On the Issue of Relevance

Assimilation. Alienation. "Outsiderness". Cultural belonging.

From the moment I started this blog I wondered about its relevance to Irish, Irish immigrant, and Irish American experience. Anything I have felt or experienced may be atypical. I incorrectly relate social, cultural, or ethnic issues to personal matters.

Feeling culturally marginal—or rather culturally alien, and at times assuming a willfully rejectionist stance—may have less to do with cultural experience than I would like, and more with personal emotional issues.

Certainly, the Irish are famous assimilators. And Irish Americans have managed to out American Americans. It is one of the most interesting tenets of Maureen Dezell’s excellent Irish America: Coming Into Clover that many of the traits we consider American were actually urban Irish immigrant qualities from the turn of the century.

I really wonder if the subject of feeling divided over identity or loyalty—Irish
and American--might not actually inspire violence from one in my peer group,
that is, first-generation (Irish) American with serious experience and ties to
the old country?

Isn’t fierce Americanism part and parcel of I/Am
culture?

Isn’t conformity important to I/Am
culture?

Doesn’t this culture shun and reject any whiff of
embarrassment, problem, or scandal? Isn’t failing to fit in embarrassing,
problematical? This is the culture still, of worry over “providing
neighbours and peers with a good perception of one's own personal matters.” Of
Squinting Windows. They wouldn’t tell you if your coat was on fire. There is
no elephant in the living room . . .

In the early 90’s I worked and played music in a bar owned by the late, lamented Tommy McGann. That wave of 80’s immigrants I worked with and for whom I helped fill out Donnelly visas for so that they might stuff the ballot box—I believe one bartender submitted 247 applications—this generation seemed easily, eagerly American.

And yet. And yet. Good assimilators, or good fakers? Is conformity a first-generation experience, or a third? I don’t know enough of those like me. I am still feeling a bit “so unique [that I] may be incapable of envisioning a peer group with whom [I] can relate."

And then after Saint Patrick’s Day, the day that I played music for my high school classes, I received an email from a student thanking me; thanking me for making her happy for perhaps the first time since her mother passed away almost two years ago. Her email shocked me, it reminded me so much of my own experience, and it proved for me that even in 2005, walking and talking under cover of American behavior, American dress, American accents, American appearance, are individuals who are first-generation, complex, divided, and sometimes confused—and some of them are Irish.

Her email . . .