Irish Diaspora

It’s St. Patrick’s day as I write this and I’m not wearing anything green. If I ever have in previous years, it’s been accidental. I’m American, a proud citizen of the USA and I’m very conscious of that whenever I’m traveling in another country, including Ireland where I’ll be visiting for the fourth time in a couple of weeks. Though all my ancestors came from there and 97% of my DNA matches that of people who live in northwest Ireland, West-central Ireland, and southwest Ireland, I’m still very much an American.

That my ancestors came from the west of Ireland means they lived “beyond the pale” — that is, they lived outside an area controlled by the British (around Dublin) called  “the pale” in the 14th and 15th centuries. My people resisted submission to foreign rule so they were banished westward, again and again, to areas with poorer and poorer soil. In the 1600s when Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland, they were pushed back still further and sent “to hell or Connaught.”

Yours truly in The Burren, 2009

Thousands were sold into slavery in the West Indies during that time and Connaught (especially an area called The Burren) was an area about which it was said at the time “to have not wood enough to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to bury him.” All were evidently very poor, which is why so many left Ireland for America. Life was very difficult long before the potato famines of the 19th century which only made it worse.

In spite of all that, the little leprechaun with his fists up on the logo of “Fighting Irish” sports teams at the University of Notre Dame does not offend me. Neither does the one of another leprechaun spinning a basketball on the index finger of his right hand while balancing on a shillelagh with his left which the Boston Celtics use. No Irishman or Irish-American, as far as I know, has objected to the stereotype that Irish people are prone to fighting. They are. As for the other well-known stereotype that the Irish are prone to drinking, that shoe fits too. It certainly has for my ancestors going back four generations at least. Paddy wagons were so named because they were usually filled with Irish immigrants named Patrick, or “Paddy” who were arrested for drinking and fighting.

Are those attributes part of Irish DNA or have they been socialized into us for generations under Viking and then British oppression? Both? No one knows for sure but at least we’re not overly sensitive about them, unlike so many other kinds of people who lead campaigns demanding certain logos and mascots be changed. Yeah, the Irish have suffered, but any student of history knows that no ancestral groups, anywhere, have been spared suffering from starvation, war, slavery, and all the other nasty things we humans do to each other.

Is it true what Matt Damon’s character in "The Departed" said about the Irish — that: “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever”? How about what Thomas Cahill said about the Irish in his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: “They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting…drinking, art — poetry for intense emotion…” Was he correct? Perhaps, but no Irish poet I’ve ever read stimulated intense emotion in me. They don’t reach me the way Robert Frost does.

My DNA map blowup for County Cork

In America, my ancestors became coal miners, policemen, domestic servants, laborers, and streetcar drivers. Their offspring — my uncles, aunts, cousins, and so forth — have joined all the professions and many are doing quite well. We’ve assimilated fully and that’s good for America. I’m struggling to find information on my great-grandfather, Eugene Sullivan, after whom my father was named. Born in County Cork, Ireland, he came over in 1900 and became a cop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the boat, he met his first wife, Mary Mahoney, also from Cork as the family story goes, who bore fourteen of his children in thirteen years before dying in 1917 at only thirty-nine. My grandmother, Mary Sullivan, was the oldest. She married and bore my father at nineteen in 1922 and five more children as well.

Great-grandfather Eugene Sullivan

Mary Mahoney’s mother, Kate Mahoney, also bore fourteen children back in Ireland and she lived to be sixty — beyond average life expectancy for a woman in that time and place. My own mother had eight, and she is still with us at ninety-four with grandchildren and great-grandchildren too numerous to count. Three more are gestating, but that is not the norm in America today. If it weren’t for immigration, the US population would be in serious decline. Few native-born Americans want children anymore. They have dogs instead.

America is changing and so is Ireland. I want to experience as much of it as I can before it changes into something that would be unrecognizable to my ancestors.

Nice to be home

Leaving Bay of Naples

One of the nicest things about exploring far-away places is coming back home to Maine. A week and a half is about my limit for traveling. After ten days comes a point of diminishing returns after which the excitement of seeing new places is eclipsed by the desire for home and familiar routines. Perhaps if I were younger I would enjoy it longer but, like many, I couldn’t afford to travel then and was way too busy with work and family to get away.

This was my fourth trip to the Mediterranean and I can see why western civilization originated there. Compared to northern Europe where my barbarian ancestors came from, the living is relatively easy. It seldom snows except in the high mountains. In late April there was still snow in the Pyrenees and in the Alps, but it very seldom snows at sea level where we spent most of our time.

Lobsters? Barcelona market

The markets were full of fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat. They grow year-round in most areas, unlike here in northern New England where farmers must rush to plant, tend, and harvest as much as they can between frosts, and where too much rain, too little rain, a late frost, or an early frost can wipe out everything. Then farmers have to wait a whole year before gambling on it all again. In the old days of subsistence farms, that could mean the difference between eating or starving.

Our ship/city

My small town of Lovell has barely over a thousand people, but there were four thousand passengers on our enormous cruise ship, not to mention fourteen hundred crew. It was a floating city with several restaurants, theaters, bars, a casino, and I don’t know how many staterooms. It pulled into bigger cities each night where it tied up near other huge, floating city-ships. Local guides waited next to tour busses each morning to show us all around their native habitat as we walked down the ramps.

Walled town in Tuscany

Clearly those guides loved their homelands as much as I love Maine and their pride was evident as we followed them around and they explained what we were seeing. One theme every guide mentioned was the need for security. Over there, they measure history by millennia whereas the history of North America is measured in centuries. Every place on earth is equally old, of course, but if history is defined as the written record of events, the record of the Mediterranean Basin goes back far longer. And, as Karl Marx observed: war is the locomotive of history. There’s been plenty of that throughout the region.

Being one of ten or fifteen people in each tour group, I mostly listened. Guides explained their cities were once fortified — surrounded by high walls and always expecting attacks. Traveling through interior Tuscany our guide pointed out hilltop villages surrounded by walls, each with a tower inside where someone was constantly scanning the countryside for invading armies or roaming hoards of bandits. Earlier there had been a long period of relative peace when the Roman Army was so strong it could protect its provinces from outside attack — The Pax Romana, or The Peace of Rome.

When Rome collapsed, Europe went into the Dark Ages — a period when no one was in charge for very long and various tribes battled for dominance. There were was no common law and few authorities to enforce it if there were. Life was tenuous and people didn’t travel much. They ventured into the countryside to tend crops and animals, but didn’t stray far from the fortress back to which they would flee if invaders appeared.

After the Dark Ages came the Pax Britannia during which England ruled the seas and few could challenge it — until the World Wars of the 20th century. Most of you reading this have grown up in a time and place during which there has been no invasion of hostile forces bent on rape and pillage. We have lived during the Pax Americana. No armies, no navies, no hoards of bandits have dared molest Americans because they knew they wouldn’t survive if they tried. We’ve been unusually fortunate to have lived peaceful lives here but how many of us realize that?

Monaco street

While most of Europe was made up of small kingdoms during the Middle Ages, or Dark Ages if you will, nearly all merged into nation states by the 20th century. One that remains is Monaco which we visited last Friday. It has been ruled by the same family since the 13th century and it’s a rich little principality of less than a square mile and over 38,000 people. It was preparing for the May 27th Grand Prix while we were there.

Naples fortification

It’s a nice place but much too crowded for me. I like Maine.

Off The Bucket List

Crossed “Grand Canyon” off my bucket list last week and, according to weather reports, it was a good time to be away from Maine. We stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona and took day trips, but only one to the big canyon last Thursday. It was cool and windy, but the sun was out. I got a sunburn on my face, arms, and that alleged bald spot on the back of my head I can’t see but people tell me is there. It feels sensitive under a hot shower now.

Hard to photograph how steep the drop-off is

My wife and I checked out cliff dwellings of the Sinagua Indians in Walnut Canyon the first day. They were western cousins of the better-known Anasazi. The National Park Service did a nice job building a path along what would otherwise have a treacherous hike for older tourists like us. My wife, Roseann, said raising toddlers on those narrow trails must have been a nightmare. I’d have put them in harness and roped them to a juniper growing out of a crevice. On the canyon rim, pottery sherds and chips left from knapping stone tools abounded on the surface. Archaeologists call it debitage — waste from manufacture of stone knives, scrapers, and projectile points. We both enjoyed it.

Then it was down to Sedona where aging hippies and young hipsters comprise a critical mass. Vogue describes a visit there as: “…basking in the pink glow of Sedona, Arizona’s red rock canyons and its aura-obsessed, pleasantly frozen-in-time, hippie-dippie community.” We drove around as I photographed red sandstone formations — some sun-lit, others in shadow.

Loopy people, but beautiful countryside

Vogue said Sedona contains, “an array of healers and their own breed of eccentric methodologies.” They were everywhere but we avoided them. The landscape was interesting, but I felt even more out of place in Sedona than when I visit Whole Foods back in Portland, Maine. I’m just not organic enough, not sustainable enough, and I eat gluten. I like preservatives and I’m free-range only in an intellectual sense that’s threatening to both hippies and hipsters.

Next day we visited a national park called the Wupatki Monument and Sunset Crater. It was fun listening to the female robotic voice in my dashboard GPS unit pronounce it. Looking north from the long road in was a pale-green sea of grass stretching to the horizon. Tasseled tops waved in a steady wind with small evergreens here and there resembled grazing buffalo. To the east were round, grassy hills. To the south were the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks — highest in Arizona.

But the flatness of the grass sea was illusory. Along the way were ravines and small, box canyons offering shelter from relentless wind. Beside these were pueblo ruins. Getting out and walking, the grass sea that seemed unbroken, down at my feet was actually sparse. Pottery sherds littered dry, gravelly soil. Here and there were small, sharp bits of chert and obsidian debitage from ancient tool-makers right on the surface. No wonder westerners find artifacts so easily. Here in New England, they’re covered with accumulated soil from decayed leaves and pine spills.

Nearby was Sunset Crater, formed in a volcanic eruption less than a thousand years ago — very young in geologic time and still in the traditional memory of nearby Hopi, Sinagua, and Navajo Indians. There were lava bombs strewn around and incorporated into the limestone walls of pueblo ruins. Black cinder covered entire hills between which were rivers of solidified lava that looked as if it hardened only yesterday. A Wupatki Park Ranger said Clovis points from 12,000 years ago were found in the region indicated a human presence then to now. What’s buried under that lava? I’ll never know.

Pueblo on the rocks

Lastly, we went the giant hole in the ground that is the Grand Canyon. It was warm and sunny when we got to the south rim and we walked along for a few hours until it got crowded. I heard many languages spoken and Asians were everywhere taking pictures of themselves and each other. We had to stop often so as not to walk between photographer and subject and that got tedious.

Neither of us would get close to the edge of the mile-deep canyon because it drops off sharply. It’s not as if you’d slide down an incline should you fall. It’d be more like a free fall until that thud at the bottom — although you might bounce off a stone spire here and there depending on where you fell off.

The Grand Canyon is aptly named. I’d call it awesome if that word hadn’t lost its literal meaning after decades of misuse. The views are truly awe-inspiring. We allowed two days to see it and were even ready to take a helicopter ride across. We didn’t go back though. It was the crowds.

Oh Little Town of Bethlehem

Pope Francis prays at Bethlehem wall. Message?

“Too much history, not enough geography.” That was how a veteran of the 1948 Israeli War for Independence described Israel. His name was Dan and he came to our house for dinner about ten years ago in the company of some old friends from San Francisco. My wife and I later toured Israel in May, 2007 and I can attest to Dan’s summation. It doesn't take long to drive the length and breadth of that tiny nation. There’s a definite lack of geography and every bit of it is contested almost constantly. In Jerusalem, it’s not unusual to see Jewish civilians walking around with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders while pushing a baby carriage. They’re in a constant state of war. Israel is located at what has been a crossroads between empires for millennia — throughout recorded history, actually.

Last month, Italian journalist Giulio Meotti wrote a short piece objecting to how the Vatican advertises tours of “Palestine,” or “The Holy Land,” but not tours of “Israel.” It seems the Vatican has as much trouble saying “Israel” as soon-to-be-former President Obama has saying, “Radical Muslim Terrorism.” Israel is a constant victim of radical Muslim terrorism — hence the profusion of AR-15s I saw there — and I’m thinking my church and my president are both refusing to recognize what is quite obvious to anyone visiting Israel.

“Catholic pilgrims spend virtually all their time visiting holy sites in Palestinian-run territory,” wrote Meotti, “staying in Palestinian Arab hotels and listening to Palestinian Arab tour guides. As a result, these pilgrims return filled with hatred towards Israel.”

Bus advertisement in Rome

That reads true because it’s exactly what our tour was like. We had a Palestinian guide and bus driver who were Christians from Bethlehem. In spite of the harassment Palestinian Christians were receiving from Palestinian Muslims, however, our guides were loyal to the Muslim view of things in that troubled land. For example, three times our bus passed the Battle of Hattin site in northern Israel at which Saladin defeated a Crusader army in 1187. Each time, our guide proudly described how Saladin outsmarted the Christians and slaughtered them. I was dismayed, but none of the other Mainers on our tour were disturbed by it.

Notre Dame Guest House in Jerusalem

Our first hotel was the Vatican-owned Notre Dame Guest House just outside the New Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem. Outside it, I could see bullet holes from battles during 1967’s Six-day  War during which Israel took control over Jerusalem for the first time since the Revolt of the Maccabees in 164 BC. The entire hotel staff was Palestinian and I was awakened by a Muslim call to prayer broadcast from a minaret just inside the Old City wall.

Inside the Church of The Nativity in Bethlehem

From there, we traveled to nearby Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity — the oldest church in Christendom. Five years before, it had been seized by Muslim terrorists who held hostages for 39 days, until an agreement allowed them to leave for Gaza. While we were there, Hamas terrorists in Gaza were fighting other terrorists from the Palestinian Authority — Yasser Arafat’s organization. Bethlehem was peaceful when Jesus Christ was born there during the Roman occupation, but it was relatively brief respite.

Your's Truly outside Seven Arches Hotel

At the end of our tour we stayed at the Seven Arches Hotel in East Jerusalem overlooking the Temple Mount and Dome of the Rock, but were instructed not to venture outside the hotel because it wasn't safe for Americans. This was the neighborhood where they danced in the streets following the September 11th attack.

Celebrating in East Jerusalem 9/11/01

I was surprised to learn that populations of both Bethlehem and Nazareth are majority Arab Muslim. When I asked why the Palestinian Christian populations of Nazareth and Bethlehem were leaving after 2000 years, both the bus driver and the guide said it was because they were looking for better jobs in America. I knew different, but neither would acknowledge that much of the migration is because of severe Muslim harassment. I saw posters of Yasser Arafat on buildings and each time we passed through an Israeli checkpoint going into and out of the West Bank they complained bitterly. Neither, however, would answer my questions about the war then raging between Hamas and the Palestinian authority even though we had to cancel our trip to Hebron’s tomb of Abraham because of it.

Yasser Arafat poster in Bethlehem

Finally, they said we would go to a dinner in Bethlehem at which the police chief and other municipal officials would be present and I could get answers to my questions. The restaurant was right beside the tall, Israeli-built, black wall. As we got in, however, the music was so loud conversation was impossible. Instead, we had to watch a solo dance performance by a Palestinian  using his Yasser Arafat keffiyah as a prop. I could go on, but yeah, Meotti got it about right.

Roman Musings

Ah, Roma. That’s what natives call it. Others say it’s the Eternal City and we spent the whole week there. I got a good feel for the place, but I’ll need a lot more time to process my impressions.

Riley and Roseann at St. Peter's Square

Our Tuesday Colisseum tour was much better than the Vatican tour I mentioned last week. It was outside, not as crowded, and with better electronics between the guide’s microphone and my earphones. The Vatican had been, stuffy, crowded, and boring. It was too visual with all the paintings and marble inlay on floors, walls, and ceilings — and tapestries. Who likes them? There were lots of painted maps and those would have interested me if I had time to examine them, but we were moved along as if on an assembly line. The paintings showed people in togas or mostly nude, with lots of muscles, penises, beards and breasts. The guide told us Michelangelo was homosexual, as if she were giving us some inside information. I was glad when the tour was over.

 At left is God's butt by Michelangelo

Did I really care if Michelangelo resented the pope who hired him and so painted the Creator mooning us? No. Did I care that he resented a bishop so much that he painted him in hell with a snake consuming his family jewels for eternity?

Not really. I think everyone concerned had too much money and too much time. Yeah, Michaelangelo was a talented sculptor, painter, and architect, but likely high-maintenance as well.

The Colisseum made more sense. Those three Flavian emperors who built it spent lots of money to entertain the masses, and completed that impressive structure in only seven years. Remarkable. With an elaborate system of elevators and trap doors beneath the building’s floor, our guide said they pushed up gladiators to fight each other and wild animals to tear criminals apart in front of 50,000 spectators who all got in for nothing — but no Christians being eaten by lions, she insisted. This guide was a Sicilian archaeologist who spoke excellent English with very little accent. I understood everything. My 15-year-old grandson, Riley, was as fascinated by all this as he was bored by the paintings and sculptures at the Vatican.

Floor partially rebuilt to show what it was like

My Catholic education from second grade through high school emphasized Christian martyrs who died in the Colosseum, so I was surprised when she didn’t mention them. I asked why, and she said there was no evidence Christians were killed there and I didn’t challenge her. Later when I looked it up, I discovered different accounts — typical for history. Some said they were Christians martyred there and some said they were not. I guess the guide and others trusted only some accounts and distrusted others. That’s their right, of course, but to say there was no evidence? Certainly there are Catholic Church accounts, but our guide must have doubts about those. Whenever she mentioned the church or “the popes” as she described them, it was in a negative context. That was true for all three guides we hired during our one-week stay.

Entrance to old Church of St. Sebastian Palatine Hill

Then there was the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill next door to the Colosseum. Nearly everything was in ruin, but our guide had images of what parts of it looked like in their prime — very impressive. We cannot know everything about how it looked because records are incomplete and images are scarce as well.

Interesting face in old Jewish Ghetto

For the last three days we hired a tour guide named Christian. With him, we walked around the city seeing the Spanish Steps, Jewish Ghetto, the Pantheon, as well as countless piazzas and fountains full of naked and half-dressed muscular guys, lots of women with breasts exposed, and boys next to fish squirting water. I liked walking up and down narrow streets with centuries-old buildings interspersed with millennia-old ruins. Throughout nearly the entire city was decades-old graffiti, never a good sign. Maybe what’s left of the empire will decline as well. Though it annoys my wife when I focus on graffiti wherever I see it, its presence or absence is, respectively, a sign of decline or of progress. It’s a barometer — a canary in the coal mine, so to speak.

Shrine to Mary above graffiti on old passageway

We returned Sunday after traveling for twenty hours, and I was very glad to get back to Maine, to my own bed, my own shower, my old routine. It’s marvelous that we can fly sitting in a chair seven miles high and cross continents and oceans in a day, but it’s still tiring. I don’t want to get back on one for a long while if I can help it. The older I get, the more I appreciate home. I’ll write more about the trip, but two columns in a row about Rome are enough for the time being. Don’t want to bore my readers.

When In Rome...

Me and Riley at St. Peter's Square

It’s a long way from Lovell, Maine to Rome, Italy. After traveling for thirty hours, we arrived exhausted at our rented condominium outside the Eternal City Saturday afternoon about 3:00 pm local time. We dropped our fifteen-year-old grandson, Riley, for nap, while my wife and I shopped for groceries. We cooked, ate, and all went to bed early. Sunday morning, we took the Metro (subway) into the city and learned how to get the Colisseum and the Vatican. I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew, but I recognized a guy just outside the colonnade around St. Peter’s Square and called to him.

That's Michael Voris in the middle

His name is Michael Voris, but he didn’t know me. I knew him because does an online show called “The Vortex” out of Detroit on Church Militant TV, a web-based subscription video service for conservative Catholics and I’d seen several episodes sent to me by a fan of my column. He is a hard-hitting, Emmy Award winning journalist who ruffles feathers in the American Catholic Church and he’s in Rome covering the Synod on the Family. He told me he would be posting his first report Monday and he did, calling it the “Sodomy Synod.” He believes there is a cabal within the Catholic Church that wants to bring it around to approving homosexuality and is using the synod as its vehicle to accomplish that. It’s going to be an interesting month watching his coverage and comparing it with what is shown in American Mainstream Media.

Carly Fiorina

I had a telephone interview with Carly Fiorina scheduled for Friday morning, just before we left on the first leg of the trip. My plan was to transcribe it on the red eye flight but the recording equipment I brought to our South Portland, Maine house failed and I had to postpone until after I return to Lovell. I’m glad to see my fellow Americans are responding positively to Fiorina’s campaign and she’s moved up to second in the polls. Italy is nice, but the longer I’m here, the more American I feel, and I still keep an eye on what’s happening back home.

Inside St. Peter's Basilica

Sunday’s commute in and out of Rome was easy, but Monday’s wasn’t. Rush hour here is worse than Boston, but we arrived in time for our pre-paid tour of the Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter’s Basilica. All were impressive, especially St. Peter’s. We had to be silent in the Sistine Chapel and couldn’t take pictures, but prior to going in our guide told us much about Botticelli, Michelangelo, and others hired by various popes to decorate. Although I paid for a small-group, skip-the-line tour, we all felt like cattle being moved along through narrow passageways competing for space and oxygen with other groups speaking different languages. It was noisy, and we were given receivers with ear plugs ostensibly to overcome ambient noise and hear our English-speaking guide, but they didn’t work well for me. I could understand only 5-10% of what she said because of her Italian accent and the static. It didn’t help that I had to take the hearing aid out of my left ear to insert her earpiece. I felt claustrophobic and oxygen-deprived throughout - even in the huge St. Peter’s Basilica.

Still, I’m very glad we went. It was the best I could afford, and now we’ve seen it. I came away with many impressions, not the least of which was that it’s all way too ostentatious and decadent. I admire Pope Francis for rejecting the palatial quarters traditional for popes and taking a simple room elsewhere. I admire him for using a small Fiat during his recent American visit. I don’t admire his comments about capitalism, climate change, air conditioning, and other things but I like that he is toning down the opulence. It’s way over the top and has been for centuries.

Taking the Metro home on a business day was more than a trip. After being moved through the Vatican like sheep, we experienced the anarchy of the Roman subway system. Many of the cars arrived covered in graffiti inside and out. Getting on and off required some muscle to hold our own against those who would elbow us aside trying to squeeze into a car before the doors closed and I had to make sure all three of us were inside. Then we rode like sardines holding on to the supports as the cars accelerated and slowed down between stops.

 Next to me in Metro subway car

It all reminded me why I don’t like big cities, but we’ll do it all again tomorrow for the Colisseum, Roman Forum, and Palatine Hill Tour. More about that next week.