Hardcore for Nerds

on gay marriage (and religion)

I

Interesting piece by the novelist Edmund White in The Guardian, that takes on the argument, as put rather polemically here, that gay marriage is inherently conservative and shouldn’t be seen as such an object of progress:

“If the president has “evolved” in his affirmation of gay marriage, so have I. Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours. When the president “came out” he was careful about mentioning the many gay couples he knew, even some in government, who had loving, “committed” relationships and who were parenting children. All pretty suburban, in my opinion. Must we be among the “good gays” in order to win our civil rights? If we’re too sexual, if we’re wearing drag or leather, if we have multiple partners, if we’re seropositive, will we be thrust beyond the pale? What if we don’t want to live with the same partner for many years or adopt a Korean daughter and join the parent-teacher association?

But I became pro-marriage equality once I realised how opposed to it the Christian right is in our country.Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office. The Republicans are the party of the rich, of the top 1% of the population. If they are going to command majorities, they must invent phony “moral” issues that will appeal to their middle-class constituents. The assault against women’s reproductive rights is one such issue; a similar struggle against gay marriage is the other leading issue in the culture wars.”

(Well, I’m a European and I’d like to know more about this claim. What exactly is a ‘personal conversation with Jesus Christ’ - isn’t that basically what prayer is supposed to be, or does conversation therefore imply that (you think) he answers back? Or is this the ‘coming to Jesus’ idea that makes Christianity in the US more of a vocational activity than the cultural religion that most people in Europe are born into and remain, mostly unaffected by? The statistic is either bizarre or spurious, and although it may be my (in)credulity, I’m leaning towards the latter - if it even exists, I doubt it comes from a nationally representative sample - an unfortunate overreach on an otherwise valid point. Or can anyone else enlighten me?)

II

Essentially, I think that as long as we have straight marriage we should have gay marriage too. Of course there are many other material or even violent inequalities in our world that need addressing, but as long as we pretend to be some kind of a consensual democracy then the need to allow consensual marriages speaks pretty deeply to our personal rights and responsibilities. The situation in Ireland is currently stuck pretty firmly in the (rapidly receding) US middle ground: we have, since just recently, civil partnerships and we don’t have any law against gay marriage, per se. What we do have is the following article (41.3.1) in the Constitution:

“The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”

I’ve never really seen this discussed, but nowhere else in the document is ‘Marriage’ defined as solely between man and a woman, so for all the defence of marriage implied, it doesn’t actually preclude gay marriage. In fact, it may even make a case for it, as “guard with special care” could mean that by preserving marriage as a modern institution relevant to the contemporary Republic of Ireland, it should be opened up to both heterosexual and homosexual relationships rather than discriminate against the latter.

It may be stretching the influence of de Valera (and his long bony hand) a little too much to say this, but in drafting a constitution to protect the commonly-agreed social values of the time, he also produced a document that has proved flexible enough to adapt to changes in those values. Often, of course, that has had to be done by amendment - such as removing the Catholic Church’s ‘special position’, or amending the second part of this article to allow for divorce - but in this case the original is open to simple reinterpretation.

III

The problem is not with the civil law; instead it lies with the remaining influence of religion and religious doctrine. Unlike in America, where religious conservatism appears to be a potent political force, in Europe its influence is more marginal and indirect. Rather than a popular and potent issue, gay marriage is merely objected to by most people here from a basic level of conservatism - they don’t like it, but they’re not particularly exercised by it on an American scale. Essentially, the establishment churches in Ireland or Britain are facing a rearguard action, in flight from declining attendances and influence, to preserve an item of civil life thought to be under their control.

Gay marriage, in this view, threatens marriage as a religious sacrament - why can’t homosexuals, to the extent that they are already tolerated, be happy with a civil union and leave marriage to the churches, who claim a right to preserve their traditions and not lose them to a wholly secular society (whether such a thing exists or is acceptable depends on the conservatism of the church)? Well, since marriage has always been more than a purely religious institution, there is no good reason to deny it to those whom certain churches don’t find to be acceptable spouses. And consequently, I think that if they don’t recognise the basic rights of equality, we shouldn’t personally consider them to be acceptable churches.

Although in Ireland the predominant influence on religion is that of the Catholic Church, I was never brought up in that faith, so what that church says is really of very little concern to me. Instead, I’m what I like to think of as an atheist and a lapsed Anglican, in that I still have a good deal of respect for the cultural tradition of the Church of Ireland - including a relatively progress stance on, say, the ordination of women priests, or at times what seemed to be quite a moderate approach to homosexuality. However, the latest position - or, admittedly, reiteration of their existing position - on marriage and sexuality makes me determined not to go back for reasons beyond pure atheism.

According to Canon 31, marriage is and will remain “a holy mystery in which one man and one woman become one flesh”; and, to add insult to injury, “The Church of Ireland teaches therefore that faithfulness within marriage is the only normative context for sexual intercourse.” In other words, not only do we define marriage, but by defining marriage we exclude homosexual relationships from the “normative context for sexual relationships”. Whatever your opinion on premarital sex, I reckon it’s okay for the church to set a ‘normative context’ on the issue - they’re not all celibate men, for a start - but not if it excludes homosexuality from that context.

However, the following statement is more than crocodile tears, in my opinion:

“The Church of Ireland welcomes all people to be members of the Church. It is acknowledged, however, that members of the Church have at times hurt and wounded people by words and actions, in relation to human sexuality.

Therefore, in order that the Church of Ireland is experienced as a ‘safe place’ and enabled in its reflection, the Church of Ireland affirms:

A continuing commitment to love our neighbour, and opposition to all unbiblical and uncharitable actions and attitudes in respect of human sexuality from whatever perspective, including bigotry, hurtful words or actions, and demeaning or damaging language;

A willingness to increase our awareness of the complex issues regarding human sexuality;

A determination to welcome and make disciples of all people.”

This is pretty much what our President was talking about here; and it’s the civil side of the discussion that religion can contribute to, drawing on a long (if not unmixed) tradition of preaching, or promoting, tolerance between people. I can forgive, for now, their intransigence on the central point - for a naturally conservative body they’ve come a long way, and there are plenty of laypeople and clergy in the Church of Ireland you’re not going to push into accepting gay marriage any time soon - if it allows for a kinder and more honest dialogue on the issues in society generally. It’s no longer my church, but credit where it’s due…

politics irish american exceptionalism religion sex

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thesefewpresidents:

popscenesters:

awkwardedmilibandmoments:

Ed took Pulp’s advice and made Labour live as Common People do.

A couple days ago, I saw this incredibly powerful picture of Barack Obama sitting on the Rosa Parks bus. The amount of things that image managed to say all at once was amazing.

This is our British equivalent.

I mean, I like Greggs, but c’mon.

I just. How is this not a satirical photoshop. How.

Um, is it such a bad thing that leading British politicians (admittedly very few of them are non-white, so there’s not the same resonance) lack the opportunity to solemnly remember the racial segregation of public transport within living memory?

Not that the UK doesn’t have its own history of injustices - racial and otherwise - though perhaps fortunately not the same degree of social schism based in overt and official dogma. Although simply in the civil rights context (and not to otherwise too closely compare African-American and Irish nationalist struggles) recent history with Northern Ireland has provided some equivalent moments - David Cameron’s speech to parliament on the Bloody Sunday report, Queen Elizabeth at Dublin Castle, and likewise former President of Ireland Mary McAleese (born in the UK, in Belfast) and everything she did in embodying the transformations of the peace process.

This is really more just the equivalent of Rick Santorum suggestively eating a hotdog or whatever - as in, politicians everywhere have to look folksy and ‘of the people’, but there seems to be an especially strong tradition in the US of photographing politicians with large local food items…?

uk american exceptionalism irish politics

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easpageag:

“An article by a black writer in an 1860 edition of the Liberator explained how the Irish ultimately attained their objectives: “Fifteen or twenty years ago, a Catholic priest in Philadelphia said to the Irish people in that city, ‘You are all poor, and chiefly laborers, the blacks are poor laborers; many of the native whites are laborers; now, if you wish to succeed, you must do everything that they do, no matter how degrading, and do it for less than they can afford to do it for.’ The Irish adopted this plan; they lived on less than the Americans could live upon, and worked for less, and the result is, that nearly all the menial employments are monopolized by the Irish, who now get as good prices as anybody. There were other avenues open to American white men, and though they have suffered much, the chief support of the Irish has come from the places from which we have been crowded.” Once the Irish secured themselves in those jobs, they made sure blacks were kept out. They realized that as long as they continued to work alongside blacks, they would be considered no different. Later, as Irish became prominent in the labor movement, African Americans were excluded from participation. In fact, one of the primary themes of How the Irish Became White is the way in which left labor historians, such as the highly acclaimed Herbert Gutman, have not paid sufficient attention to the problem of race in the development of the labor movement. And so, we have the tragic story of how one oppressed “race,” Irish Catholics, learned how to collaborate in the oppression of another “race,” Africans in America, in order to secure their place in the white republic. Becoming white meant losing their greenness, i.e., their Irish cultural heritage and the legacy of oppression and discrimination back home. Imagine if the Irish had remained green after their arrival and formed an alliance with their fellow oppressed co-workers, the free blacks of the North. Imagine if they had chosen to include their black brothers and sisters in the union movement to wage a class battle against the dominant white culture which ruthlessly pitted them against one another.”

—

How the Irish Became White

For those who would continue to liken the struggle of Irish people to the struggle of blacks, I figured you’d be interested in how the Irish were able to get themselves out of oppression.

(via dionthesocialist)

“The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois. True, this is the case with most peasant nations. But in Ireland it is particularly bad.” - Engels.

(via tiocfaidharlulz)

On “those who would continue to liken the struggle of Irish people to the struggle of blacks” - is that Irish-Americans and African-Americans, or the Irish in Ireland and black Africans? Because while there’s an obvious separation between the former two groups (the Irish never came to America as slaves - unless you maybe include the indentured Irish labourers in the Caribbean), the latter both fall under the umbrella of postcolonialism. Although rather dubiously in the Irish case, since while Gaelic Ireland was in some ways the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon colonial experience, by the 19th century plenty of Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, were involved in running the British Empire, while the Ireland that won independence from Britain was not a colony but a constituent part of the imperial core, the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, in terms of national self-determination Ireland did set a precedent for the post-war decolonisation - one could debate the positive and negative senses of that precedent (and there are a lot of positives about the establishment of Ireland as a democratic republic in an unfavourable situation), but one thing comes to in mind that in that our almost-corrupt ex-prime-minister is touring various African countries telling them about our economic boom. The point being that if you confine the perspective to America, the institutional oppression comes from nearby white folks, but if you expand outwards to the Irish and African experiences ‘at home’, post-independence, you have globally peripheral economies oppressed by broader trade forces (in this respect joining the EU has helped Ireland about as much as it has, as trading bloc, hindered much of Africa) but also their internal political systems which favour certain social or economic groups.

This is a situation which is obviously not unique to newly liberated countries, but which is perhaps accentuated by their peripheral nature and the lack of industrial wealth to spread around in the form of welfare or the consumer economy. To return to America, the labour history of the Irish or Black America has to acknowledge not only that this form of economic progression was more possible there, but that its harsher capitalist edges were also tempered by unionisation. Had there been more collaboration across ethnic boundaries it could have created earlier a more equitable social movement in the United States, but it could arguably have also decreased the unions’ bargaining power by expanding the available pool of ‘surplus labour’. This is the essential paradox of labour unions - in order to create better conditions for all in general, they typically have to restrict their own ‘all’ to a certain set of existing workers. To do so racially would be unacceptable today, at least within America - but defending American workers’ rights today is largely restricting that defence to American, not Chinese or Mexican, workers. There’s no need to excuse or condone past racism, merely to point out that it may have served a certain structural purpose which more people may benefit from today.

(the alternative being, of course, a fantastic syndicalist movement on a cross-racial basis which would have completely rewritten history and made much of this debate redundant - but it didn’t happen, and the reasons why are as important for understanding past history as they are for understanding the conflicts of identity and class politics today, or the consequences of globalisation for different populations.)

There’s also a rather odd statement above, that “[b]ecoming white meant losing their greenness, i.e., their Irish cultural heritage and the legacy of oppression and discrimination back home.” But most Irish-Americans, traditionally at least, have not lost their greenness - rather, compared to the humdrum and equivocal reality of Ireland post-independence, they accentuated it. Unless, and this is a rather Marxist way of puttings things, they lost their ‘objective’ heritage (oppression is bad and we should avoid perpetuating it in any situation) but embraced their ‘subjective’ heritage (the self-image of poor Irish immigrants working their way up American society by hard work and ingenuity, but retaining their ethnic identity and closeness). Except the first is just as normative as the second - the experience of oppression is always subjective, and my guess is the Irish-American legacy has always been one directed against the specific cultural and geographic rule of ‘the English’, comfortably located across the Atlantic Ocean (although there was that one time the Fenians tried to invade Canada), while allowing for collaboration with and a partial supplanting of Anglo-America. It’s not that the Irish ‘lost’ their heritage of oppression, but that they experienced and reshaped it in a particular way that didn’t really allow for, well, a grand socialist interpretation. Also another important history lesson!

irish history politics socialism american exceptionalism

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healthcare debates: UK, Ireland, USA

“It ought to be mandatory, for instance, for Andrew Lansley to reveal whether or not he has private medical insurance, just as it should be for an entire coalition cabinet suspiciously relaxed about slashing the NHS.”

—

from this Guardian piece about tax transparency for politicians

My first reaction to the above is, wouldn’t you just assume they have private insurance? But that’s an Irish perspective, not a British one - testament to the actual strength of the NHS that the level of private health insurance in the UK is in the low teens. Whereas in Ireland, where the establishment of proper public healthcare was constrained historically by a combination of lack of government resources and strong Catholic opposition to buying off the doctor’s private interests (as was essentially done by Bevan in post-war Britain), private health insurance is used by around 30-40% of the population (the number has dropped with the effect of the recession on incomes) and is a pretty typical middle-class thing.

So one would just assume that the cabinet, Fine Gael and Labour, are of the income bracket that would choose private health insurance rather than rely on a creaking public system which they are ostensibly committed to reforming. Although the current scheme being proposed by Minister O’Reilly, of universal health insurance, is a combination of the neoliberal imperative of privately-purchased insurance with the social necessity of public care. It’s practically American in its awkwardness! (actually it’s Dutch, but it’s supposed to be working out to be quite expensive and relatively inefficient, long-term, there)

Speaking of which, I’ve come to understand (in an obviously limited, even ironic sense of the word) that the current debate about the individual mandate in the US healthcare legislation is complete and utter insanity. Not because it’s objecting to government regulation of markets in order to make them more efficient - that’s ideological libertarianism, and at least it’s a (somewhat) coherent opinion. But those objecting to the government requiring individuals to purchase insurance are not themselves people who don’t wish to or have not already acquired insurance, nor can they be conceivably interested in the moral freedoms of anyone who wants to live without insurance - they simply don’t want to contribute, as employers and taxpayers, to a system where everyone has access to healthcare! Seriously America, WTF?

uk irish politics Healthcare american exceptionalism

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“ But I guess they had to be realistic in order to make up for the dialogue, the acting, the special effects, the mawkishness, the closeted homoeroticism, the jingoism, the appalling black propaganda, the subnormal sloganeering, the endless justifications, the sickening Thanatos and the ideological mire.

—

Act of Valour [sic - or not, depending] review in the Irish Times

I went to see this recently (and dragged a couple of people along too). It’s not quite hilariously bad. In fact it’s impressive how little outright hilarity there is in its cheesiness. Instead it’s interestingly bad, or disquietingly bad.

The introduction mentions ‘authentic’ or ‘authenticity’ at least three times. It’s not, of course, except to a certain idea of literalism and straightforward belief in the righteousness and rectitude of everything you do. This is a world where terrorism is literally a man blowing up an ice cream van in a school-yard full of children. Where violence is horrific and total, but just off-screen enough not to cause visceral discomfort or presumably to give what is widely described a Navy SEALS recruitment film an adults-only rating, and yet where language is never worse than ‘assholes’ (liberally applied, but only to terrorists).

As a war film this shows certain aspects of military hardware to good effect. Less so than Transformers, but one gets to see the sharp end of American force applied, in a rather surgical way. But unlike the fantasy genre of desperate fighting against inhuman odds (from Independence Day to War of the Worlds and Transformers, and onwards to the godawful-looking Battleship) here, and in any documentary account of modern wars, there is the awkward sense of unavoidable technological might. Awkward not because America’s modern super-soldiers are invulnerable - IEDs took care of that idea, and a single shot can still kill - but because they are faced with a mass of human (however ideologically culpable, terrorists - or ‘assholes’ - are still human) vulnerability.

This mass of enemies chiefly has power through numbers and persistence - virtues the US military also still needs to maintain, albeit in different ways. So the threat is out there - or in this case, soon to come here with a novel development that inexplicably threatens mass panic (and ‘economic disaster’) on a scale worse than 9/11. Ironically, the very existence of the media comes in for some heavy bashing, as an irresponsible, irresistible vector of moral fear. There are values to defend at home - they are painstakingly spelt out - so the SEALs have to go out into the world and kick ass:

“When Bush said that we are fighting the terrorists “there” so that we won’t have to fight them “here”, he was making a very distinctively American political move. It is certainly not a rhetorical trope that makes any sense in Europe, for example. Because “there”, whether it’s Lebanon, or Gaza, or Baghdad, or Basra, is actually just a short plane ride from the borders of the EU; and what you do there, to “them”, has immediate consequences for their fellow Muslims or Arabs or outsiders in Hamburg or the Paris suburbs, in Leicester or Milan.” - Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century

And what a world it is. Basically, if you live by the coast in the less developed world, expect NAVY Seals to swoop in by nightfall and start shooting. No doubt as part of the ‘authenticity’, armed men in Africa are referred to as ‘skinnies’ - as popularised in Black Hawk Down, the precursor to this kind of ‘real’ action movie, and ‘defined’ by the Urban Dictionary as “militia forces hailing from an impoverished nations… also used in Multiplayer Games, such as Command and Conquer: Generals, to describe the Terrorist teams”.

It’s scary how much the close-quarter fighting resembles modern first-person-shooters. Not just in the gun-sight views as the SEALs move through murky corridors, which is a simple case of life imitating art imitating life in the form of ‘authentic’ art, but in the copious amounts of headshots (again, seen through the gunsight, flat and dimensionless) and the interjections of the female communications soldier - “mission not complete”, said in exactly the tone of a computer game.

In short, what it so scary about this film is how unreal it is, in any kind of liberal, civilised world, on the one hand, and on the other how apparently ‘authentic’ it is to the shadow world of glorified violence, necessary death, and power as beauty:

“Perhaps the fascists were last to believe that power was beautiful.

That power was beautiful, yes. Communists of course believed to the end that power is good: invocations of power, properly surrounded by the right doctrinal packaging, could still be presented without apology. But the unapologetic presentation of power as beauty? Yes, that was uniquely fascist. But I wonder whether you are correct for the non-European world. Think of China, after all, the most obvious case in point.”

Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, ibid., p. 165-6

It’s a tough world out there, no doubt. But I wonder do we celebrate acts of value - humanitarian, political, even philosophical, the stuff that democracy is actually made of - enough, rather than valour which, while important, is meaningless without context; and the context here is, baldly, a world where American military action contributes to the danger of, and motivation for, terrorism. There’s a value in this film in that it shows the terrifying normality of militarism as a modern-day fascist ideology, dressed up as a defence of democracy.

american exceptionalism film war politics judt

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“Irishness” -v- “American Irishness”

easpageag:

carlconnor:

I came across a post on reddit, asking people about “the most irritating misconceptions” they have to deal with. The guy I’ll be quoting started with this;

As an American who has been married to an Irish woman for over a decade, I’ve come to really appreciate how utterly disconnected ideas of Irishness in America and actual Irishness in Ireland are. They are utterly distinct, and bear no relationship to one another.

He was then asked to clarify, which lead to a very long post that pretty much could have been written by me. It echoes a ton of stuff my “regular followers” will remember me whining about. I figured it’d be nice to show someone else’s view on this particular annoyance of mine, while also acknowledging that I don’t believe all Americans are idiots (which my tongue-in-cheek posts often suggest), because I know many people like this guy exist. It’s a long enough read, but totally worth it if you’re interested in that kind of thing…

Clicking the “Read More” below will take you to my blog-version, but if you’re familiar with reddit, here’s the original source.

—

Read More

An interesting read

An Introduction to Irishness for Americans 101

(some good points about identity and why Irish-Americans identify in this way, which is important too - and not entirely reducible to contempt)

irish american exceptionalism

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» How the Irish Invented [some] Slang

easpageag:

So … this is an interesting article. There are quite a few of these that make a surprising amount of sense, but there are some that are clearly clutching at straws. Admittedly, I can see how some accents could render ceap as cop, but that doesn’t even remotely begin to explain how the police became known as The Thinkers.

However, there’s one urban legend that I’d like to address here:

In Irish if you want make sure someone understands your meaning, you say, Diggin tú? It’s a normal phrase you hear at the end of sentences all the time. In America, An duigeann tú? Became Diggin you? or You dig?

Yeah, the genesis of this term makes a lot of sense. Except for the Akan verb for understanding, coincidentally, also sounds a lot like dig. Akan is one of the main languages of modern day Ghana, and it’s also spoken in parts of Suriname, Cote D’Ivoire and Benin.

Now, which sounds more likely to you? Cool Black people learning to speak Irish - a fairly odd and complicated language bearing little to no relation to any other European language they’re likely to come across - or cool Black people continuing to speak a language common to a modest sized chunk of Africa that was particularly heavily hit during slavery?

I think this can be pretty much summed up, Roddy Doyle-style, as “the Irish are the black people of the English language”. The article also makes a big deal of the Irishman inventing the word ‘jazz’ thing, with a convoluted explanation of how teas, or heat, became the name for a primarily African-American cultural movement.

Everything is tied up with a disdain for any kind of academic linguistics, because it doesn’t recognise the automatic specialness of Irishness - “the snoots prefer to say the word jazz comes from the unknown, leaving Scoop, with lots of Irish writers using Irish speech, in the dust of neglect”. But Wiktionary sums it up more plausibly as deriving “From Louisiana Creole French jass (“Congo dances of New Orleans”), from jasm (“energy, drive”), from African (compare Mandingo jasi, Temne yas), while the Wikipedia page for the word goes into more detail and describes the teas-jazz etymology as one of several alternatives which “although they cannot be ruled out absolutely, such derivations lack empirical supporting evidence and must be considered speculative”.

Which applies to basically everything else listed from Cassidy’s book in this article - and it’s not just grasping at straws, it’s randomly comparing the sounds of words in the face of more obvious logical connections. Such as ‘stiff’ as in corpse coming from staf (“big fella”, apparently) rather than the more literal reason that corpses of all sizes undergo rigor mortis, or ‘racketeer’ coming from reachtaire, a church rector or auditor, rather than someone engaged in a criminal racket. Some of it’s kind of amusing, like the redefinition of the slang ‘pussy’ for vagina, which “isn’t so bad, it just means pus or pouty lips in Irish Gaelic. It’s a descriptive term, and not insulting.” - it doesn’t mention that it’s still common in Ireland to refer, often insultingly, to someone’s mouth or facial expression as ‘puss’ (“would you look at the puss on yer man”) so I don’t know where that one’s going.

But mostly it’s sourpuss post-colonialism, with a shocking level of historical illiteracy - in retrospect, this explains why the etymologies presented are so weak, as to do them properly requires rigorous historical research and an understanding of context. Not like this:

“Irish Gaelic was a secret language in Éire, which was once an Ireland riddled with foreign spies”

Where do I begin with this? There is a long history of oppression of the Irish language, to be sure, though chiefly as a way of imposing authority in the Tudor period, but there was no time since when it was meaningfully a ‘secret’ language, under threat from ‘foreign’ spies - the Gaelic Revival and the underground Irish Republican Brotherhood were different things, okay? And as for ‘Éire’, well that Irish-language term is mostly a 20th century invention, the attempt on the one hand to legitimise Ireland as a culturally independent nation, and on the other (from the British perspective) to delegitimise its official independence by denying ‘Ireland’ a place amongst English-speaking states.

“There is shame associated with the destruction of native Irish Gaelic civilization, because the Irish lost their literature and institutions with the victory of the British Empire over their native government.”

Yeah… there was no Irish ‘government’, or unitary state, nor any British Empire, when English became the governing language in Ireland. The loss of the (high) Gaelic culture in the Flight of the Earls was real, but it’s two centuries before most of the Irish emigration to the United States, and in the meantime Gaelic low culture was a persistent if gradually declining presence amongst Ireland’s rural poor. So at least in that sense, this is partly correct:

“It takes a certain knack to understand how closely related the concepts and sounds of tuig and dig are to each other. Most scholars go by their goofy hunch, that tells them that Irish Gaelic is some dead language no one ever spoke. In fact, it was the first language of most Irish Americans that came here in the big flood of Irish after the famine, when that famine adversely targeted Irish-speaking areas first and foremost, sending Irish speakers to America before anyone. In the anti-Gaelic mind, Irish language is a queer idea, and way too vast a thing to even engage—easier to kill it than to incorporate it into an academic’s repertoire of reference. The academic makes this decision usually because he or she is already burdened with three centuries of censorious English state propaganda about the meaning and origin of Anglo-American civilization, which did not come about like their poets’ tell us it did.”

It also takes a certain knack to notice that there is such a thing as coincidence, and that other examples, as above, that don’t leap quite so far across cultural boundaries may be more plausible. And what evidence is there for a specifically ‘anti-Gaelic mind’ outside of the minds of over-sensitive cultural nationalists, themselves insensitive to the continuing reality of Irish as part of a national culture in Ireland that straddles both Irishness and Englishness, of a sort? In viewing Irishness as the constant victim of imperialism, it erases the more proximate experiences of non-white groups, such as in Black history. There’s no doubt Irish made a contribution to the development of the English language, but there’s no need to cast it in such an unnaturally heroic light or to exclude the influences of other cultures by doing so.

irish language american exceptionalism

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» An Irish Tradition With an Only-in-America Star

easpageag:

ourgoatrodeo:

GREENVILLE, Ohio — For those feeling down about the United States and its place in the world, meet Drew Lovejoy, a 17-year-old from rural Ohio. His background could not be more American. His father is black and Baptist from Georgia and his mother is white and Jewish from Iowa. But his fame is international after winning the all-Ireland dancing championship in Dublin for a third straight year.

I’m American. I’m part Irish. I’m Jewish. This thrills my little heart.

Found a short video news report on him here. It’s not mentioned in the article, but apparantly he’s also won the All-Ireland championship 3 years in a row. He’s also in this video for RTÉ, about the All Irelands, as well as a (very) short interview with a half Japanese girl from Chicago.

This kid seems pretty badass, and comes across pretty level headed and normal for a world class dancer. Actually, he was the first POC to win the World Championship for Irish dancing, which is a little sad.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” his mother said, shaking her head. “You’re biracial and you’re a Jew. We thought you had to be Irish and Catholic.”

Not to belittle his achievement, but it kind of highlights how heavily Irish POC are ostracised. And Irish Jews as well, I guess, though they’re not mentioned in the piece (or ever).

Wait, is that headline suggesting that it’s ‘only-in-America’ that people of different races and different religions can have children?* Like, such bullshit. It’s not the 19th century (when that probably wouldn’t have happened in America anyway, whatever about Europe) anymore! What about a North African Muslim and a white Catholic having a child together in France, which probably happens a lot more often than this scenario? Or the same in Ireland?

I mostly dislike American exceptionalism on an intellectual level, or when being critical of culture (artistic or political), which is why I ironically tag most of my US-centric posts with it. But sometimes it really gets up my nose, especially when I’ve been thinking a bit about nationality and the parroted-back-to-us version of Irishness that emerges at this time of the year. So I have a lengthy post in my draft folder about a Dropkick Murphys version of an Irish traditional song (that I like!) and containing as-yet-unfinished musings about national identity, heritage and culture. The dispiriting remark about Irishness and Catholicism - dispiriting both in its falsehood and its accuracy - above connects with a couple of comments I saw in yesterday’s paper about schooling in Ireland, so please don’t think I believe Ireland to be a land of no social ills.**

There is (or should be) no such thing as Irish or American or even European exceptionalism; there are merely differences and similarities in the things we take for granted. Something like the above is neither exactly typical of nor unique to the United States.

*I mean, I understand that black Baptists and white Jews are only really likely to both be found in significant numbers in the US, but that’s not what this is really implying, is it?

**Oh yeah - remember when our best-paid TV presenter essentially asked a small (white) Irish kid, who was good at break-dancing, on air, whether he’d wear blackface? That happened.

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On The Trudeau Controversy

I guess not many people on Tumblr read daily newspapers, because I haven’t seen anything about this on my dashboard, even though it involves abortion and Republicans. But seriously though, this story is pretty relevant to the relationship between media and politics in the US; and how the former’s reaction to the latter seems to be even more firmly embedding the ‘war on women’ resurgence of social issues into what constitutes the boundaries of acceptable discourse (cf. Limbaugh and the ‘slut’ comments about access to reproductive healthcare).

There’s an opinion piece in today’s Irish Times by their resident political cartoonist, Martyn Turner giving his perspective on events. In it, he notes:

“There are two subjects that cartoonists tackle seemingly at their peril. One is Israel. The other is abortion (Well, I guess there are three now – drawings of Muhammad, but that evokes a response of a totally different dimension).”

He can’t be talking primarily about himself here, because I seem to recall plenty of cartoons about the Middle East and Israel (plus, despite the best efforts of the Israeli embassy and the Irish Friends of Israel, Irish public opinion is generally quite pro-Palestinian; mind you, it could also be said to be pro-abortion, albeit in the limited sense allowed, and where does that get us?). His most famous abortion cartoon is this one (warning: knowledge of Northern Irish political history and the Republic’s abortion legislation is required to really understand it) which is utterly effective in its simplicity. By contrast, the current Doonesbury strip seems ~~a little too on-the-nose and hyperbolic, but~~ [edit: actually, no, I just found out how true it is, dear god!] I guess that matches the incredulity and absurdity of the situation?

Most of what he goes on to say about the business of cartooning is something I’m familiar with from reading the story of Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame - not an overtly political cartoonist (like Trudeau is - as Turner says, the current segment “was censored by some papers, and moved, bizarrely, to the opinion pages by others as if Doonesbury had suddenly, after four decades, become a political strip”) but had his own problems with editorial timidity and a strikingly similar diagnosis of the problem - the loss of local city papers. With wide-ranging effects:

“That story has been repeated across the United States in the last decade. Where there were once more than 200 political cartoonists working daily, there are now only about 50. Many have no home newspaper but rely on syndication. This suits the newspapers that can take their service but pick and choose what they will print without having to explain themselves to the resident bolshie cartoonist.

But the decline in the number of American political cartoonists has been matched by the decline in political content in the drawings. The Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning has been won, in recent years, by some cartoonists who just make jokes about the news and don’t have a political thought in their heads. As Fox News has dumbed down TV news, the newspapers themselves have dumbed down political comment.

In Europe things aren’t quite so bad. The structure of newspapers is different as more papers are national and more papers are identified by their politics and not by their geography. So the decline in political cartooning isn’t as noticeable. We also have a lengthy history of commenting through drawings. Freedom of speech, freedom to draw, is constrained more by the current sad economics of the newspaper industry than by any shift in cultural practices.”

Of course, being a satirical cartoonist it wouldn’t suffice to stick to the economics without having made some dig at the social background:

“American newspapers, and their editors, with some notable exceptions are not noted for either their bravery or their wisdom, if the truth be told. They feel beholden to the lowest common denominator among their readership as proprietors, especially in these financially suspect times, don’t want to offend for fear of losing readers. In the past this wasn’t so. Well, not so much.

They also, of course, reflect a deeply conservative society with a seemingly renewed devotion to religious dogma, perhaps as a response to the perceived fanaticism of Muslim states. And a strangely uninformed society. It was only last week, for example, that a survey in two southern states, Alabama and Mississippi, showed that almost half of respondents believed still that Barack Obama was a practising Muslim. Rick Santorum won both primaries in those states. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.”

(Admittedly I think that bit of America-bashing is a little naive, but still - if you’re going to export your culture all over the world and still do stupid shit like this, we’re gonna keep ‘calling you out on it’, to use a, uh, familiar turn of phrase. We’re aware the US is a diverse society and polity, but it also appears to be one in love with a monolithic, superior, exceptional idea of itself as the epitome of human values, so, yeah, sorry! America, I love you but you’re bringing me down. Though so is Europe, currently)

Finally, there is some more interesting comment on the Irish Times business and media pages, making the extremely apt point:

“It is interesting that a country with no abortion rights like Ireland can publish the original free of controversy, while US states with some abortion rights are bound by a climate of censorship.”

What that says about the effectiveness of our political culture (and our ability to elect people that can stand up to pressure from the religious extremes in order to pass important social legislation) isn’t really a happy thought; nor does the more optimistic suggestion that we are open to progress say much cheerful about where US politics is headed. Or the wider issues of media in the internet age (relevant to Turner’s point about lowest common denominators above):

“This is about more than just the limits of the US media, however. Ultimately, a publication’s attitude to the importance of satire will depend on whether it believes its audience is the kind that will dip into The Onion every now and again and find it funny, or whether it pitches itself at those Facebook users who find their blurred avatars on Literally Unbelievable, a site dedicated to people who think The Onion’s headlines are for real.”

A horrible vision - a Facebook ‘like’ button thumbing a human face forever.

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