Call them Ulster-Scots, not Scots-Irish

Hey Joe,

This is kind of a mild complaint. I found in your archives a letter from Grace from Washington, who essentially upbraided you for assuming liberals are mostly wealthy. What bugged me, however, was her (and your) constant use of the term "Irish" to describe the murderous Borderers that come up so often in your writing. The people you speak of, your people, came here mostly before the Revolution and were mostly either from Scotland or Ulster; they did not come as a whole but individually, not unlike the English and Pennsylvania Dutch. They just sort of filtered in. Now, surely, these people left their mark on America -- the violent frontier spirit, and surely their spirit lives on among the southern poor.

But the Irish-Americans, my people, are a different group altogether. The Ulstermen that dribbled in during America's early days were Protestants. The massive wave of Irish that poured into New York, Boston and New Orleans following the Famine were Catholics. While the Ulstermen, the people you misleadingly call the Scots-Irish, mostly scattered across the rural south, the Irish-Catholics are still mostly massed in New England, New York, Chicago and other northeastern urban areas. In fact, the two people have almost nothing in common (urban v. rural, yankee v. southern, blue v. red, green v. orange) and fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. The one thing they seem to have in common are their "bloody, blind, murderous aspects" -- that is, their mutual bloodlust, often for each other.

Part of what bugs me about our society is how everyone with white skin is assumed to be of the same background. There are no Irish, Ulster-Scots, Poles, French, Russians, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Swedes, Finns or Danes -- no, we're all "white." How frankly boring. I think it's just another symptom of the boringness(?) of American culture -- everyone is raised an only child in the suburbs, the offspring of two only children surrounded by "homes" and "families" exactly like their own, with no unique identity, and certainly no nationality aside from American, and America doesn't count, because it's so huge most Americans don't have anything to compare themselves to.

I think the concept of nationality is becoming obsolete, at least in America, and I worry about that. Sure, nationality leads to war, but our people don't seem to find that a bad thing, do we? Life is not supposed to be bland, suburban, peaceful and dead; it's supposed to be vibrant, thriving, alive and yes, violent. What we have now are middle-class suburban kids groping blindly for a sense of purpose and belonging -- and they label themselves jocks, preps, skaters and Goths, try to stake out an identity by their consumption choices, or join the military.

Patriotism, nationality, is necessarily not the belief that one's people are the best -- it's the appreciation of the view out one's bedroom window, the things one did for fun growing up, the friends and community one was surrounded by, the lullabies one was sung to as an infant. Who wouldn't kill and die for the defense of that? The problem is that America is too big to kill and die for every corner of it, and its ideals are no longer pure enough for kids to kill and die to defend. Unfortunately, this also means to doings of Washington seem far-off and irrelevant, making people forget that they still have to obey federal law.

I don't know what I'm trying to say here. Basically, we've forgotten our Old World heritages and have given our entire histories over to a 400-year-old youngster of a civilization, which doesn't work, makes us restless and makes all American problems seem too big to handle.

Ulster-Scots might be a better term than Scots-Irish.

Solidarity,

Colin
Burlington, Vermont

PS. Have you heard of the band Green Day? I imagine your first reaction would be that they're a bunch of pussy middle-class crybabies and Jon Stewart liberals. However, their latest album, a rock opera called American Idiot, is a very cohesive look at liberal middle-class youth restlessness, confusion and apathy. I'd highly recommend, if you've got the Internet for it, going to YouTube and looking up their videos "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and "Jesus of Suburbia."

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Yo Colin !

I couldn't agree more, and in the future I will differentiate between the Ulster Scots immigrants and the Irish immigration. I guess I used the term Scots-Irish for the sake of reader familiarity and its common usage in America. My choice also illustrates my Southern cultural bias. Most of us down here barely know of the Irish immigration. Well, we know it only from public school history books, but that's all. And besides, your people are Catholic, which to my people were an imaginary cult of baby eaters in Rome. The same Rome that spawned that Italian gang that killed Jesus.

In any case, I'm with you on everything you wrote. Period.

I too have been seeing the growing restlessness among the thinking liberal middle-class youth of suburbia. I do believe that their inheritance will be the big shakeup is coming -- actually a collapse of the American lifestyle that keeps everyone so blind. And I think those kids will be around to help change direction when that happens. I won't be around, so I'll just have to trust them.

Here's how I see it:

Life is long. Cultural stupidity is longer. But I think stupidity (and even Einstein acknowledged its existence) is necessarily self-extinguishing in the long run, which is why it's considered stupid. But it snuffs out only after it has fucked everything up so badly it cannot be redeemed. Then it is replaced by a newer, somewhat less murderous form of stupidity, and we call that replacement human progress and evolution.

Nasty business this stuff called life, this "mortal coil."  If I had it to do over again, I'd have bought better gin and fished a lot more.

In brotherhood,

Joe