Posts Tagged ‘st patrick’s day’
James Joyce is performing a valuable service in this picture. And I'm not making a corned beef joke. Oh no I'm not.
So my grandmother’s parents were right off the boat from Ireland. She got hit in the head with a rock when she was a kid by some smelly Protestant who called her a “dirty rotten Irish Catholic.” This apparently justified giving me five bucks when I broke up with my Jewish girlfriend 60 years later. Though, to be fair, she later regretted her decision and told me, “You know, Christ was a Jew.” I kept the five bucks.
Why did I tell you that? Because Irish Americans are rivaled only by the Italians in pride of their heritage. The Latvians and the Polish and all the other Euro communities can screech all they want, but they don’t have the stroke of the Irish. And the Italians have to deal with the “terrifying mobster” stigma. All the Irish have is drunken wife beating which usually only occurs at home and rarely has movies or TV shows made about it.
But on St. Patrick’s Day, everyone gets to be drunk. That’s really the point of it. I mean, there are parades. I have one down below (which is awesome btw) from Havana, Cuba. But how many old white guys and pale kids can you look at all in a row? For me, I found out the answer is seven…in any combination.
So why do the Irish get such good press? Why are they (and, I guess, partly me) so lovable? Well, I guess if you look angelically up from the floor, with the strings of puke connecting your cheek to the puddle beneath you like rainbows, who wouldn’t be charmed by your child-like innocence, especially if you are missing a tooth and bleeding from one ear? Who could read a lot of Samuel Beckett and not feel the joy of…well, anyway. You can’t expect a lot from a people whose most famous mode of dancing relies on not moving your arms or upper body in any way.
Also, the Irish were not really all that persecuted. I’m starting to doubt if my Nana got hit with that rock at all… I mean, the song I have linked below, No Irish Need Apply, is about how the Irish were discriminated against. Except they weren’t. Nobody can find a single instance of the No Irish Need Apply sign anywhere. Doesn’t make the song less bad ass, though! After the jump, I sort of ease up on my people and there’s that cool Cuban bagpipe video!
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