ShareThisYou are not Irish.
You, with the green beads, and you with the shamrock face paint -- I have bad news. And you, with the Irish tattoo? I have very bad news. Come, set down your stout and pull up a barstool. I'll try and make this as painless as possible.
They say that on March 17, everyone is Irish. They are wrong. You are no more Irish on St. Patrick's Day than on any other day of the year, which is to say, you have never been Irish and won't be anytime soon.
It doesn't matter how much Irish paraphernalia you own. Beads, buttons and suggestive T-shirts do not confer any measure of Irishness. They make you look silly, which is more of a French thing.
It doesn't matter if your car is festooned with magnets and stickers denoting your Irish heritage. Though oval country decals are very popular, it is unlikely that your SUV has ever been to Ireland. An Irish flag on an American car manufactured in Mexico makes as strong a cultural statement as the average shopping-mall food court.
It doesn't matter if you have red hair, fair skin, freckles, a thick woolen sweater and a last name identical to the name of an Irish clan, Irish town or Irish beer.
If you were not born in Ireland, did not live a good portion of your life in Ireland and do not at least slip into a convincing Irish brogue when discussing whiskey with an "e," you are not Irish. You are American, like the rest of us.
Your great-grandfather on your mother's side may be Irish. Your mother herself may be Irish. Even your setter may be Irish. You, born and living in America, are not Irish.
Do not tell people you are Irish. Do not blame your faults or credit your features to the Irish. Do not, for shillelagh's sake, tell perfectly nice Irish tourists or visitors that you, too, are Irish. They will know you are not Irish, though they will likely keep this to themselves.
By all means, when visiting Ireland, tell anyone you'd like that you're Irish. The genuinely Irish will politely agree and politely take your tourist dollars. In fact, there's a castle up the hill that was probably in your family, wink, wink.
This applies to any other preconceived notions of nationality. You are not Scottish, Italian or German, either, no matter which festival is in town. Your ancestors may have been so Polish as to have rendered your last name an incomprehensible tangle of consonants, but this does not make you Polish as well.
The Irish phenomenon, though, has gotten out of hand. It is one thing to co-opt another culture as an excuse to spend a weekday consuming alcohol and food coloring. It is entirely another to claim national complicity year-round, when the closest you come to Ireland in a given day is the scent of your moisturizing soap.
So this St. Patrick's Day, as you hoist a green-hued 98-calorie excuse for beer, reflect for a moment. Recognize that tomorrow you'll go about your very American day in a very American way. And remember that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Your ancestors would certainly agree -- it's good to be American. Though they'd have trouble understanding the beads.
(Ben Grabow writes for the young, the urban and the easily amused. Contact him at thinlyread(at)gmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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