Stewart Neville (who participates as “Conduit” in the blogalogue at various writerly sites) is an Irishman with a hard-boiled fictional voice and a voice of sweet reason — or at least reason, period — when not constrained by a “Once upon a time… The End” frame.
His post yesterday offers up a case in point.
Here in the USA — which at least used to be an open-minded melting pot (maybe not in these days of fences and quotas and such) — we of course celebrate, for good or ill, a handful of ethnicity-inspired holidays: St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, Kwaanza, Bastille Day. But the Twelfth of July? Here’s Stuart:
One day in the Northern Irish calendar is more divisive than any other. A few words of explanation for my American friends: The 12th of July is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that commemorates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic forces of King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Yep, more than three hundred years have passed, and we still haven’t let it go.
The day is marked by parades throughout Northern Ireland, organised by Orange Lodges, featuring marching bands, much flag waving, and general bluster. When I was a little boy, the Twelfth was one of the highlights of the year, bettered only by Christmas and Easter. It’s hard to describe the feeling of a big bass drum being hammered to within an inch of destruction, the way it pounds your chest, along with the crackle of side drums, and the piercing melodies of dozens of not-quite-in-tune flutes. If you’re walking along, you can’t help but fall into step with the music.
What I don’t know about Irish history could fit in a stadium. (Think about it.) But there was something very familiar to me in this description of parades from Stuart’s childhood.
My sisters, brother, and I grew up in a household infused psychologically, if not audibly, with the sounds of those bass drums, snare drums, fifes, and bugles. Not that Mom and Dad were ultra-patriots, no. But they were both fans of “drum and bugle corps” music; Dad, in fact, co-founded a corps, the Jersey Joes, which won the national championship in 1948. (They actually met while Dad’s corps was practicing on the field at Mom’s high school — where she was a majorette.)
For us, naturally, the biggest national holiday was Memorial Day — always May 31 in the 1950s, before we became obsessed with three-day weekend convenience. The parades were thrilling — especially those featuring the Joes. We knew the men mostly as guys who liked Budweiser, the mysterious hidden workings of automotive engines and undercarriages, the next cigarette. None of this seemed compatible with these starched-uniformed, white-helmeted precision marchers who wielded their gleaming instruments with such confidence…
But the heart of Stuart’s post isn’t celebration. It lies, rather, in the “we still haven’t let it go” in the above excerpt.
The “it” in his case, of course, is the [fill in the blank] which continues to torture the Irish soul: nationalism; sectarianism; anger and hurt; memories of past injustice, vows of future vengeance.
Dozens of books no doubt — maybe hundreds — have been written which trace the arc of Ireland’s ongoing (although, one hopes, steadily improving) “Troubles.” Yet if you stand back and squint at it a bit, so you can’t see all the sharp Irish-defining edges, you (whoever you are) will probably recognize its blurry outlines:
Those people are different… They have their ways, we have ours… Don’t go into that neighborhood… Don’t let them into OURS… I knew a guy once who trusted one of them and boy, wait till I tell you what happened to him… They screwed us over, bad. Now it’s payback time… You want to marry WHO?!?…
And so on. And so on. And so on.
I’m no historian. It’s hard enough for me to come up with a photograph of a family member of 50 years ago. (And if I somehow manage that, it’s hard enough for me to conjure up a name to go with it.) But I would love to read a real historian’s smart, well-considered, and above all even-tempered tracing of the arc of American patriotism from the 1940s to now — from the thumping bass drums which swelled little boys’ and girls’ hearts and minds with something they could barely understand, to what has become, far too often, the crabbed, xenophobic, “my flag, right or wrong!” 21st-century counterpart.
Stuart’s ruminations are right on the mark. All you gotta do is change the dates, the proper nouns, and the slurs.
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