'The Fighter's' 'Irish' Micky Ward - a working class hero - SEE VIDEO

Read more: Irish Micky Ward: "The Fighter" speaks out

This Sunday, when Hollywood big wigs gather for the 83rd annual Academy Awards, The Fighter will be looking to have the biggest night for a heavily-Irish movie in five years, since The Departed was up for a bunch of awards, including a Best Supporting Actor nod for “the fighter” himself, Mark Wahlberg.

Given what is going on in the world, given the angry, messy state of the union here at home, it’s tempting to dismiss the Oscars as little more than a gathering of pretentious, pretty folk.

But can we actually find deeper meaning in the Oscar-nominated films? In The Fighter? Is there a deeper message for our time in this inspirational flick?

Joyce Carol Oates thinks there might be. The only trouble is that the message may be a frightening one.
Oates is a best-selling author, as well as long-time chronicler of the boxing world.

According to an essay in this week’s New York Review of Books, Oates likes The Fighter, even if she has some questionable things to say about Irish culture along the way.

For example, the characters in the movie, Micky Ward and his half-brother Dicky Ecklund, have “crude-rhyming nicknames,” and thus are “quintessentially working-class Irish, suggesting the playful camaraderie of a pub society in which men remain adolescent and “unattached” through their lives, so long as they don’t “return to their homes where wives and mothers exert authority.”

You need more than one hand to count the stereotypes in that statement.

But in the end, Oates sees a connection between The Fighter and another recent movie about an Irish American boxer.

“Like Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004) … The Fighter is, if not a champion film for all time, a very good, poignant, and commendable expression of its era—postindustrial working-class urban America, bereft of history as it is bereft of jobs, strong unions, pride in one’s work.”

Talk about a back-handed compliment. Trouble is, I think Oates is on to something.

The Fighter, after all, is about an old mill town which lost its decent union jobs a long time ago. Micky Ward rises above that, but what about everyone else in the town?

It’s no wonder the governors of New Jersey, Wisconsin and elsewhere are picking on public-sector unions. There are no other unions left to pick on!

I love that today’s anti-union forces want teachers, cops and firefighters to behave more like private sector workers. Because if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the private sector never screws up, right?

But okay, fine, go ahead, treat government workers like the private sector. I’ll sit back and wait for my cut of a billion dollar bailout.

Full disclosure here -- as regular readers of this column know, I am a member of the New York City teacher’s union.

Which, first and foremost, means I understand how unions can at times become lazy and complacent.
But this effort to transform public sector union members into public enemy number one is as frustrating as it is bizarre.

Are you trying to tell me that after the events of the last several years -- the trillion dollar wars abroad and the billion dollar bailouts at home -- that men and women who educate millions of inner city kids every day, and who run towards danger when the rest of us run away, are solely responsible for the poor financial health of states across the nation?

C’mon! Interestingly, Irish Americans -- once the backbone of organized labor -- seem to be evenly split on this fight, just as they have become more or less evenly split between the Republicans and Democrats in the last 40 years.

For me, though, there comes a time to draw a line. Yes, unions need to sacrifice during tough times.

But simply because the private sector has been pillaged is no reason to do the same to the public sector.
To bring this back to The Fighter, it’s great that Ward emerges as a champion in his Hollywood movie.

But these times seem to call for a leader who can rally not just himself and his family but the working and middle classes, who are being unfairly attacked these days.

That great Irish Liverpudlian John Lennon once wrote that “a working class hero is something to be.”
It is, indeed. So, who will answer the bell?

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Read more: Irish Micky Ward: "The Fighter" speaks out

How the CIA got ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan

Given what New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg apparently thinks about the Irish, he almost certainly would have had some trouble back in January of 1940.  That was when “Wild” Bill Donovan was out and about talking up a new movie starring fellow Irish Americans Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney. 

The movie was The Fighting 69th, about the famously Irish National Guard brigade which leads the St. Patrick’s Day parade down Fifth Avenue every year. 

Given the stars and subject matter of the movie, you can imagine our mayor envisioning the brigade kicking off the march, while dozens of “inebriated Irishmen” hang out of their Fifth Avenue windows.

That moment back in 1940, however, was actually pivotal for one of the most important, lesser-known figures in 20th Century American history – “Wild” Bill Donovan, who earned the Medal of Honor as a member of the Fighting 69th back in World War I.

Donovan, who died exactly 52 years ago, in February of 1959, is back in the spotlight these days.  Just last week, Martin S. Quigley, who was America’s chief spy in Ireland during World War II, died at the age of 93.  Quigley worked directly under Wild Bill Donovan during the war.

This comes just as a brand new biography of Wild Bill hits bookstores.  Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage (Free Press) by Douglas Waller outlines Donovan’s humble Irish roots, his service with the Fighting 69th and his relationship with Cagney and O’Brien, not to mention Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy.

Most importantly, Waller argues, we are still living in the cloak-and-dagger world of diplomacy more or less created by Donovan.  The OSS, after all, was the forerunner of the CIA. 

So, any time you here about intelligence gathering or paranoid “spooks” working for “the agency,” you can thank this humble Irish Catholic from Buffalo.

Donovan was born on New Year’s Day, 1883, the son of Timothy and Letitia Donovan, from Ulster and Cork, respectively. 

Though dubbed “a poor Irish Catholic boy from Buffalo” this week in a New York Times review of Waller’s book, Donovan went on to earn a stellar education. 

It was at Columbia, while playing football, that he earned the nickname that stuck with him for the rest of his life.
A 1905 Columbia graduate, Donovan worked as a lawyer before leading a cavalry troop of the New York State militia, during the build-up to World War I.  In the Great War, Donovan served as major, then colonel, ultimately earning the Medal of Honor for his service in France.

Donovan is still the only American to receive four of the nation’s highest military distinctions -- the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal and the National Security Medal.

After World War I he was a U.S. attorney (who vigorously prosecuted bootleggers), and entered politics – as a Republican, of all things!

Donovan ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor (against the sainted Al Smith) in 1922 and governor in 1932.

Donovan was a vocal critic of Franklin Roosevelt, though unlike some Irish American isolationists Donovan seemed to grasp the threat raised by Nazi Germany and the looming European war.

In fact, on the eve of World War II, Roosevelt tapped Donovan to visit Britain, where Joseph Kennedy was serving as ambassador and had raised a stink by declaring that Britain was not ready to fight in World War II, and adding that the U.S. should remain isolated from the tensions. 

Donovan disagreed, arguing Britain could serve as a bulwark against Nazi imperialism – especially with U.S. aid.

This came in handy when Roosevelt had to decide who might be the best person to centralize all U.S. intelligence during and after the war. Donovan was selected as the head of the Office of Strategic Services -- the OSS. 

Donovan fell out of favor with Washington big-wigs, in part because he picked a fight with J. Edgar Hoover.  But when the Cold War rose and the CIA was formed, though Donovan was not its leader, he had set up the infrastructure which remains deeply flawed but utterly fascinating to this day.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

The enemy is...multiculturalism - foiling home-grown terrorist plots

In his new book The Matchmaker of Kenmare, Irish novelist Frank Delaney sends his characters on a tour of World War II-era Ireland.

Soon, they become sucked into the era’s foggy diplomacy, visiting the war-town landscapes of both England and Germany. These characters are able to move around without raising too much suspicion, in part, because they are from Ireland, and Ireland, of course, was neutral during World War II.

We can argue some other time about Irish neutrality in the face of Nazi barbarism. What this does remind us of is that people – and nations – have had to make tough choices in the past.

During World War II, the Irish weighed their unique history with British imperialism against the realities of 1940s politics and made their choice.

This is interesting to think about as British and American politicians are now saying some provocative things about religion, immigration and terrorism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over in Great Britain, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron blasted the very concept of multiculturalism.

As The New York Times put it, Cameron criticized “the country’s decades-old policy of ‘multiculturalism,’ saying it has encouraged ‘segregated communities’ where Islamic extremism can thrive.”

Cameron criticized what he referred to as the “hands-off tolerance” of Britain and other European countries, adding that they had encouraged Muslims and other immigrants “to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, Congressman Peter King, new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, prepared to hold hearings next month which will focus on the role Muslim Americans have played -- or not played -- in foiling home-grown terrorist plots.

King, for years a well-known presence in Irish American circles, is no knee-jerk immigrant-phobe.

Indeed, there is understandable concern on both sides of the Atlantic about terror, and about whether or not immigrants are assimilating, or are instead participating in plots to destroy the very nations they once chose to adopt as their homelands.

Which brings me back to World War II. Let me call upon another expert, though not a novelist or congressman or prime minister.

My mother grew up in 1940s Brooklyn, when another global war was raging. In talking to her over the years I’ve gotten a fairly strong sense of what her block in East Flatbush was like, in part because there were many other blocks just like it.

It was -- though no one used this word back then -- a “multicultural” block. Mostly white ethnic, with plenty of working class Irish, German and Italian Americans.

That bears repeating because, as any regular viewer of the History Channel knows, among our enemies during World War II were … the Germans and the Italians!

The Irish, of course, were no enemy. They were simply neutral.

Which is kind of how some Fox News devotees view the French these days. It’s not that they’re against the global war of terror. They are just kind of neutral.

The point is not that everyone on my mother’s block got along. From what I can tell my grandmother showed no prejudice, mainly because she hated everybody.

But here, living side by side, were the children of immigrants from nations the U.S. was fighting a bloody war against. Yes, of course, there were spasms of anti-German sentiment, and some Italian-Americans were indeed sent to camps, and a handful of rough Irish kids teamed up with members of the German American Bund and dreamt up terrible anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

But in their day-to-day lives that multicultural Brooklyn block endured. And did so under circumstances that seem more disturbing than our current concerns over terror and multiculturalism.

Yes, we should be vigilant, and we should demand that immigrants grasp what is great about America. But there is a fine line between vigilance and fear-mongering.

We want our immigrants to know what is great about America. But it seems as if the native-born also need to be reminded from time to time.

(Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)