(no subject)
I worked late today, though not as late as I could've. Someone else needed the hours more. They always do.
No whiskey at home, nor Guinness nor Murphy's nor anything truly appropriate for drinking. St. Patrick's Day has the bad luck to fall right smack in the middle of the Lenten season, and I've given up meat entirely for Lent. So no corned beef and cabbage.
Work doesn't like it when I reject dress code entirely. Seen someone get fired for it. A little antsy about it. So no wearin o' the green.
All I've got today to show for being Irish are a few songs I've got. I got them off a CD from an old friend who has actually been to Ireland. I've never been. I'm not even mostly Irish. I'm half French Canadian, if Leslie's genealogy is to be believed. My surname counts for only a quarter of my ancestral heritage, at most. All the Irish I've pretended to be has been 75% bullshit.
So I listen to the songs, like I always have. They came from Ireland, and it says 'Irish Drinking Songs' right on the CD cover, so it's got to be 100% authentic native fucking IRISH, right?
Wrong. My favorite song on the album, 'The Molly Maguires', is about a loose organization of Irish coal miners in, of all places, Pennsylvania, who were accused of killing the mine owners in terrorist acts. 17 of them were accused of murder, their guilt proven in a court bought and paid for by the mining company, executed by a company-owned gallows. I've been to the town where they were allegedly based in. I've seen the underground prison cells they were kept in.
Another, 'The Fields of Athenry', is about a man convicted of stealing his neighbor's corn to feed his children. He's sent to Bodney Bay- the British penal colony in Australia.
'Spancil Hill'- set in California. Same for 'Long Way from Clare to Here'. The only song which references contemporary Ireland is 'Dublin in the Rare Ould Times,' which, as you might expect, is not so much about Dublin that is as much as it is mourning the passing of Dublin that was.
The Irish are called superstitious- the Internet abounds with folkways unique to the Irish. A superstition is really just a tradition that we've forgotten the reason for. Just pretending to follow a tradition. Even these 'traditional' Irish ballads turn out to date only to the 1960s and 1970s or so.
But you know-- a fair quarter of Ireland was destroyed by the Famine, a million dead and a million out of the country for other shores, mostly the U.S. It's often said now that there's more Irish in Boston than there is in Dublin. It's a bit of a joke, it is- Dublin's urban area has 500,000 citizens and 83% of them are Irish, while Boston has 600,000 citizens and only 15.8% of them identify as Irish. It's a bit less of a joke if you consider Dublin's metro area, which only contains 1.5 million total to Boston's nearly 6 million.
So now Ireland is going through a bit of an economic revival, the IRA is fragmenting and perhaps breaking up entirely, and nothing is the way it was. The Irish in Ireland, who have lived the Troubles down, rarely have a care for stirring up that sleeping dog, while the Irish in America, largely insulated from famine or political oppression, are eager to embrace anything and everything Irish.
It may change in the future, but this St. Patrick's Day, as far as I'm concerned, all us Irish are only playing at being Irish. Nobody remembers exactly what being Irish was like, and so we're making up the rest as we go. Which, it seems to me, is pretty damn Irish.
No whiskey at home, nor Guinness nor Murphy's nor anything truly appropriate for drinking. St. Patrick's Day has the bad luck to fall right smack in the middle of the Lenten season, and I've given up meat entirely for Lent. So no corned beef and cabbage.
Work doesn't like it when I reject dress code entirely. Seen someone get fired for it. A little antsy about it. So no wearin o' the green.
All I've got today to show for being Irish are a few songs I've got. I got them off a CD from an old friend who has actually been to Ireland. I've never been. I'm not even mostly Irish. I'm half French Canadian, if Leslie's genealogy is to be believed. My surname counts for only a quarter of my ancestral heritage, at most. All the Irish I've pretended to be has been 75% bullshit.
So I listen to the songs, like I always have. They came from Ireland, and it says 'Irish Drinking Songs' right on the CD cover, so it's got to be 100% authentic native fucking IRISH, right?
Wrong. My favorite song on the album, 'The Molly Maguires', is about a loose organization of Irish coal miners in, of all places, Pennsylvania, who were accused of killing the mine owners in terrorist acts. 17 of them were accused of murder, their guilt proven in a court bought and paid for by the mining company, executed by a company-owned gallows. I've been to the town where they were allegedly based in. I've seen the underground prison cells they were kept in.
Another, 'The Fields of Athenry', is about a man convicted of stealing his neighbor's corn to feed his children. He's sent to Bodney Bay- the British penal colony in Australia.
'Spancil Hill'- set in California. Same for 'Long Way from Clare to Here'. The only song which references contemporary Ireland is 'Dublin in the Rare Ould Times,' which, as you might expect, is not so much about Dublin that is as much as it is mourning the passing of Dublin that was.
The Irish are called superstitious- the Internet abounds with folkways unique to the Irish. A superstition is really just a tradition that we've forgotten the reason for. Just pretending to follow a tradition. Even these 'traditional' Irish ballads turn out to date only to the 1960s and 1970s or so.
But you know-- a fair quarter of Ireland was destroyed by the Famine, a million dead and a million out of the country for other shores, mostly the U.S. It's often said now that there's more Irish in Boston than there is in Dublin. It's a bit of a joke, it is- Dublin's urban area has 500,000 citizens and 83% of them are Irish, while Boston has 600,000 citizens and only 15.8% of them identify as Irish. It's a bit less of a joke if you consider Dublin's metro area, which only contains 1.5 million total to Boston's nearly 6 million.
So now Ireland is going through a bit of an economic revival, the IRA is fragmenting and perhaps breaking up entirely, and nothing is the way it was. The Irish in Ireland, who have lived the Troubles down, rarely have a care for stirring up that sleeping dog, while the Irish in America, largely insulated from famine or political oppression, are eager to embrace anything and everything Irish.
It may change in the future, but this St. Patrick's Day, as far as I'm concerned, all us Irish are only playing at being Irish. Nobody remembers exactly what being Irish was like, and so we're making up the rest as we go. Which, it seems to me, is pretty damn Irish.