Over lunch several weeks ago, after a morning’s-worth of futile errand-running back and forth over the unfortunate expanse that is Highway 15-501 to Durham, the Boop and I settled in for lunch in the entourage booth at the local burrito joint. She was cautious and a bit pensive. I was exhausted and hung-over. Moments earlier, I’d erupted into a frothy fit of irrationality, after noting the absence of a long-awaited, delinquent paycheck in my mail box. The Boop bore the brunt of my short-lived wrath, and had since taken to prefacing comments with: “Look, don’t be crazy.”
I wasn’t crazy. Just sore and feeling the aftereffects of the previous night’s activities.
“Look, don’t be crazy here, but have you talked to Dad?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“I think you should call him,” she said. “Apparently he’s planning an elaborate trip and thinks you’re going with him.”
I bit into a tortilla chip and tried not to laugh. My father and I have not traveled together for any great distance in about eight years. My father and I can barely stay civil for two hours, let alone twelve hours, or two days or two weeks. My father does not offer travel unless you’re willing to split the cost, even if you’re seventeen. And my father likes his elaborate trips solo, or with his motley crew of middle-aged hikers, who all envision themselves as Bohemians, except for the fact that they’re, you know, rich and CPAs.
“Right,” I say. “Elaborate trip with Dad. If not impossible, then highly improbable. Did he tell you where we were going?”
The Boop blinks. “Ireland, apparently. It’s a roots thing.”
I’d spat out the chip long before she said roots, which was a good thing because I probably would have choked.
The party line on my father’s roots goes something like this: Once upon a time, there were some people, who saw a conflict coming and fortuitously picked the side most likely to win, and by so doing, insured a liberal amount of social, political, and material comfort for their scions and the scions of their scions. They wouldn’t be oppressed by any –archy, they wouldn’t be alienated by the dominant ideology. They would, instead comprise the archies and invent the ideology as they went along. Maginalization is for losers. Only losers tow the line. Therefore, they would not be losers, they would be winners, leaders, and, if necessary, trot out some extravagant bullshit to reinforce their claim.
It was, as luck would have it, a functional philosophy from roughly the Battle of Hastings until the US Civil War. After the latter, the family encountered small setbacks—battlefield casualties, the frustration of not being able to literally own people anymore (pisser). But the bloodline survived Antietam and Gettysburg, and came home to learn savvier techniques for enslaving the masses without actually, you know, literally enslaving the masses.
My father will tell you that his great-grandfather was a poor dirt farmer from Appalachia, who triumphed over his hardscrabble upbringing to eke out a humble living for himself in the service of the state. My father will not tell you that, having watched his mother lose her copious properties in the unease of Reconstruction, his great-grandfather married into money so old it could have fueled engines, and triumphed over the temporary blight of poverty by acquiring more property and eking out a humble living for himself as attorney, legislator, and finally, Governor of Tennessee.
I suppose my father’s various fabrications and half-truths about his family would not seem so sad, were the truth not a matter of public record and obvious to any innocent passerby who happens upon my paternal grandmother on a bad day. In his defense, Dad would occasionally, after spending an afternoon sitting under oil paintings of ancestors in my aunt’s dining room, cop to his privileged birthright, and then try to explain how being rich fucked him up, which was why he needed me to pay for dinner.
These days, the material reality of my father’s family is not what it once was. Decades (some might argue centuries) of financial mismanagement, mental illness, polite (and not so polite) infighting, and a genetic disposition to valuing enjoyment over achievement has chipped away at fortune and reputation. I didn’t grow up lacking necessities or trivial luxuries. We had a nice, if marginally dysfunctional, suburban existence. And I followed my forefathers to prep school, but I attended on financial aid.
What’s left of what was is little more than furniture, old china and silver, some jewelry secreted away, the afore-mentioned oil paintings, and an odd guilt-tinged displacement. Like, it’s all well and good the assets are spent, and the expectation levels have been compromised. All part of the inevitable redistribution of wealth. Also, the times have changed. An affectionate 1947 Memphis newspaper clipping about my Mississippi great-grandmother’s spirit of “genteel paternalism” would today be met with at least raised eyebrows, if not burning in effigy. The two generation disconnect between me and the last member of my family to keep a butler on payroll has left plenty of room for equivocation. So I can easily vacillate between feelings of righteous satisfaction that the world has turned, and the family fortune has been whittled down to some aged knick-knacks and whatever resides in my grandmother’s bank account, and envy-tinged curiosity. I mean, do you have a butler? College-aged folk fitted with butlers would have likely had no problem paying for the expensive liberal arts college in upstate New York, where I was unable to matriculate due to lack of financial resources. And hey, it’s not like having a trust fund would have killed me when I was mostly unemployed, recently relocated, and living off generic macaroni and cheese and canned vegetables. Right?
If you’re wondering what this has to do with Ireland, you’d be well on the way to my thoughts on the matter. We’re not a family of recent immigrants, if by recent you mean having arrived in on these hallowed shores since Blackbeard was no longer a threat (and that actually stands for both sides of my gene pool—my maternal great uncles still reside on property from a land grant issued shortly after the Glencoe debacle). What that means to me is, essentially, any interesting, instructive, or uncommon cultural heritage that may have once derived from the Old World, went missing sometime before the Boston Tea Party. I am the product of three-hundred plus years of procreation in the melting pot. Assimilation personified. And yes, it’s entirely possible some portion of my family tree was fertilized on the Emerald Isle. But considering my family’s provenance over the last three centuries or so, I’d say it’s also likely some portion of my family tree was fertilized in West Africa—but I don’t see my father chomping at the bit to explore his specious roots in Senegal.
This brings me to the crux of the problem:
I don’t have any beef with Ireland. In fact, Ireland is, to my mind, a pretty cool place to be from. It boasts an A++ list of world literary contributions, charismatic revolutionaries, an unpronounceable native tongue, a baroque pantheon of mythological deities, lovely landscapes, some good looking men with sexy accents, and a liberal distrust of sobriety. There’s a lot to love there.
It also has long-time history of oppression, famine, guerilla warfare, poverty, and marginalization, owing mainly to its proximity to that other, slightly larger Island (you know, the one where my father is more likely to have roots). For most of the last few centuries, Ireland has been Western Europe’s dirty little secret. The third world amid the first world. The poorest country in the European Union until the fall of the iron curtain. The Irish are the underdogs of Europe. They’re plucky and loveable and poetic. They like singing and dancing and bawdy jokes and alcohol and Jesus. They don’t like abortion. And Americans love underdogs. Especially when the underdogs happen to be white, blue-eyed, Christians who are not now, nor have ever been members of the Communist Party.
The Irish are a rare and highly valued commodity on the roots market. You can have your victimization. You can triumph over adversity with your indomitable spirit. You can have mystery and mysticism. You can even have a sliver of controversy and revolution. You can have romantic ideologues. All that, and still be complete acceptable at all levels of society. Including the Oval Office.
If you think I’m overstating my case, I’d ask you pause for a moment and consider, say, Russia. Also a country with a literary canon like you wouldn’t believe, charismatic revolutionaries, an unpronounceable native tongue, a deeply and profoundly weird mythology, extraordinary landscapes, and a meaningful contributor to alcoholics everywhere. Russia’s history has not been without its pitfalls. No one knows how to be oppressed quite like a Russian, except, perhaps those who were oppressed by the oppressed Russians. And yet, the number of suburban babies named Colum or Liam or Bridget or Siobhan vastly outnumber the Vladimirs. You don’t see the Cyrillic analogue to stores like Celtic Wonders, popping up in American mini-malls.
Is it because mainstream, Protestant Americans find Eastern Orthodoxy even more confusing than Roman Catholicism? Is it because white, blue eyed Slavs are somehow less white than white, blue-eyed Celts? Is it because Liam Neeson would not make a convincing Trotsky in a biopic? Is it because we just couldn’t bring ourselves to elect a president Ivanov?
Or is it just that Ireland is a lot less scary.
And Russia, children, is the tip of the iceberg. Imagine middle-American suddenly becoming obsessed with finding their roots in any of the other oppressed peoples of the world who have settled here (whether by choice or not). What if we embrace our Hispanic roots? Or our African roots? Or our Chinese roots? Or our Jewish roots? Or our Indian roots? Or, fuck it, our Native American Roots (this is much more acceptable. Even the most hard line conservative assholes feel guilty about the Native Americans. As such, at least 80% of people I know will claim some portion of Native American heritage in order to assuage said guilt. Bear in mind, most evidence is apocryphal at best—but studies have shown that attributing your ability to tan to your great-great-great-great grandmother’s one night stand with a Cherokee saves you from having to actually DEAL with the fact that the ghettos with casinos we call reservations are a fair trade out, for say, the North American continent)? Or, hey, our Arab roots?
I empathize with the Irish of the 19th century. The famine, the afore-mentioned oppression, the absentee landlords, the irritating poets with their doofy occultism, the subsequent waves of immigration to the New World that lead to signs in store windows comparing them unfavorably to house pets. I’m sure it sucked for them (which is why I’ll say this only one time—Draft Riots—and leave that dead horse for Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee to beat in the DVD commentary for “Gangs of New York II: Shit Hits the Motherfucking Fan.”) And damn, the twentieth century was no picnic either—the Easter Rebellion, the guerilla war, the IRA, James Joyce’s enthusiasm for hand jobs, the Bloody Sunday massacres, Bobby Sands, Belfast making the top ten for last places in the western hemisphere you’d want to live (a tragic list also including such notable metropoli as Managua, San Salvador, Medellin, Sarajevo, Port au Prince, and probably Detroit), Bob Geldof, Bono, Enya, Riverdance, and fucking Colin Farrell.
But let’s be frank: If you’re shopping at Celtic Wonders and taking expensive trips to County Cork in search of some distant relative, you, personally, probably didn’t have to deal with any of that shit. You are, in fact a middle-class+ White American, who’s relative Irishness is probably less than or equal to Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife. And as such, my only response to this desperate hankering for identity is to quote my old roommate, Maggie, “I feel your pain, but I do not see your point.”
Americans have a contradictory relationship with the concept of roots. We want the security of a known ancestry, we want to revel in the unique cultures of our forefathers, we want to brag about our family icons or tartans or great-grandmother’s fluent Yiddish, at the same time we fear the marginalization caused by being too alien. It’s the paradox of assimilation. American culture is sort of like one of those all you can eat buffets where you can get all the sushi, taquitos, bratwurst, spaghetti, and hummus you want for $6.99 at a joint owned by a family from Bangladesh. None of it tastes very authentic, or even very good, and all of it's been enhanced by the chemical food processing plant in New Jersey. But then again, no one’s going to give you an evil eye if you ask for a side of pico de gallo for your samosa either. And there’s some comfort in that, and in the thought of a not so distant future when most Americans will look more like Tiger Woods or Vin Diesel or Salma Hayek or Sean Lennon than Gwyneth Paltrow.
But, to oblige my father, I did a little fact-checking, and did find roots in Ireland. Though, I could find no evidence to support my father’s romantic notions of being descended from romantically oppressed mystics. I did learn that my ancestors had been in the business of oppressing the Irish at least a century before they started oppressing African-Americans. Before that point, I can only assume they were oppressing women and everyone that fell outside of their literally incestuous coterie of power-hungry fuckwits with entitlement complexes. We lose track of the bloodline sometime around the Battle of Hastings. (I’d like to believe my ancestors only headlined one millennium of oppression. Up to that point, I’m willing to concede oppression by association e.g. Christians=Intolerant Asshats who almost single-handedly gave rise to the Dark Ages. Who needs fresh water, central heating, sanitations, and functional infrastructure when you have Jesus? Let’s ask the Romans.) All of which underscores a previously made commitment I’d made to leaving genealogy to civil war reeanactors, and focusing instead on the family gossip and stupid anecdotes about who may or may not have gotten shot for cheating at a hand of poker or shacking up with a trick pilot in Southwest Virginia. Trying to peg down an identity for the father of your illegitimate great-grandmother is a fun waste of time in a pinch, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really mean anything. Just provides a shadow of a hint that may or may not account for why your father’s family still treats you like you should be using the service entrance, or whether preexisting medical conditions may or may not derive from the fact that you are almost certainly the product of incest somewhere down the line
In the meantime, I'll wait and see whether my father's quest becomes a reality.
And pretend I'm adopted.
I stand by my long-term belief that, had Constantine left well enough alone, the Romans would have been well on their way to electricity by 600 ad. And it wasn’t that we lost just the big ideas when Rome fell, but the little ones too. Like, how long did it take anyone to figure out how to build a goddamn road after the Romans checked out? 1000 years? The only thing more terrifying than chaos is the collective amnesia that succeeds it. How do you forget how to build a road? For 1000 years?
This makes one wonder whether oppressing Christians wasn’t a reasonable idea on the part of the Romans. Certainly burning alive is a little severe, but come on. If you’re trying to promote tolerance over the broad swath of the Empire, you can’t have a bunch of whiny prosthelytizers saying that everyone else’s God is bullshit. At least not when you’re trying to keep copacetic relations with the Druids.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home