A mesolibertarian voice.
What is a mesolibertarian? Not a paleo or a neo. The traditional principled kind. notanempire@aol.nospamcom (you know what to do with the "no spam")
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Monday, March 17, 2003
WEARIN’ DOWN THE GREEN: A ST. PATRICK’S DAY “APPRECIATION” OF THE IRISH-AMERICANS AND OUR OVERLOOKED “CONTRIBUTIONS” TO AMERICA
[*Warning to the humor-impaired and ethnically hypersensitive, DO NOT READ FURTHER!! The author is actually obscenely proud of his Gaelic heritage (not that he did anything to earn it), thinks British misrule in Ireland was horrible and enabled the Famine, thinks Sinn Fein and the worthy Congressman Peter King (please vote for him) have articulated real grievances, regards the Rev. Ian Paisley as a first-rate scumbag, and admires greatly (most of) the priests that educated him. He also thinks the police and other emergency security civil servants are underpaid folks of actual or potential heroism who put their life out on the line for the average person. A nice little reflection on Irish libertarians is available on Gene Healy's blog today.]
Others have a nationality. The Irish and Jews have a psychosis. -- Dead Irish writer, nationalist, and internationally renowned drunk Brendan Behan, sagely explaining more than one world trouble spot in a single epigram.
Few realize how many Irish contributions to American life there are. St. Patrick’s Day allows us to recall them. They go well beyond President John F. Kennedy, best known to the current generation for being killed, or Bing Crosby, best known to the same generation for being dead.
I am qualified to speak. My ancestors migrated to these shores from the Emerald Isle circa 1847 during the era of the potato famine. Between 1845 and 1850 as many as 2 million Irish died or emigrated as a result of a recurrent blight that killed large portions of each year’s potato crop. Finally in 1850 after 5 years of unprecedented catastrophe, a committee of leading Irish agronomists studied the problem and solved it by arguing that “sure’n after 5 years we might start growin’ and eatin’ somethin’ else.” To which the nationalist Ireland Youth movement further added the phrase, “And if it weren’t for the damned English we would have thought o’ that earlier.”
Some background. The original language of St. Patrick-land, by the way, is Irish Gaelic and not the familiar hi-brow classy English of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. The original language disappeared because its pronunciation and spelling bear no logical relation to . . . anything.
For example, in that language my name, Matthew Hogan, is spelled as follows:
Mathghamhainneachaigh O-Ni hOgaimhbheanneachainne
Which two words are pronounced roughly as follows: “Muh Hoy”. However if the word is used as a possessive as in “Matthew Hogan’s” it is pronounced “Vuh Vay”). In the Donegal county dialect the name is pronounced Deh Vay because Mathghamhainneachaigh is spelled Mhathghamhaineachghaighe there, and most accurately means “devoted to Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and of the Rosary.” In fact, all Gaelic words mean some variation of that.
Today it is standard to refer to the old language simply as “Irish.” This is more authentic. It seems to be, though in authentic Irish, the word for “Irish” is “Gaelic”. The word for an Irish native is “Gael” and to sharply distinguish them from foreigners, the word for “foreigner” is “Gall”.
Add to the above the fact that in Gaelic, the city name Dublin is pronounced “Blaakleeah” and sometimes “Mlaakleea” and even “Vlakleea”, conceivably all in the same sentence (true: I’m not just satiring here), and we see why the Irish only pretend to want to preserve the ancient tongue.
The only reason they want the language to continue is for politics, in order to keep Ireland’s leading parties names in Gaelic, even when speaking English. This is not done out of “nationalism”, but out of “embarrassment”. The leading Irish parties are the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. The first means “The Tribe of Gaels” and the second means “Warriors of Fate”. Now if your country had party names that in plain English sound like something that should be spray-painted on an underpass by acne-faced teenagers claiming “territory”, you’d keep it to yourself. So Gaelic lives.
Still more background.The Irish and their language derive from the larger ethnic group called Celtic. This is pronounced “Keltic,” as with a hard “c”, except when they are playing basketball. The word Celtic comes from “Kaltoi” an Indo-European root word meaning “people who cannot tan”.
The Celts’ greatest accomplishments include:
1) ruling half of Europe for a millennium while leaving behind no written or architectural record,
2) developing Halloween’s decorations, and
3) being regularly slaughtered by the Roman and British empires respectively.
Contributions to America Now back to our main St. Patrick’s Day theme: Irish contributions to America. Ireland has sent countless emigrants to America who upon arrival chose to become immigrants. They and their progeny have shaped America and its institutions in many ways that are still not fully appreciated. Here I consider just a few overlooked legacies.
The least appreciated of this immigrant legacy may be municipal corruption. Without the Irish, Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed, and the Pendergast machine of Kansas City that produced Harry S Truman would have been nowhere. Nepotism in police and public service recruitment and promotion would be far harder to find. Civil service in cities like New York would have much too fair personnel practices and far fewer people would be upset by firemen’s statues with Negroid features. And didn’t Mayor Curley govern Boston for a while from jail? Do I have to even mention Chicago Mayor Richard Daley? The Irish helped heal America. Why, without the Irish, voter fraud and other vices of ward politics would have been restricted to Southern backwaters, leading to continued post-Civil War self-righteous sectional stereotypes.
And speaking of Richard Daley, let’s not forget a related Irish gift to America -- police brutality. When some West Indian sporting a cigarette lighter in the wrong place gets gunned down by 80 law enforcement bullets, you can be sure most of the involved officers’ names will read like the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ roster. And wasn’t it a moment of personal pride when a van full of very swarthy types was fired on a little too quickly by New Jersey cops some years back and one of the officers was named Hogan? Without the Irish, Southerners would also have been saddled with this redneck albatross.
And we cannot forget the lasting Irish blessing upon American collegiate and other escapades, and the source for countless entertaining teen films --- no, not the creation of Notre, Dame but the promulgation of public vomiting. Yes, at my strongly Gaelic-American university, I can yet recall unsatirically decades later a keg drinking contest at which Kevin O’Daly, after expelling from his stomach beer “head” foam in an Exorcist-reminiscent projectile flourish, announced with a ruddy face, “And that was just a burp!”
He is a cardiac surgeon today and only occasionally gets nauseous during “opening”.
But all that pales next to another freshly discovered Irish innovation in America: systematically concealed massive clergy child abuse. What state of the union doesn’t hear of a local Bishop O’McFitzpatrick being under scrutiny for diverting the Angelic Friars Poor-Due to buy off the silence of some grown-up kid who in altar boy days once received on his tongue more than just Christ’s body at the hands of a priest with a name like Liam MacSwineegan? Once again, the Irish to the rescue, feeding America’s hungry trial lawyers as well as starving journalists who need yet another issue for “anguished debate” and “startling exposes”.
The above examples are far from exhausting the list of Irish impact on American society. There are still more contributions to remember on St. Patty’s Day. How about the Irish creation of a really expanded Cold War? Without names like Buckley, McCarthy, Donovan, McNamara, Casey, Kennedy, etc. the Cold War with Russia would never have morphed into an orgy of hysterical fears and reckless global interventions which helped keep countless Americans employed over the last decades.
And let’s not forget the gift, encountered all over society, of Irish Alzheimer’s Disease where one progressively only remembers grudges.
Other areas of early influence on modern American society by St. Patrick’s Isle’s descendants in the New World are the invention of the combination race and draft riot (1863--New York), and the financing of foreign subversives and terrorists (Irish rebels and IRA -- 1860- today) . It is widely believed this continues and that the IRA’s inner Executive Command Council consists of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, “two guys called Seamus . . . just Seamus”, and New York Congressman Peter King.
On a related point, let’s also not forget the pioneering Irish development of “passionate attachment to a foreign land” ethnic lobbying, now improved on so well by others in the Israel and anti-Castro lobbies.
Nor have the Irish been remiss in cultural pursuits. They gave new energy for example to immigrant and second generation plebian city-dweller bigotry over the last two centuries. Although the tasks of street anti-Semitism and/or color racism have since been passed on to Italian-Americans (cf. Howard Beach) and thence to the Albanians (Bronx and Manhattan) who hold the portfolio today, the Irish do have so many pioneers in that field, particularly the South Bostonian anti-busing rioters of the 1970s. The late 1930s era Father Coughlin was not only a major example of this contribution, but he also illustrates another great Irish contribution to our land -- the political media loudmouth.
What in the world would American TV do or have done without Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, Bob Dornan, Joe McCarthy, and the originator of the television loudmouth brigade -- the late Morton Downey, Jr.? On St. Patrick’s Day it is always good to remember who put the “bully” in “bully pulpit.”
So, the next time you see a shamrock, or a real rock, I charge you with remembering the contributions above. At the very least , remember the words of G.K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse,” if I recall the title correctly:
The Great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad
Or, if you prefer the Gaelic version:
“Zheh” -- spelled
Gaelmoreireannbeanachtpogmothonglochandoraiseiregobraghbasinherieannmaccumhaillgaelteachtcuplafocaleannaighcennetigbrianboramha.
[*Warning to the humor-impaired and ethnically hypersensitive, DO NOT READ FURTHER!! The author is actually obscenely proud of his Gaelic heritage (not that he did anything to earn it), thinks British misrule in Ireland was horrible and enabled the Famine, thinks Sinn Fein and the worthy Congressman Peter King (please vote for him) have articulated real grievances, regards the Rev. Ian Paisley as a first-rate scumbag, and admires greatly (most of) the priests that educated him. He also thinks the police and other emergency security civil servants are underpaid folks of actual or potential heroism who put their life out on the line for the average person. A nice little reflection on Irish libertarians is available on Gene Healy's blog today.]
Others have a nationality. The Irish and Jews have a psychosis. -- Dead Irish writer, nationalist, and internationally renowned drunk Brendan Behan, sagely explaining more than one world trouble spot in a single epigram.
Few realize how many Irish contributions to American life there are. St. Patrick’s Day allows us to recall them. They go well beyond President John F. Kennedy, best known to the current generation for being killed, or Bing Crosby, best known to the same generation for being dead.
I am qualified to speak. My ancestors migrated to these shores from the Emerald Isle circa 1847 during the era of the potato famine. Between 1845 and 1850 as many as 2 million Irish died or emigrated as a result of a recurrent blight that killed large portions of each year’s potato crop. Finally in 1850 after 5 years of unprecedented catastrophe, a committee of leading Irish agronomists studied the problem and solved it by arguing that “sure’n after 5 years we might start growin’ and eatin’ somethin’ else.” To which the nationalist Ireland Youth movement further added the phrase, “And if it weren’t for the damned English we would have thought o’ that earlier.”
Some background. The original language of St. Patrick-land, by the way, is Irish Gaelic and not the familiar hi-brow classy English of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. The original language disappeared because its pronunciation and spelling bear no logical relation to . . . anything.
For example, in that language my name, Matthew Hogan, is spelled as follows:
Mathghamhainneachaigh O-Ni hOgaimhbheanneachainne
Which two words are pronounced roughly as follows: “Muh Hoy”. However if the word is used as a possessive as in “Matthew Hogan’s” it is pronounced “Vuh Vay”). In the Donegal county dialect the name is pronounced Deh Vay because Mathghamhainneachaigh is spelled Mhathghamhaineachghaighe there, and most accurately means “devoted to Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and of the Rosary.” In fact, all Gaelic words mean some variation of that.
Today it is standard to refer to the old language simply as “Irish.” This is more authentic. It seems to be, though in authentic Irish, the word for “Irish” is “Gaelic”. The word for an Irish native is “Gael” and to sharply distinguish them from foreigners, the word for “foreigner” is “Gall”.
Add to the above the fact that in Gaelic, the city name Dublin is pronounced “Blaakleeah” and sometimes “Mlaakleea” and even “Vlakleea”, conceivably all in the same sentence (true: I’m not just satiring here), and we see why the Irish only pretend to want to preserve the ancient tongue.
The only reason they want the language to continue is for politics, in order to keep Ireland’s leading parties names in Gaelic, even when speaking English. This is not done out of “nationalism”, but out of “embarrassment”. The leading Irish parties are the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. The first means “The Tribe of Gaels” and the second means “Warriors of Fate”. Now if your country had party names that in plain English sound like something that should be spray-painted on an underpass by acne-faced teenagers claiming “territory”, you’d keep it to yourself. So Gaelic lives.
Still more background.The Irish and their language derive from the larger ethnic group called Celtic. This is pronounced “Keltic,” as with a hard “c”, except when they are playing basketball. The word Celtic comes from “Kaltoi” an Indo-European root word meaning “people who cannot tan”.
The Celts’ greatest accomplishments include:
1) ruling half of Europe for a millennium while leaving behind no written or architectural record,
2) developing Halloween’s decorations, and
3) being regularly slaughtered by the Roman and British empires respectively.
Contributions to America Now back to our main St. Patrick’s Day theme: Irish contributions to America. Ireland has sent countless emigrants to America who upon arrival chose to become immigrants. They and their progeny have shaped America and its institutions in many ways that are still not fully appreciated. Here I consider just a few overlooked legacies.
The least appreciated of this immigrant legacy may be municipal corruption. Without the Irish, Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed, and the Pendergast machine of Kansas City that produced Harry S Truman would have been nowhere. Nepotism in police and public service recruitment and promotion would be far harder to find. Civil service in cities like New York would have much too fair personnel practices and far fewer people would be upset by firemen’s statues with Negroid features. And didn’t Mayor Curley govern Boston for a while from jail? Do I have to even mention Chicago Mayor Richard Daley? The Irish helped heal America. Why, without the Irish, voter fraud and other vices of ward politics would have been restricted to Southern backwaters, leading to continued post-Civil War self-righteous sectional stereotypes.
And speaking of Richard Daley, let’s not forget a related Irish gift to America -- police brutality. When some West Indian sporting a cigarette lighter in the wrong place gets gunned down by 80 law enforcement bullets, you can be sure most of the involved officers’ names will read like the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ roster. And wasn’t it a moment of personal pride when a van full of very swarthy types was fired on a little too quickly by New Jersey cops some years back and one of the officers was named Hogan? Without the Irish, Southerners would also have been saddled with this redneck albatross.
And we cannot forget the lasting Irish blessing upon American collegiate and other escapades, and the source for countless entertaining teen films --- no, not the creation of Notre, Dame but the promulgation of public vomiting. Yes, at my strongly Gaelic-American university, I can yet recall unsatirically decades later a keg drinking contest at which Kevin O’Daly, after expelling from his stomach beer “head” foam in an Exorcist-reminiscent projectile flourish, announced with a ruddy face, “And that was just a burp!”
He is a cardiac surgeon today and only occasionally gets nauseous during “opening”.
But all that pales next to another freshly discovered Irish innovation in America: systematically concealed massive clergy child abuse. What state of the union doesn’t hear of a local Bishop O’McFitzpatrick being under scrutiny for diverting the Angelic Friars Poor-Due to buy off the silence of some grown-up kid who in altar boy days once received on his tongue more than just Christ’s body at the hands of a priest with a name like Liam MacSwineegan? Once again, the Irish to the rescue, feeding America’s hungry trial lawyers as well as starving journalists who need yet another issue for “anguished debate” and “startling exposes”.
The above examples are far from exhausting the list of Irish impact on American society. There are still more contributions to remember on St. Patty’s Day. How about the Irish creation of a really expanded Cold War? Without names like Buckley, McCarthy, Donovan, McNamara, Casey, Kennedy, etc. the Cold War with Russia would never have morphed into an orgy of hysterical fears and reckless global interventions which helped keep countless Americans employed over the last decades.
And let’s not forget the gift, encountered all over society, of Irish Alzheimer’s Disease where one progressively only remembers grudges.
Other areas of early influence on modern American society by St. Patrick’s Isle’s descendants in the New World are the invention of the combination race and draft riot (1863--New York), and the financing of foreign subversives and terrorists (Irish rebels and IRA -- 1860- today) . It is widely believed this continues and that the IRA’s inner Executive Command Council consists of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, “two guys called Seamus . . . just Seamus”, and New York Congressman Peter King.
On a related point, let’s also not forget the pioneering Irish development of “passionate attachment to a foreign land” ethnic lobbying, now improved on so well by others in the Israel and anti-Castro lobbies.
Nor have the Irish been remiss in cultural pursuits. They gave new energy for example to immigrant and second generation plebian city-dweller bigotry over the last two centuries. Although the tasks of street anti-Semitism and/or color racism have since been passed on to Italian-Americans (cf. Howard Beach) and thence to the Albanians (Bronx and Manhattan) who hold the portfolio today, the Irish do have so many pioneers in that field, particularly the South Bostonian anti-busing rioters of the 1970s. The late 1930s era Father Coughlin was not only a major example of this contribution, but he also illustrates another great Irish contribution to our land -- the political media loudmouth.
What in the world would American TV do or have done without Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, Bob Dornan, Joe McCarthy, and the originator of the television loudmouth brigade -- the late Morton Downey, Jr.? On St. Patrick’s Day it is always good to remember who put the “bully” in “bully pulpit.”
So, the next time you see a shamrock, or a real rock, I charge you with remembering the contributions above. At the very least , remember the words of G.K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse,” if I recall the title correctly:
The Great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad
Or, if you prefer the Gaelic version:
“Zheh” -- spelled
Gaelmoreireannbeanachtpogmothonglochandoraiseiregobraghbasinherieannmaccumhaillgaelteachtcuplafocaleannaighcennetigbrianboramha.