Kiss This, I'm Oirish

Patrick Belton is actually Irish.

Not "Oirish".

The distinction?

Plenty!

Belton is not crazy about the Saint Paddy's revelry in America.

It's not so much Irish as Oirish - that depiction of Paddy the tireless vaudeville employee, setting down his green beer and praties only momentarily to brawl with his shillelagh, or mutter semanticisms never heard in Ireland save from Americans imagining they are communicating with the locals. While of late New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have wisely rid themselves of parades featuring all other ethnic stereotypes, come mid-March and drunken, pugnacious leprechauns appear go leor on Broadway. Equally odd, to hear most pubgoers of the nuclear superpower talk over their green Miller Genuine Drafts, one could be forgiven for imagining that the peoples of England and Ireland were still fervently at war, or that the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square somehow still advertised that Irish need not apply. The story of how we got to this amusing state of affairs wends through Latin-scented ecclesial disputes; to Shakespeare, an Empire, and vaudeville; and a mysterious Britannic cleric whose writings provide one of our few glimpse of Britain in the century after the first Empire on which the sun never set extricated itself from its imperial commitments west of the Channel.

Read the whole thing.

For me? It's enough to note that the bagpipes that will be prowling the streets of the Twin Cities today are entirely Scottish.

Oh, the Irish call them "Celtic War Pipes", but that's purely a Dublin Chamber of Commerce thing. Real Irish pipes - the Uillean pipes you saw on Titanic that are power by bellows rather than lung power - aren't the kind of thing you follow into battle, boyo.

However, I may just make it to Keegans tonight anyway...

Posted by Mitch at March 17, 2005 08:01 AM | TrackBack