What has 2010 in store for Irish America?

It’s been another wild year for Irish Americans, but what will next year bring?

Sit back as we gaze into the crystal ball. What will each month of 2010 bring?

JANUARY: Following the success of their tacky new reality show Jersey Shore, in which Italian Americans proudly act like buffoons and call themselves “guidos,” MTV announces its next reality venture -- Irish Riviera. That’s right, MTV will throw a bunch of Irish lads and lassies into a Rockaway Beach bungalow while we sit back and watch the fireworks.
The guys and gals philosophize about religion, Northern Ireland and whether or not they will get a “Mick” or “donkey” tattoo, following a breakfast of Irish car bombs.

FEBRUARY: Susan Boyle releases an album of Valentine’s Day love songs.
Executives from her record label declare that Boyle will single-handedly save the recording industry.
They also announce that Boyle will be releasing an album of St. Patrick’s Day favorites in March, and Easter classics in April.

MARCH: The “St. Patrick’s Day Riots” of 2010 break out in Hollywood. American actors are angry that advertising executives have decided to actually use actors from Ireland to do commercial voiceovers.
“Who knew there were so many folks born speaking with that cool accent?” one commercial director is quoted as saying. “We’ve been killing ourselves all these years trying to match the realism and authenticity of The Quiet Man.”
Also in time for St. Patrick’s Day, despite protests from all corners of the Irish diaspora, MTV unveils two more Irish-themed reality shows.
First there’s Natives vs. Narrowbacks, in which hip Irish immigrants live side by side with the not-so-hip children of Irish immigrants.
Then there’s Real World: Belfast, in which former paramilitaries from both sides of the Northern divide are now charged with the task of running a chip shop in a Polish-Nigerian enclave.

APRIL: Susan Boyle cancels the release of her Easter album. Rumors swirl that she needs radical throat surgery. Record label executives deny the rumors, and announce that Boyle will be releasing albums of classic songs about Memorial Day, Father’s Day and the Fourth of July.

MAY: Despite a letter of concern from the Pope and numerous resignations, the Catholic Church crisis will not end in Ireland. Converts to the church of Ireland, Judaism and the newly-formed Cathedral of Sinead rise steeply.
The Pope writes another letter of concern.

JUNE: Not content with writing a column for The New York Times and working on a freelance basis as world savior, Bono takes a leave of absence from U2.
U.S.-Irish tensions rise when President Barack Obama and Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen offer the singing superstar cabinet-level positions. In a wide-ranging interview with 60 Minutes, Bono refuses to rule out any offers.

JULY: Seamus Heaney and Eminem release a spoken word CD entitled White Lightning.
AUGUST: Susan Boyle finally emerges with a healthy singing voice. Executives at her record label try to convince her to record an album of American folk classics.
Boyle, instead, performs a racy duet alongside Lady GaGa on MTV.

SEPTEMBER: Having made movies about the wrongfully imprisoned, a tortured artist who must eat with his feet and, most recently, two brothers who torture themselves because of a domineering father, Irish cinema genius Jim Sheridan announces his next project -- a 12-hour documentary about one, small cemetery outside of Dublin. The only script for the project will be random excerpts from the plays of Samuel Beckett.

OCTOBER: Bono engineers a coup, is named Irish prime minister.

NOVEMBER: Colin Farrell appears in a movie people have heard of.

DECEMBER: Irish church leaders plead with the Pope. They say that only a papal visit to Ireland will help heal the wounds left in the wake of the sex abuse scandal.
Pope writes another letter, promises to get back to them in 2011.

Happy New Year!

Tiger Woods and the immigration dilemma

Irish-born World War II veteran James Patrick O’Donnell has lived a long, vibrant life. He came to the U.S. at the age of four with his family.

He fought alongside members of the greatest generation, serving as a machine gunner in Europe. He then lived in New York and Connecticut for decades before moving to the south to care for an ailing family member.

Along the way, of course, O’Donnell became an American citizen.

Or so he thought.

While enlisting in the military, O’Donnell filed all the paperwork required to become a U.S. citizen. But, according to a news story which recently ran on a Fox network channel in Tennessee, O’Donnell was not, in fact, a citizen.

He told the Memphis TV station, "When I was discharged they had on my discharge papers that I was a citizen. I assumed I was a citizen all that time."

But O’Donnell’s paperwork had never been processed. This snafu remained undetected -- you might say O’Donnell remained an undocumented immigrant -- until he applied for a passport.

That’s when he discovered he had technically never become an American citizen. That oversight was finally corrected earlier this month, when O’Donnell officially became an American citizen.

That’s a nice story if we leave it at that. However, as we exit the 9/11 decade, and venture into the uncharted territory of the 2010s, we also know that immigration remains the most perplexing issue on the American landscape.

Maybe we are glad when a Tiger Woods media frenzy comes along. Why?

Because it gives everyone a break from the impossible task of trying to figure out how to reform America’s immigration system.

But, make no doubt about it. If the war on terror kicked off this 2000s, and health care is drawing this decade to a messy close, then it is immigration which has remained the great, unresolved issue.

Will it remain that way in the coming years? Or worse, will the nativists and alarmists from Main Street to Congress win out by attempting to build unbuildable walls?

That’s not to say we should just lay out the welcome mat and hug every lunatic who wants to come to America.

Consider the recent arrests of five young Muslim men from Virginia, aged 18 -- 24, who had apparently been in contact with the Taliban for months.

If not for the Tiger Woods story, this story would be whipping up a broader anti-immigrant frenzy, and that would be somewhat understandable.

This case is disturbing for many reasons. First and foremost, it undermines the arguments that Muslim youths tend to grow disenchanted and radicalized in Europe, whereas, in America, they tend to assimilate.

These five look like very dangerous fellows, even though they were born in the ol’ U.S.A.

And just this Monday, a court in Pakistan -- where the five men were detained when they suddenly hopped on a plane without telling family members just after Thanksgiving -- ruled that the case must be reviewed by Pakistani authorities.

This means the men will not be sent back to the U.S. for possible prosecution for some time, if ever.

You can see why many people might say, “We should never have let them over here in the first place.”

What a tragic turn of events that would be. And don’t just think about cuddly old veterans such as James Patrick O’Donnell.

Think about all of the immigrants -- Irish, Mexican, Dominican, Russian, and yes, Pakistani -- who have transformed neighborhoods from Queens to Los Angeles.

A recent editorial in the New York Daily News analyzed an extensive report by the Fiscal Policy Institute and

Declared, “Immigration has, in fact, been a vital force in the American economy.

Even in tough times, immigrants boost or replenish the labor pool and inject entrepreneurial energy that opens businesses and creates jobs … providing a road to citizenship for those who are here, while fixing gaping holes in enforcement, is the way to guarantee continued economic benefits for all

Americans.”

We spent this decade avoiding the immigration question. But I don’t think the Tiger Woods scandal will stick around for another 10 years.


(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Rebels, like George Carlin, taught us how to laugh

In his new, posthumous autobiography, the late, great George Carlin writes about how his Irish Catholic parents brought the legendary comedian into this world.

“I was conceived in a damp, sand-flecked room of Curley's Hotel in Rockaway Beach, New York. August 1936. At the Paramount Theater in Times Square, Bing Crosby and Frances Farmer starred in "Rhythm on the Range.''"

“Meanwhile at Curley's Hotel on Beach 116th Street, Mary and Patrick Carlin starred in yet another doomed Catholic remake of Rhythm in the Sack.”

Carlin’s mom (Mary, of course) was the daughter of a cop. His dad (Patrick!) often “drank, got drunk (and) hit people.” Where the stereotypes end and the memories begin is obviously hard to say.

Carlin continues, “For several generations, Rockaway Beach had been a favorite weekend retreat for New York's alcohol-crazed Irish youth in search of sex and sun.

“Popular ethnic slurs to the contrary, the Irish do enjoy sex -- at least the last 10 seconds or so. But we must admit that Irish foreplay consists of little more than ‘You awake?’ Or the more caring, sensitive ‘Brace yourself, Agnes!’"

You can punish Carlin for pandering to negative thoughts about the Irish. But with this new book (completed just before Carlin died this summer) as well as the passing of troubadour Liam Clancy last week, I was reminded of just how rare it is to find authentic rebels who can also make you smile.

These days, so many so-called rebels aim to fire you up with their righteous indignation. Perhaps it’s always been that way.

All the more reason to cherish the likes of Carlin and Clancy, one a child of Irish New York, the other an adopted son by way of Tipperary.

Carlin and Clancy, like so many Irish Catholics of humble origins, had every reason to have chips on their shoulders.

But rather than shout and rage earnestly, they entertained, and along the way changed the world around them in profound ways.

It’s hard to say who had the more difficult task. Carlin aspired to be a comedian at a time when “heck,” was a dirty word.

Clancy wanted to play complex Irish tunes to audiences who wanted little more than sturdy classics such as “Molly Malone.”

A year ago it was my privilege to interview Clancy for Irish America magazine.

Clancy explained that his music was, at first, received coldly by many in New York’s conservative Irish community.

“Irish Americans weren’t really interested in us. Pete Seeger played with us. A lot of people said, ‘They’ve got a Communist up there.’ So most of our audience were folkies and liberal Jews.”

This could have made Clancy bitter. This could have turned him away from Irish Americans, and even Irish music.

But he understood that there was power and beauty and plenty of raucous comedy in the ballads the Clancys and Tommy Makem would make famous. They changed the way people think about Irish music.

Then there’s Carlin. Let me be clear -- he could at times be so stridently anti-Catholic, anti-church and, frankly, anti-human, that he was a little hard to listen to.

Doesn’t change the fact that, just as often, he was riotously funny.

Since Carlin liked to dabble in negative stereotypes about the Irish, we might as well dabble in a positive one.

He had a distinctly Irish love of language and its intricacies, and a fierce yet familiar loathing of hypocrites that stretches back to Jonathan Swift.

Swift, however, could never get a belly laugh like Carlin.

Carlin, of course, was famous for his expletives and his bit on “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”

But way back in the early 1970s, he also performed a bit called “I Used to be Irish Catholic.” And it was not a rant against perverted priests and knuckle-bashing nuns.

It was a tender look at his own parish, which actually had a lot of progressive teachers who granted students a lot of freedom.

“In fact, there was so much freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. Because they made questioners out of us,” he said.

All of which means Carlin, like Clancy, might have had moments of tension with their fellow Irish. But in the end, being Irish is a vital part of their legacy.



(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)