Identities vs. Narratives
12th May 2021
Severian points out some inconvenient truth.
Like every American-American (that’s my new hyphenated victim group name for “normal White people”) who has at least one ancestor from The Auld Sod, I have an uncle whose hobby is Irishness. Uncle Paddy, as we’ll call him, can be a real nosebleed about it; I’m still banned from certain family gatherings for having set him off by mentioning a few jejune truths about 19th century European history. Nonetheless, so long as you don’t step too hard on sore toes, Uncle Paddy is loads of fun. He’s easy to shop for at Christmas, at least. In short, he’s the best kind of “Irishman” — the kind who only believes his own blarney when he wants to.* It keeps him occupied in his golden years, and so long as you can keep yourself from laughing whenever he goes into ecstasies over his beloved Fighting Irish football team signing a not-exactly-Hibernian running back with a name like Cthulhuvious Smith III, it’s all harmless…
…but it’s harmless because, and only because, everyone knows where Uncle Paddy’s realloyalties lie. Like every other “Irish” hobbyist I’ve met in America, he has no idea who the political leadership of Ireland are, and the idea that he’d take orders from some gay Pajeet (or whoever the PM is now) is ludicrous. Ditto the Pope — though Uncle Paddy is, of course, the kind of “Irish Catholic” who hangs a photo of JFK meeting St. John XXIII in the kitchen (then remarks how nice it was of His Holiness, to let the Bishop of Rome be in the picture like that), the idea of Uncle Paddy going against one of the family on the orders of that goddamned Marxist Bergoglio is even more laughable.