A Wee Nip

"Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him."

-Mark Twain

Watching morning joggers bounce past on a lovely 37 degree morning.

I'd thought about writing on the aftermath of Trump's surrender in the Iran War, particularly with regard to the knucklehead core of true believers who light up social media to parrot their Cheeto Messiah's talking points in the face of an objective dreadful outcome, but what's left to say that hasn't been repeated a thousand times? If one voted for him maybe that was delusion or wishful thinking, or the side effects of some powerful narcotic.

Or maybe they're just stupid. The problem now is that we have over a year of data points showing just how awful he is, not just the worst president ever but also entering that pantheon of the transformationally bad along with Hitler and Stalin. So now we're talking about someone who's still a Nazi in 1942 or 43, trying to ignore the smokestack spewing smoke above the odd camp outside of town and reminding us that der Fuehrer has promised a golden age right around the corner. We can all see for ourselves what's happening, and if you're still on board you're either stupid or evil.

So enough of all that.

During my time in NYC I've been crawling a few pages a night through a history of Five Points, the notorious 19th century slum situated a few blocks from here. It's been slow going--when one spends one's working day mostly reading, it's hard to carve out leisure time for more reading.

Last night I wrapped up a chapter dedicated to the vices of the place (if you saw the movie Gangs of New York, you're familiar with the neighborhood), working through petty crimes and murder, prostitution and finally the secret sauce that seemed to bring it all together--alcoholism.

Pockets were picked to pay for liquor addictions, women earned the means of servicing their habit on their backs on filthy straw beds, drunkenness led to irrational rage led to murder. Tiny orphans wandered the streets picking up odd jobs after their parents died of multiple organ failure, vomit induced asphyxiation, or maybe freezing to death after lying down drunk in the street on a frozen January night. Not a pretty picture at all.

And the disease seemed to afflict one group of folks more than any other--the newly arrived Irish.

You see, Five Points was inhabited by Germans, Jews, Welsh, African-Americans; you name it. But although alcohol-driven mayhem wasn't unknown on those streets, it was in the Irish neighborhoods that one encountered the broadest and worst of a community that was drunk and bearing all the consequences of that affliction.

All this is pretty well-known. What came as news to me was the commentary of contemporary observers who'd lived both in Ireland and in New York, to the effect that this sort of widespread alcoholism was very rare in Ireland at the time.

One might take that with a grain of salt; after all, Guinness was created in part to give Irish factory workers something that would fill them up, with low alcohol content, and perhaps keep them from drinking themselves into a stupor in the pubs.

The 19th century eyewitnesses pointed to the availability and low cost of whiskey in the United States as the difference. Apparently rot-gut was cheap and everywhere then, and for a day's pay the New York Irish could stay blotto much of the time, with all the unhappy consequences attending that state. Irish poverty back home in effect saved us from ourselves, and the abundance of the New World brought to the fore a genetic predisposition (how else does one explain the fact that they were the only ones whose community was defined by it?) that's become a stereotype to this very day.

But no day drinking for your author today. I have a couple writing deadlines to meet before class, and hope maybe to outline a couple more partnership tax lessons. After class I limp briskly to the car and start the happy drive up into the hills to Corning and my Peg. That last part extends a glow over it all.