by Frank Gannon
It seemed to me odd, when I first discovered it, that John Ford was an Irish guy. When I was a kid, I was surrounded by Irish people, and, because the Walt Whitman Theater was four blocks from my house, I was also, if you consider fifties American television and movies, pretty close to surrounded by westerns.
When I was a kid I would watch a movie that would be classified as a “western” almost every week. My absolute oldest television memory is of watching (half watching—I must have been four years old) an anthology series that featured old westerns. My mom told me that one of the first names I ever spoke was “Johnny Mack Brown.” She would do an impression of me saying it: “Johnny Mack Bwown! Johnny Mack Bwown!” This would cause me acute embarrassment in high school, but I got over it.
Johnny Mack Brown, certified cowboy movie star, was one of the recurring actors on the particular anthology show that I watched with my mom and my brother and sister. My mom told me later that, at the end of the show, she would ask me, my sister, and my brother, “Who is your favorite cowboy?” Mary and Bud had varying answers, but I would always answer “Johnny Mack Bwown!” I was, she told me later, just about screaming.
Johnny Mack Brown. Those four syllables are all that remains in my memory banks of that particular cowboy. I know that I said, “Johnny Mack Bwown” when asked the cowboy question. I have absolutely no idea who he is or what he looks like. I could not pick him out of a lineup.
Years later, I was going to look up “Johnny Mack Brown” and attach a face to the syllables, but I didn’t. It seemed purer to leave him as the only person I “know” only as a sound.
So, although I could have bumped into Johnny Mack Brown at an airport and not known it, he is real, to me, only as a sound. I do know that Johnny Mack Brown rode a horse and had a six-gun and wore one style of those hats. That’s about it.
Like “Johnny Mack Brown,” the concepts “Irish” and “western” were never quite clear in my young mind.
Even now, described in a certain manner, The Quiet Man sounds just like one of Ford’s westerns. There is an outsider who is a nice guy but, when aroused, capable of violence, something he’s really good at. There is a beautiful untamed landscape with a breathtaking, beautiful heroine, and there is, of course, the bad guy. The bad guy is also violent, but not as good at violence as the good guy is.
This good guy is a man of few words. He’s tall, and he is John Wayne, aka Marion Morrison. The first time we see him, he’s getting off a train. The voice we hear is the voice of his dead Irish mother:
Don’t you remember it, Seannie, and how it was? The road led up past the chapel and it wound and it wound. And there is the field where Dan Tobin’s bullock chased you. It was a lovely house, Seannie, and the roses, well your father used to tease me about them, but he was that fond of them too.
Wayne’s name is Sean Thornton. Ford had relatives named Thornton, and he liked to say that he was born “Sean.” The movie has a family feel to it. Ford’s brother Francis and his son-in-law Ken Curtis were in the cast, which is packed with Ford’s “regulars.” They were doing what they usually did for John Ford—making a western.
If you watch My Darling Clementine and follow it with The Quiet Man, there is no mistaking it. Those cowboys were really Micks with bigger hats.
THREE
Green Simians Within
In writing this book, I read a lot about the Irish coming to America. American history isn’t the prettiest story in the world, but Ireland’s role in American history is, at the beginning, a particularly ugly chapter. The theme is basically “Who gets to oppress whom this year?” Irish immigrants start out oppressed, then swiftly become the oppressor.
The eighteenth century was the first Irish immigration to America. The first wave was Protestant. They settled in the South. Like most immigrant groups, they were stereotyped (period drawings show the newly arrived Irish largely as a form of drunken monkey-men with porkpie hats and pipes in their mouths).
The next wave, the famine immigrants, was much larger. Period representations, drawings for newspapers, still emphasized the hats, the pipes, and the booze, but the monkeys seem to have gotten much more violent. These monkeys aren’t comic. They’re still funny looking, but they’re threatening, especially when they are drunk, and they are drunk all the time. America seems scared of these monkeys. One of the sons of these Irish people became the baddest man on the planet (circa 1880s), so maybe the drawings aren’t that fanciful.
This wave was, of course, largely Catholic. The first group of green monkeys (who had now morphed into southern gentleman planters and a few northern businessmen) actually tried to suppress the second green-monkey group. They largely failed. By the pre-Civil War era, it’s too late to suppress that second Irish group anymore. They are by now almost human.
In 2002 America you still find that little green monkeyman once in a while, but he’s usually confined to cereal boxes and Hallmark “humorous” Saint Patrick’s Day greeting cards, and he’s comic, not threatening. The truth is we’re just not that scary anymore. Even his kids are not threatened by Gerry Cooney.
It is very possible to be a first-generation Irish-American in 2002 America and be almost completely divorced from Ireland, a country that, until recently, made divorce against the law. I am a walking example. I can go (except for brief flashes near the middle of March) an entire year without having a single “Irish moment.” Nevertheless, the fatal Irish identity was still buried somewhere in my subconscious mind. One summer day a few years ago, it bobbed to the surface.
My “trigger” was rather unexpected, but, as my mom would say, there you go.
I was looking at a car with a mouth when I first decided to go to Ireland. It was a moment of, for me, deep meditation.
I was alone. I had just mowed the lawn. Whenever I mow the lawn I have “distant thoughts” because I don’t like to think about mowing the lawn. I went inside and took a shower. The television, the great meditative tool, was on. It was a show (I think it was PBS) about “low riders,” cars that are adapted to ride very slow, “bounce,” and look cool. The show features many of these cars and their owners. One car had Pez dispensers, filled with Pez, glued all over. Maybe two hundred Pez dispensers. This got my attention.
The owner of the car told the interviewer that this car “made him look friendly. Especially to girls.”
There was a low rider whose headlights had been turned into eyes. There were eyelashes and everything. There was a big nose on the hood. The best part, though, was the tongue. When the driver popped the hood latch, a big red tongue came out. “It made people laugh,” said the owner. The car was painted a deep metallic green.
When the owner popped the hood, the unseen narrator said, “They see this as a part of their native culture.”
That was my Jungian synchronicity Irish moment.
A green car with eyes and a mouth and a purple car with Pez dispensers. Native culture.
I began to think about my native culture. I grew up in New Jersey, so my native culture, to some, isn’t that great a culture. Bruce Springsteen is probably the first thing you think of when you say “New Jersey.” In 1984 I remember Ronald Reagan saying that his administration was deeply committed to that culture. Ronald Reagan said that during his re-election campaign. I remember thinking at the time that it was the most bullshit thing ever said by a politician.
Springsteen’s songs are about fast cars and Jersey girls and the Jersey shore, and, of course, the always-popular “broken dreams.” I remember when they almost made “Born to Run” the official state poem. A state senator objected to “Baby this town rips the bones from your back, it’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap” as bad for tourism.
Native culture. I have eight Bruce Springsteen albums, but for me the Paragon of New Jerseyism is Frank Sinatra. His songs are about women and broken dreams, but there are no cars (except the elegiac honking limousine horn in “September of My Years”).
If you want to tell something abo
ut a person’s culture, it is usually informative to examine his living area. In Do the Right Thing Danny Aiello’s pizza parlor “Wall of Fame” was given its proper cultural significance. The fact that there was not a single African-American on the wall was a telling anthropological pointer.
In my office, New Jersey is well represented. There is a framed letter I received from Frank Sinatra in a prominent position on my personal wall of fame. Sinatra sent me it thanking me for ridiculing Kitty Kelley (an apparent Irish woman) in a magazine article. I also have a framed copy of the Philadelphia Phillies 1964 roster and a Phillies button from 1980, the only year they were ever champions.
But the only Irish thing is an old sign that says “Help Wanted. No Irish Need Apply.” Every Irish-American has the same sign. It’s required.
In my albums it’s the same story: forty-five Sinatras, eight Springsteens, two Chieftains, and that terrible “the Irish Tenors” CD.
I began to feel more inadequate than I normally feel. Every year of my youth, when my family went to the Hibernian Saint Patrick’s Day Party I had heard one Irish guy ask another Irish guy this question. This was always followed by obscenities, so even then I knew it was not a good thing to be asked.
“What kind of Irishman are you?”
What kind of Irishman was I? I could hear a voice: “You wouldn’t put a patch on an Irishman’s ass!” I knew what kind of Irishman I was. I wear green on Saint Patrick’s Day, that’s what kind of Irishman I am.
This started to bother me. I was two-thirds through my life and I hadn’t even been to Ireland once. I had never even kept up with my Irish relatives. I barely kept up with my Irish relatives in America. The idea of dying before I even bothered to see where I was from was a sad, sad thing.
So I watched the green car with the eyes and the mouth and I thought about Ireland. I wouldn’t put a patch on an Irishman’s ass. I didn’t know what that meant, but it bothered me.
It is an often-made observation that there are more Irish people in America than in Ireland. Because of this, there are a lot of people like me, Irish people whose idea of Ireland is based on something that has no basis in reality. The authentic reality is the result of many sad circumstances—the potato famine, the English, the Irish economy, the English, and so on. But this situation has created a huge market for stuff that is directed at the “Irish Diaspora,” Irish people who know nothing about Ireland, but feel a little guilty about it once in a while.
I feel a little sympathy toward these people because I’m one of them. It’s very strange to consider: all these Irish people with a substitute country. But as with most things in the modern world, there is no “solution.” Ireland is a tiny island, which is relatively sparse in population. If the population of the “Irish Diaspora” were all sent to Ireland, the entire island would be as tightly packed as New Jersey. If there were enough guys like me, it might turn into Jersey. Then what would we do?
All these people need their absent Ireland, and they get infusions of it on a regular basis. The highbrow Diaspora gets a never-ending stream of books that connect Ireland with everything in America. Ireland and Walt Whitman. Ireland and Thoreau. Ireland and Joseph Campbell. The mythic area here is a particularly rich lode, and the racks of Barnes and Noble are filled with examinations of Oisin’s wanderings and Queen Maeve’s thoughts. Plus wind chimes.
The longing for the Old Country has, in America, taken on a New Age aspect that is disturbing. It is responsible for the marketing of an appalling array of Celtic spiritualism that takes the form of “Celtic” CDs, meditation guides, and God knows what. This is a regrettable phenomenon, but at least it is (sort of) Irish in nature. In a group as large as Irish America, there has to be a huge number of Windham Hill fanciers.
Those guys are the Irish-Americans who have been to college. IQ-challenged members of the Diaspora (God knows there is no shortage) have their marshmallow-flecked cereal, their oddly blue soap, and, most important, their many, many varieties of alcohol. (It’s all alcohol, but hey, I’ve seen people in Wildwood, New Jersey, argue about the merits of Bushmills versus Jamesons as if they actually tasted it before they swallowed.)
All these people also, of course, have to get back to Ireland and comb through it for whatever threads are to be found. Ireland right now is covered with every variety of American root-seeker. I know a fifth-generation dentist who has just returned from such a journey. He must have truly awesome genealogical abilities.
Irish America magazine is a thriving (and very well done) bimonthly periodical aimed at just this massive audience. You would think that a magazine that comes out six times a year and has, as its sole focus, Irish people in America would run out of things to say, but that is emphatically not the case. Irish America is larger than most countries, and Irish America is, in 2001, an extremely healthy publication.
Irish America, in all its numbers, is an enormously powerful cultural and economic force, but this has not always been the case, and that fact has a permanent position in the Celto-American (a new one!) cranial cavity. We used to be those monkeys, remember that? How can you forget? Here’s a “No Irish Need Apply” sign. Put it in your den.
As has been often noted, this whole phenomenon has more to do with power of numbers than anything else. Twenty-first-century Irish America likes to say, like Stephen Crane’s MAN, “Sir, I exist!” I have a lot of money and it’s time that everybody notices me. Okay, you’re noticed. Here’s a magazine. You want anything else? Plane tickets?
Although there have been a lot of Irish in America for centuries, much of Irish America’s past has been spent as a minor bit player in the movie of America. “Laborers and servants,” however numerous, don’t get to be the stars of the movie. There is no Irish Stable Boy magazine.
Today, however, Irish America contains leaders of industry and the arts. Has the monkey-man vanished? He is rare, but he can still be seen. Mister 2002 Irish-American need only walk through any greeting card display in March and see the same little green guy sitting on a rack, who says to him as he passes, “You are still a mick. Get used to it.”
At this point this Irish-American man’s green-man-group message doesn’t bother him much. He doesn’t write any letters or call any congressmen. He’s above the fray now. His reaction is A, Doesn’t notice, or B, Mild bemusement.
He walks out of the drugstore to get into his fine Japanese automobile and drives to an Italian restaurant with his Swedish girlfriend. His arrogance is well-grounded, this one. He knows certain facts that cannot be taken from him: In 1960 a monkey was elected president of these United States. When he turns on his high-definition television he sees the simian Peter Lynch walking in the rarefied air of big money, of cubic American Benjamins. What is he? Third generation?
The Irish-American has a sip of his Jamesons and thinks of where he is in the American structure, and he concludes that he’s not anywhere near the basement. He thinks, Am I to weep over a pig? The dog barks but the caravan goes on. I am a complex, well-paid human being. Need I concern myself with some little green monkey grinning at me on a rack at Walgreen’s?
But we like it here. Most Irish people who have come to America stayed here. I think, if everything were the same except that my parents had gotten rich in America, they still would have stayed in America. Irish people get along well with America. There are a variety of reasons for this. Many Irish people never even had the option of returning home, of course, but I don’t think that there was, even for a second, a “get some dough and return to the Old Country” thing working in my parents’ brains.
We speak the language, after all. A lot of first-generation Irish people made a huge social leap in one generation. Peasant to vice president in one generation. But now is a very good time to be an Irish guy in America because 2002 America is “being buried in Irish shit,” as an acute (at that moment) Irish-American friend put it.
This is, I guess the American Celtic revival. The first one, the one over there with W. B. Yeats and
Lady Gregory, was a whole lot lower on the bullshit scale, but this is, after all, America.
It’s all bullshit, but we gotta have it. The Chieftains have gone the way of Shirley MacLaine/Riverdance. Where they once made beautiful versions of ancient Irish songs on ancient Irish instruments, they now have achieved great spiritual authenticity and their recent records are largely only played to force suspects to confess.
But who is this audience? Who buys this shit?
Yes, the woeful people in America with Irish-sounding last names. For some of us Ireland is a mythic land of Tir Nan Og with Michael Flately dancing on the shore while some chick named Moira sings like Joni Mitchell on nitrous oxide.
The real reason that the Irish in America (no matter how remote) have a bottomless appetite for this crap may be this: The most basic thing about being Irish isn’t any of the things we often associate with it. It isn’t a great sense of humor or a great talent for tragedy. It’s the fact that Ireland is the most spiritual place on earth, and the major legacy that Irish people have always, in one form or another, left to their children is a deep abiding faith in God.
In America, of course, that’s really not much of a possibility. So Irish people like to fill up the space with Ossian and Moira’s divination keening followed by a large dose of dancers in those long lines.
When there is a hole you try to fill it. The spiritual hole in the middle of Irish America contains a whole lot of Celtic Moods CDs.
But for those Irish-Americans who just can’t take “Yanni Plays the Druids,” there is, of course, the thing itself. The eastern half of Ireland may be turning into America, but the western half is, in a lot of ways, the same place my parents left. Go back there, or go back to there, and, my son, you don’t need any Celtic moods. You can go to the damn Catholic church and get your mood there, I can hear Dad say.
