I don't *heart* St Patrick's day

I loathe the green beer binge drinking version of St Patrick's day that afflicts us ever year. My father's family is of Irish descent and their story is fairly typical: part of the wave of immigrants in the mid to late 19th century (when about a third of immigrants to the U.S. were from Ireland), settled in New York and eventually ended up as police and firefighters, except for my grandfather, who became a dentist. He and his wife had social pretentions that some would label "lace curtain" Irish.

Both of my parents fled their East Coast ethnic enclaves when they left New York and moved to San Francisco. As a result, I didn't grow up in contact with any relatives or a community--we moved often. But certain Irish and Italian gestures, ways of thinking and acting, were handed on as an invisible legacy. One element that was most openly Irish was the music. Songs that told stories fascinated me, as did Tommy Makem's thrilling vibrato.

The Irish republican songs (no, not like U.S. Republican, more like Up the IRA="freedom fighters" throw-out-the-British) influenced my later studies of colonialism as the case of AngloNorman/English/British colonization of Ireland (800 years) and the "troubles" in Northern Ireland stood out as a particularly painful and intractable situation.

Irish independence is still new. The oral history of Robert Emmet's 1803 speech from the dock is still a living memory. In this press conference on the Ken Loach film The Wind That Shakes The Barley the actors tell how they grew up with the echoes and the presence of the struggle for independence earlier in the century; the Black and Tans burned Cork City in December 1920. This conflict continues to be played out in our days in the six counties in the North that are still part of the U.K. Since the 1997 Good Friday agreements, a difficult but growing consensus for peaceful negotiations and co-government has emerged. The most recent act of violence has been roundly condemned by Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein, both in Northern Ireland and in the U.S. havens formerly nostalgic for a romantic nationalism (such as Boston), maintaining the policy of renouncing violence as a means to political ends. The 1997 film The Boxer by Jim Sheridan shows how hard it is for and embattled people to give up the myths and structures that have enabled their very survival and resistance and yet how necessary it is that they do so. Part of me hates to see this complex and compelling history reduced to an excuse to get as drunk as possible. But I also want to steer clear of what the Irish call being a "Plastic Paddy" so if we must celebrate inebriation, here are some great Irish drinking songs! My very favorite is Johnny McEldoo because it is also about food.

Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers "Whiskey You're the Devil"

The Pogues, "Streams of Whiskey"
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Ronnie Drew of The Dubliners talks with the Clancy Brothers and

singing one of those grimly funny songs that fascinated me when I was a kid.