Thoughts of Love and Ethnicity

This being the eve of St. Patrick's Day, a fine American holiday, I inevitably end up exploring my own ethnicity in a way that the other white people seldom do.  You can be English, French, German, Armenian, Italian, Sicilian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Bengali, Mexican, Puerto Rican, etc.  And those are just some of the ethnicities in Chicago besides the Irish.  The Irish seem to be oddly suited for political life, and dominate state and City politics in Chicago, Blagojevich notwithstanding.  

And they drink a lot of green beer.  They dye the Chicago River green.  These hallmark holidays have a way of expanding to fill a whole month.  As soon as Valentine's Day is over (celebrating love and chocolate) we have St. Patrick upon us, who himself wasn't even Irish, but never mind.

  A poor little English boy minding his own business on the shore of the Irish Sea, he was abducted by Irish pirates (Arrr!!) and was made to mind pigs for them.  That would put you off pork for the rest of your life probably, but while over there, thus engaged he probably learned enough Irish to say things in their native language about Jesus and God as well as "Hey, I think your pigs got out of their pen and are eating your vegetables".   Eventually he escaped pig duty, and, taking holy orders in France came back to convert the Irish.  A little bit later when the Northmen were rampaging and hurting people along the coasts of England and Northern Europe, and the Islamic infidels were knocking on the doors of Vienna and pouring across the Pyrenees into France, the Irish kept the Christian flame alive in their little island.

In the long run, they certainly were given no great reason to love the English, who lorded it over them for centuries. For centuries the Irish and the Scots were playing the English off the French and Germans and doing their Celtic thing, which was essentially defined as being the opposite of English.  If the English were Protestant, they they were Catholic, if the English had eschewed the Stuarts, the Irish and Scots embraced them. And the English came over to Ireland many times in history in acts of tough love and rough wooing.  And of course the Irish mostly speak English as do the Scots, but are reluctant to admit it.  And Americans, being heavily Irish too, the wretched refuse from Europe's teeming shores, have been markedly ambivalent about the English and their royal family as well.  While America is safely a bastion of republican sentiment (not the GOP kind but the other kind) there are a fair number of closet monarchists in our midst, many of them Episcopalians.    

The Scotch Irish, the original hillbillies.

And though I can be convicted of being Scotch Irish on multiple counts, I expect it is questionable whether I can say I'm really "Irish",  I have a green shirt or two and wear one of them when the day rolls around but that is about the extent of it.  My ancestors from the Emerald isle were Protestants, who, being mostly poor landless, lowland Presbyterians Scots, were encouraged to move to Ireland and take the land of  the dispossessed native Irish who were on the wrong side of struggles with Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, and the Hanoverians after the restoration and other things like that.  Plenty of Irish of course have moved to Scotland and England too, but never mind.   Having lived there for a while, we left again, this time for America and settled in the Carolinas and the Appalachians, took our fiddles along, and our recipes for hard liquor. We may not be Catholic, but we can drink just as much as they can, and do other things that can be considered, well, Celtic.  And don't forget our brethren, so to speak, in Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, and the Basque country. 

It's almost dark,   Werewolf time

Which brings me to the question of "love", which is perhaps the most fuzzed up word in the English language, of which I am the linguistic prisoner.  I work all day in an environment where men and women tunelessly go on and on about love.  I make subversive fun of them in my own way as I absentmindedly go about my work.  When I say that I "love" children, for example, does that mean I want to molest them or serve them like veal with a spicy breading?   The witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel probably, when asked, would admit to loving children. 

The old woman said she loved children.

One does not love chocolate the same way one "loves" a woman.  It's all in the context I guess, and an English speaker is supposed to know one for the other.  A dog that is "good with children" is different from a dog that thinks children are good.    And someone says that they "love" you?  WTF do they really mean?  Maybe they just want to eat you with a fork and spoon and discard the undigestible parts in the morning garbage. 

We value people we love, I guess, which means that we want to preserve them and keep them from harm.  We may also want to keep them for ourselves, not willing to share them with others.  Indeed sharing the ones we love with others could put some of us in a murderous rage.  

I would be the first to admit however, that in the presence of a beautiful woman something goes "sproing" in my brain, and I'm not entirely in my right mind any more.  Only in retrospect or times apart when you get to reflect in calmer moments do you realize that your "love" is some powerful biological urge that drives you onward to ultimate ecstasy or disaster.  Anything that stirs the passions that powerfully is not a little dangerous.  It's all God's way to keep the human race going, this "sproing" phenomenon.   It's the reason also that babies are cute and Maurice Chevalier sings "Thank Heaven for Little Girls".  So if I ever stopped feeling this way, would I even be human any more?