St. Patrick's Day - Where Rich Snotty People Complain about the Death of the Irish Tradition

Alright, so if you can't tell by the name plastered across the top of this blog, I'm of Irish descent. I'm also Polish and Welsh, a mixed stockyard whelp, just like every other "Irish" American. But whatever. If we call Obama black, then call me Irish. Yay for overgeneralized ethnic labels.

Now that it's March, one of the crummiest months of the year, it's time for everyone to start wearing that horrible Kelly green and CVS to break out the terrifying leprechaun pin ups and plastic hats.

You know how you can tell if someone has real Irish blood? They are scared shitless of leprechauns and fairies. All of you who saw Leprechaun before age 10? You're officially adopted Irish. My grandmother had a book of Irish fairy tales and folklore she gave me when I was a child, and I read it voraciously. Which is how I know to stay the fuck away from fairy circles and ruins, and don't talk to women with no feet you see on the road. And don't get drunk near wells. There are a lot of drunks in Irish folklore, and the sober people usually win.

Last year I wrote about how living in Cleveland is just like being Irish. This year, let's talk about assholes who search for the perfect Irish bar.

That's an article about this guy who's searching for his fairytale Irish pub, and he's writing a book about it. Cause there aren't enough of those.

“A good pub is a place devoted to conversation, with drink as the lubricant,” Mr. Barich said one evening last week. “In an American bar, the minute you finish your drink they say, ‘Do you want another?’ You’d never see that in a good pub.”

What else qualifies a "good Irish pub"? According to this guy, the bar must have:

- low key atmosphere
- traditional decor
- "warmth and fraternity"
- a "publican" ie owner who lives above or nearby the bar, leads impromptu singalongs, is "concerned about the welfare of his patrons" and doesn't ask you if you want another beer.

"An early candidate, R. McSorley & Sons, had “a musty dignity that spoke of permanence,” as Mr. Barich writes, and antique bric-a-brac on the walls. But soon after he became a regular the pub was sold and given a slick makeover by new owners, who told Mr. Barich that the old decorations were phony anyway — purchased for nostalgic effect."

I have never understood people's obsession with Old Ireland, and especially the Irish pub. It's like they don't understand that in Old Ireland, just like Old England and Old Europe and everywhere else 200 years ago, people worked 14 hour days digging peat, and bars became popular because they needed the alcohol to make themselves pass out so they could forget their shitty lives. Everyone was dirty, unhealthy, ugly, and uneducated. This Irish "conversation" he so lovingly refers to was the braying of men with middle school degrees trying to be smartasses. And, for the record, pretty much still is.

Also, the Irish being alcoholics is not a good thing. It's a terrible thing to have a husband, father, or mother, who drinks themselves to death because their life sucks so much. It's a bad thing to have a father you never see until he comes home late at night from the pub and beats the shit out of your mum because she says something about needing money to buy food. And then your mother forces the strictest version of Catholicism on you ever, and fills your life with priests and nuns who beat you again, just so you won't turn out like your dad. Then you get older, say 12, and start avoiding going home so you don't see your dad or your crying mom, and you start hanging out at the local pub with a bunch of other kids, scamming pennies from drunkards. Eventually you get a job yourself, and a wife, and you start hanging out at the bar every night trying to forget your dreams of youth and the fact that you don't find your wife attractive (maybe you're gay?) and you don't really believe in all this religious claptrap. And your nose gets horribly red, and your eyes get watery, and you die of heartbreak or liver disease.

See, that's my Irish stereotype.

Of course, the recent Irish aren't as bad as all that, right? They only used the pubs as a center of underground political terrorism designed to keep alive some of the most insidious corrupt political machines of all time. Or they used it as a stage to launch the most annoying kind of punk/Irish crap music imaginable. And now the Irish pub is a kinder, more impotent version of itself, where there's men who still like to talk about nothing, and do even less, and hard wood flooring, and way too many Guiness posters. But people seem to prefer this friendlier version of the pub, since there's 12 thousand of them in Lakewood alone. Now Irish Pub just means "2 dollar carbombs" and "lots of people who drink as much as you." Maybe that's all it ever really meant.

You know what else? There's nothing that irritates me more when I'm drunk than "celtic pop" or fucking U2.

So here's a nice big F U to Mr. Barich. The Irish don't have a tradition of good bars. They just have so many of them, some of them turn out well. Kind of like the Irish.