17 March 2010
San Patricio
I think I will wind up at Kitty O’Shea’s place sometime this afternoon for a pint or two. I don’t have the stamina I once did, and besides, from what I hear my younger son paid the dues for the family in a legendary day-long celebration by the concrete banks of the Chicago River dyed bright green last weekend.
But this is the day, the actual Saint Patrick’s day, and I have to pay a little tribute to the O’Socotras of yore. I am a quarter of the blood, and I will raise a glass to those who left the Emerald Isle in 1848 to come to these shores and build a life for us that led, ultimately, to be citizens of the Empire at its zenith.
I read Thomas Cahill’s marvelous book “How the Irish Saved Civilization” several year ago. He had a little piece in the Times this morning, citing the seminal contribution to Western Civilization of the toiling scribes who copied the literature of Greece and Imperial Rome and preserved the glory that was to be reflected in the glory to come.
The monks scoured barbarian Europe for manuscripts. It is a marvelous story, which you will enjoy. But what is most significant to me is not the happy circumstance by which the Irish Monks saved the knowledge of classical times. Rather, it is Cahill’s succinct account of how the Empire of eleven centuries fell with barely a whimper to the Goths and Gauls and Vandals.
It was about taxes, in the end. Rome had a peculiar system of tax collection. Direct taxes were extracted in the provinces by private contractors called publicani. Roman citizens were exempt from direct taxation, as was Italy itself. It was an efficient system, civilization in exchange for a fee. Poll taxes were created in some of the provinces, and the census was conducted to apportion the burden.
Indirect taxes were also paid by everyone, and the burden was the source of much bitterness in the provinces. The job of the publicani became harder and harder as the needs of Rome became greater to support free bread and circus. Eventually it created a situation whereby appointment as a tax collector was not a path to great riches, but a path to ruin.
People made the rational decision to switch allegiance to local warlords rather than pay the taxes, and the light of the Roman peace flickered out in just a few generations.
St. Patrick was a Roman, of course, kidnapped as a wee lad by Celtic slavers. He escaped and took holy orders, but settled on a return to Ireland with the idea of the conversion of Celts as his life’s mission.
He created the conditions that allowed Ireland to become "the isle of saints and scholars” even as Europe was ravaged by the savage German tribes.
From Patrick’s Golden age there followed a thousand years of sorrow.
I took an upper level course in the history of Ireland back in college, and it was a depressing tale of bloodshed and misery, with some major conflict occurring in each generation. Finally, in subjugation to the hated English, the potatoes were blighted, and exile was the only answer.
That brought my people to America, but the diaspora also washed the shores of Australia and all the provinces of newer empires.
One of the exportable skills of the Irish was mayhem. My people were on both sides of the Civil War here, but they also fought in the Mexican War that preceded it.
I heard Ry Cooder talking about it on the radio the other day. I have always liked Cooder since he broke out back in the day, an elliptical roots guitar player with a raffish political sense. He partnered with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains to commemorate the adventures of the San Patricio battalion of the Mexican Army.
The San Patricios had few ties to the United States, other than a dialect of the same language and an enlistment contract. They saw the American adventure in Mexico, 1846 to 1848, that followed the annexation of Texas as an act of imperialism against fellow Catholics, something with which they were all too well familiar.
They deserted the American Army en mass, and went over to the army of Mexico. Led by Capt. John Riley of County Galway, they called themselves the St. Patrick's Battalion and fought against Zachary Taylor’s Yanks in all the major campaigns of the war.
They are remembered in Mexico today as having “fought with daring bravery." But eventually, Mexico surrendered. It was thoroughly Irish of them to pick the doomed losing side. In the end, they were captured. The sentence for their perceived treachery was death for half of them, by hanging. The rest were branded with the capital letter “D” for deserter, and let go.
Some stayed in Mexico and Texas, others drifted north to fight again. Their saga was mostly lost to history, but Maloney’s album brings them back to life. They are our people as much as Mexico’s, and I am proud to have them in my heritage.
After all, when the Union Army came to my Irish Great-Great Grandfather with an offer to re-enlist after this three-year commitment was done, he took it. He got a thirty-day pass and half his cash bonus to go home for a break from the War. He married when he got home, to the comely sister of an Irishman who was fighting for the Confederacy.
I assume it was the gentle urging of his new wife that convinced him not to go back, a fact for which I am forever grateful. If he had returned for another year in the bloody war, he might have been killed by malice or disease, and I wouldn’t be here at all.
That is something to raise a glass to, don’t you think?
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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