Beam Me Up, Paddy

So here’s another St. Patrick’s Day, reminding me of a place where I’d once belonged. My ancestors left me no memories, but I can imagine why they had to leave. For here we are again, governed by strings of arrogant, corrupt and bloodthirsty profiteers.

As the Irish Socialists wrote in 1908:

“We came here because we found that the government of the country was in the hands of those proprietors and their friends, and that army and navy and police were the agents of the government in executing the wit of those proprietors, and for driving us back to our chains whenever we rose in revolt against oppression. And as…that government was backed and maintained by the might of a nation other than our own, and more numerous than us, we could not hope to overthrow that government and free our means of living from the grasp of those proprietors. We fled from that land of ours and came to the United States.”

So my forebears came as workers, and yet all too soon, they—not the Irish Socialists, of course, but the Irish I knew—set out to prove themselves to the society that wouldn’t admit them into the country clubs. My father’s parents founded a travel company. Invisibly, they made good money in a spot on Chicago’s South Side after the Irish and Italians had moved out. The African-American manager was instructed not to tell the customers who actually owned the business, my mother told me.

In How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev explained race as a gateway to–and barrier against–social mobility. Everyone pretended it was real. So it was. One by one, groups of immigrants strived to identify themselves with the privileged class. This enabled the magnates to suck the life force out of the next batch. Ignatiev’s concept of the race traitor refers to those who have access to the privileges manufactured by white supremacy, but decide to align themselves with the have-nots.

For what is race? Social hierarchy, made up by the people with land and weapons, gold and silver. Producing workers for plantations, the 18^th-century ship-factory constructed race, Marcus Rediker observed in The Slave Ship. Captains hired motley crews of sailors, who would, on the African coast, become white. The crews went after multi-ethnic groups of Africans who, after surviving the voyage to the Americas, would be described as the negro race.

The race traitor rejects and thereby devalues the currency of race. The race traitor brings an understanding of the world that neither lies for you nor betrays you.

Conditions We Left Behind

For just a few days, I brought myself to the place where my ancestors lived. It was the late 80s, when I was an airline worker. I brought my mother. She spotted a bridge with my father’s name on it. She’d told me about it several times when I was growing up, but could it be real? That’s where your father’s grandfather would pass out drunk.

It was a few years before Sinéad O’Connor wrote Famine. The song describes the ethnic cleansing and the starvation of the Irish people by England’s forces—bolstered by the Roman Catholic popes and priests who called the destruction of a culture God’s will. And it describes the way alcoholism, addiction, and abuse tormented the survivors and their descendants.

In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine things could have been different here. We lived on stolen land. The name of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team originated with Chief Black Hawk, who survived a gruesome, genocidal attack, the slaughter at Bad Axe, only to live as a prisoner of war. Andrew Jackson had Black Hawk dressed in European-American clothing and displayed as a war trophy as the conquerors moved west.

And now here we are. A society in which wealth and income inequality have reached surreal levels. With a bunch of proprietors jostling for position, flinging missiles at the cost of billions of dollars, while there’s no money for public education or care for people’s basic well-being.

As the Irish Socialists wrote more than a hundred years ago:

“In the United States we find that every day the condition of matters for the working class drifts more and more in the direction of the conditions we left behind…Here also we find that government is but the weapon of the master class, that the military and police forces of the nation are continually at the service of the proprietors in all disputes just as in Ireland, and that the ‘rifle diet’ is served out to workers in America oftener than to peasants in the old country.”

The lesson, wrote the Irish Socialists, is plain. “We must fight against in America that which plundered and hunted us in Ireland…”

Enemy of Life Writ Large

The Irish Socialists pointed to the private ownership of land and machinery, which leads to division, class hierarchies, and enslavement: “It is the enemy of the human race.”

It is, we might add, the enemy of life writ large.

Much has been said about Trump’s bigoted reposting of the Obama couple portrayed as nonhuman apes. The Irish (and others designated non-white at various times) have been subjected to similar tropes.

Apes and Angels author L. Perry Curtis Jr. noted that Queen Victoria’s chaplain, Charles Kingsley, called peasants in Ireland white chimpanzees. Curtis added:

“Later in the century, a new chimpanzee was brought to the London Zoo…the new inmate was called Paddy, and an amusing article in The Strand Magazine described him as follows: For Paddy certainly is a gentleman, since he wipes his mouth after drinking, and would be a master of polite manners could he overcome his shyness.”

Curtis placed this gibberish from the 1892 magazine issue in context. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had appeared just three decades earlier. For British society, “pressures of upward social mobility were already disturbing the recently entrenched middle classes who had no wish to share their status and neighborhood…”

And we do class hierarchy on a whole-planet level. In the Peaceable Kingdom archetype, the wolf is brought to heel. A human child assumes leadership and control of the Earth’s most formidable beings. As for actual free-living cats and wolves, humans kill them, conquer them, breed them, and build whatever we like on their ancestral habitats, wrecking natural systems as we go. And now we are pulling our climate apart, with little regard for the living communities that cannot adapt.

Ireland is a small island. When glaciers melt, the waters rise. Coasts erode; cliffs crack and crumble. How much time is left before the sea begins to reclaim those places where we once belonged? How will we know what has happened to the land we left, as our daily struggles continue?

We’re all primates. Our lack of self-respect for our role on this Earth is becoming ever more obvious and appalling. Can we learn to be traitors to the proprietor’s mindset, wherever it is found? Maybe that’ll get us into heaven before the devil knows we’re dead.

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