Category: Social Media

St. Patrick’s Day: An Alternative History

Stuck between The Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day, March 16th is probably the most neglected day on the calendar.  It shouldn’t be: after all, The Ides of March was really just a minor Roman festival before Brutus and Cassius decided that power came out of the pointy end of a dagger.  Frankly, if Julius Caesar had been feeling a bit frisky that morning and gone over to Cleopatra’s instead of to the Senate, we wouldn’t remember The Ides of March, at all.  Plutarch wouldn’t have written about it, and Shakespeare wouldn’t have borrowed it to add a little spooky to his play Julius Caesar.  As Katherine Hepburn once said, about an unrelated matter, “Such is the role of sex in history.”

This minor change (given the tenor of the times Caesar was going to get his one way or the other) would have made March 16th a bigger day: Saint Patrick’s Eve, perhaps; just as Hallowe’en is All Hallows’ Eve and December 24th is Christmas Eve.  Unlike the Ides of March, which needed an assassination to put it on the map, St. Patrick’s Day is one of the big boy holidays.  It is so connected to Ireland that even if Saint Patrick hadn’t become the kick-ass saint he was destined to be, the Irish would have made him up – which, for the most part, they probably did.

There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Saint Patrick was a real guy.  His life is actually pretty well documented (for the time.)  At least two letters he wrote are considered authentic, which doesn’t seem like much but when you consider most everybody in the 5th century was an illiterate peasant, it’s a lot.  However, that’s where it ends.  Most of the juicier details of his life are actually just high-end speculation.  There are no snakes in Ireland and there are a lot of shamrocks but we have no documented proof that either had anything to do with Saint Patrick.  In fact, there is actually no record in the Vatican of his ever even being canonized.  He is the patron saint of Ireland by tradition alone.  Likewise, the stories of his exploits were probably just good press for a church that was fighting tooth and nail against some long-established pagan gods.

The early Christians weren’t stupid.  They knew that a single God was a hard sell to superstitious people who had always worshipped a pantheon of pagan deities.  So they turned a bunch of ordinary people — who had led virtuous lives — into saints.  These saints weren’t gods, but they were already in heaven.  Thus, they were able to perform miracles in aid of the living and could be invoked in prayer, just like the old gods of the forest that the people were accustomed to.  Then, the Christian church went one step further and made it all personal.   They invented the patron saint, who had a personal interest in you.  Whether through your occupation, your birthday, where you lived or some other circumstance, a number of saints were available just for you, to handle your earthly problems.  The local river nymphs didn’t stand a chance against that kind of firepower, and Christianity came to dominate Europe.  Interestingly enough, though, these days, even ahead of Saint Patrick, the universally accepted symbol of Ireland is the leprechaun.

For centuries, St. Patrick lounged around in the same secular/celestial neighbourhood as St. Andrew, St. David and St. George, first among equals in the regions they represented but not that well-known beyond the borders.  (For example, most non Scots get St. Andrews Day and Robbie Burns Day hopelessly confused.)  But then, in the 1840s, the potato crop failed and Ireland began to starve.  First, the old people died and then the children.  Mothers abandoned their babies rather the watch the inevitable.  Whole villages turned their backs on their homes and roamed the countryside, looking for anything to eat — including the grass that grew in the ditches.  Without hope and forsaken by the future, the Irish left Ireland by the thousands to go anywhere beyond this despair.  In the 19th century the Irish Diaspora was huge: an army of homesick exiles, driven from their land.  Isolated in their adopted countries, by their speech, their customs and their religion, they clung together, keeping their traditions alive.  It was here — in the Irish ghettos of New York and Boston, Melbourne and Montreal — that St. Patrick’s Day was born.  It had always been a religious holiday in the old country, but far from home, St. Patrick’s Day became a time to drink a toast, sing the old songs and try to remember that which had once been.  A day of Irish pride far from the graves of their families, it was the slender thread that could take their hearts home.

Today is March 16th, the most neglected day on the calendar, but tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, the party where everyone is Irish.  So, at some point in the festivities, pause for a moment, and raise your glass to St. Patrick, a virtuous man, good enough to be turned into a legend by the early Christian spin doctors.  Then, raise it once more to all those nameless Irish immigrants who carried him with them, around the world.

May yer neighbours respect ya
Troubles neglect ya
The angels protect ya
And heaven accept ya*

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

*(Did you just read that in an Irish accent?)

Food: A Western Self Indulgence

I have never wondered why a good portion of the earth’s population is so mad at our society they want to kill us.  It seems self evident to me.  We, as a society, have tons of stuff – more stuff than we’re ever going to need.  In fact, if you think about it, we have lots of stuff we don’t even want.  We have stuff we don’t remember how to use, stuff that has no function at all and stuff that spends its entire existence in a box in the basement.   I’m not talking about stupid stuff like Aunt Edna’s ugly souvenir lamp or the “it seemed like a good idea at the time” electric shoeshine kit.  I’m talking about the regular things that ordinary people have.  The kind of stuff people around the world see when they look at us.  The stuff that makes them say, “WTF are those people doing with all that stuff.”

You don’t have to look very hard to see the enormity of what we have compared to everybody else in the world – just take a look at food.  We have food in such abundance that whole aisles in our grocery stores are devoted to soda pop (grossly over-sugared water) and potato chips.  Think about that.  We take thousands and thousands of acres of perfectly good, nutritious potatoes and turn them into snacks.  That’s the food we eat off-handedly — between meals.  We plant them, harvest them, process them, add at least a dozen artificial flavors, salt the hell out of them, bag them and sell them by the carload.  That bag of All-Dressed you’re saving for the ballgame was once the only thing between an Irish family and starvation.  These days, during the playoffs, it doesn’t even last until half-time.

Our society’s gourmand self indulgence is beyond measure.  We’ve bred food for aesthetics alone.  Apples and oranges are all the same size.  Tomatoes are round and uniformly red.  I’m surprised onions still make us cry.  When I was a kid nobody liked the little black seeds in the bananas; now they’re gone.  For that matter, when was the last time you and the bros spit watermelon seeds at each other?  Not only that, but in Japan, for a hundred bucks, you can get your watermelons square if you want.

We have food in such variety that we don’t even recognize some of it.  We have food that looks and tastes like other food.  Can’t afford crab?  Surimi is half the price.  Don’t want to eat meat?  Barbeque a veggie burger.  We have bacon made out of turkey.  A sugar substitute that brags it’s made out of sugar.  What is the possible reason for having a substitute food that’s made out of the very food you’re substituting it for?  We have an artificial butter that is made from corn; the same organic base as ethanol and synthetic motor oil.  Think about that the next time you have a tuna sandwich.

We have food that doesn’t exist in nature.  No one, to my knowledge, has ever picked a red berry, or a mixed berry.  No one has ever harvested an oat cluster or a wheat flake, and nothing that runs, floats or flies looks anything like the chunks of whatever I’ve found in some processed meals.  And speaking of processed food, there’s food on the ready-to-eat shelf with so many additives in it it’s actually poison.  That’s the scary stuff whose new and improved label boasts 25% less sodium or sugar.

We have food that doesn’t even claim to be food.  There is at least one something out there that proudly calls itself a meal replacement.

Meanwhile, back at the grocery store walk around the corner from the soda pop and you’ll find an entire aisle committed to food for our pets.  A whole row, two metres high and ten metres long, packed on both sides with different kinds of food for animals – dogs, cats, birds and hamsters.  We have food especially processed for kittens, for God’s sake.

And who gets all this food?  Bill Gates?  George Soros?  That 1% everybody’s always ragging on?  No!  This food is available to 95% of the population – anytime, everytime.  You don’t want to hear the carpin’ and bitchin’ that goes on if any grocery store runs out of Chocolate Cheerios™.  And I’m not even talking about what’s out there for those folks who don’t bother to shop or cook their own food.  There’s a whole different industry devoted to them.

Now, remember this is just food — not water, or power, or clothing or any of the other goodies our society has to offer.  Each one of them is also available to us, in nearly infinite variety.

To anybody looking at us from the outside it must look like insanity.  We must look like 21st century debauchery incarnate — reckless hedonists with the morals of Attila the Hun, Henry VIII and Jean Des Esseintes, rolled into one irresponsible brat whose only concern is self-gratification.

We are the people our parents warned us about.  It’s no wonder that — to a lot of people — we look like the bad guys.

The Twitterpatter of Little Tweets

I’m way too old to understand Twitter.  I know what it is – obviously – I don’t live in a cave.  But I have no emotional attachment to it; therefore, I can’t possibly understand it.  It’s always been my experience that you have to care about something before you can figure out how it works.  For example, I don’t care how the microwave works: zap my burrito and I’ll be on my way.  It might be heat; it might be light; for all I know it might be a little guy with a blow torch.  The transformation from frozen to food doesn’t interest me.  Twitter, however, fascinates me.  Unfortunately, I’m not young enough to see it as an intimate part of life.  I grew up with other things that take precedence.  It’s as if I were my own grandfather, trying to understand why everybody is so captivated by the magic box in the living room where grey-tone Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz live.  It’s nice, but I’ve got other things to do.

Twitter is changing the way we live — D’uh!  But, not in that vacant “everybody’s on Facebook” kind of way.  Yes, everybody’s on Facebook, but most of us have figured out that while Facebook works fine as an ego repository, nobody’s going to change the world by clicking the “Like” icon.  Twitter is more than just being connected, putting on the brag and showing everybody our pictures.  It actually makes us communicate.  Not since the Golden Age of letter writing, when the Victorians introduced regular and inexpensive mail service, has there been such an outpouring of social communication.  It’s as if there’s a gigantic cocktail party going on, 24/7, and everyone’s invited.  Of course, as at any cocktail party, there are a bunch of dolts over by the food, talking nonsense, and most of the rest of the room is as dull as my half-heated burrito.  However, interesting people will gravitate to each other (or to the bar) and Twitter lets them do that – on a scale worthy of the pyramids.

A couple of rainy afternoons ago, I wandered through this electronic booze cruise and randomly gleaned (“stole” is such a hard word) some of this good stuff.  The kicker is it only took me a little over an hour and here are just a few of the results.  I’ve changed them slightly from Twitterspeak.

I wish I had two more middle fingers for you.
Deja Moo: Same old bull
I have heels higher than your standards.
I hope when the shark comes, you don’t hear the music.
Are you Voldemort’s child?
Don’t you think if I was wrong, I would know it?
I can only aspire to be the person my dog thinks I am.

I could go on and on.  If Dorothy Parker were alive today, her head would explode.  The entire world is playing Algonquin Hotel, and Twitter is the Round Table.

Yet, even as you read this, people are lamenting the passing of the written word and damning YouTube for filming the eulogy.  They see texting and Twitter as mind-numbing barbarians who are putting Shakespeare’s quill pen legacy to the sword.  However, there are more words being written today than at any other time in human history.  There are more words being read, more conversations taking place and more ideas being exchanged.  Certainly, most of them are crap, but that’s the nature of democracy: everybody gets a voice.  My point is, though, so far, Twitter is not only saving the written word (140 characters at a time) it’s finding its own place in history.  It, along with texting, are reviving the art of written communication that cheap and easy telephones almost destroyed.   Young people all over the world are thumbing away at each other, sitting in schools and at the dinner table looking down at their crotches and laughing.  The wit and wisdom of the 21st century is sitting there — right in their lap.

This is the Twitter revolution that I’m never going to be able to understand.  I think it’s a wonderful, magical thing, but, as Mark Twain would have texted, “Too bad Tweets are wasted on the young.”