Internment Camps in California, I can never seem to switch off the emotional response.
***
My current reading is called To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland.
I'm no slouch when it comes to Irish history. I'm at the very least conversant about the Easter Rebellion. I can tell you the importance of Irish monasteries in preserving the last vestiges of learning in Medieval Europe. I can explain the myriad injustices that underwrote the Great Famine.
I'd never read about the Irish slaves in Virginia and Barbados.
It's a hugely affecting book, a period of history of which I was peripherally aware without understanding the ramifications of Oliver (censored expletives) Cromwell's hatred for the Irish. It's the kind of book that requires a unicorn and puppy chaser at the end of it.
Realizing that there was a huge section of history with which I consider myself passingly familiar that I didn't realize existed was . . . I don't even have the words for it.
It is the reason why I'm so upset this St. Patrick's Day.
Let's discount for a minute the incredibly depressing history of Ireland itself and focus just on Irish in the United States (which, honestly, isn't much better). Immigration was largely a result of famine, entrenched xenophobia and mistrust of the Irish generally and Catholics specifically, which lead to things like No Irish Need Apply, which lead to grinding poverty.
Yeah, you get it.
Once you get your head around that, imagine that the same people came from a place where they were systematically exterminated over the course of hundreds of years. Where they were consistently denied basic human rights. Where they were reviled everywhere they went. Where somewhere between 12,000 and 60,000 of them were sold into slavery and we'll never know because they were sub-human and records weren't kept. Where 25% of their population starved to death while produce was shipped to England.
It's what frustrates me, what makes me crazy about this holiday. Yes, leprechauns and shamrocks and the Luck of the Irish. Those are all fantastic things to celebrate. God knows I laughed at a sign during my race on Saturday that read "Run Like Leprechauns Are Chasing You." But this holiday is about so much more than that. It's about keeping your history alive in a hostile country and remembering the people who passed who meant something to you. It's a day that should be about history at its most vibrant and alive.
Right. But it's not, is it? We're all Irish on St. Patrick's Day without understanding any of what we're celebrating, without so much as a hint of why some of us might get angry when we run into you shitfaced on the side of the street.
So today, go to a parade. Have a whiskey or a pint. See some Irish Dancers. Dance to some Flogging Molly. Sing Whiskey in the Jar. But while you're doing it maybe take a minute and raise one of those glasses to the men and women who are buried in unmarked graves in Barbados or who passed quietly as a result of famine.
And for Christ's sake. Stay away from green beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment