Me and the rest of the micks are not cool in Hollywood

It seems that the American Entertainment Machine has its crosshairs set on a new ethnic darling. Last year it was the Scottish. We saw a resurgence of Sean Connery movies and millions of Marlboro smoking, "Star Wars" worshipping, dorm rat retards fell in love with dirty heroin -chic and "Trainspotting." Suddenly, being Scottish was cool.

Fine. Stupid things happen.

Now it's the Irish. This is my neighborhood.

I'm not sure where or when it happened. First there was "The Matchmaker" with Janeane Garafolo, when she went to Ireland for some reason and had big fun with cute accents and dark beer. Then "Angela's Ashes" gave women everywhere a non-Hallmark commercial reason to cry.

Everyone was so moved by the plight of the Irish that no one pointed out that Frank McCourt had ripped off "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." The Irish tale of maturation in a cruel and drunken world has already been done by James Joyce and in Brenden Behan's "Borstel Boy" after that; and Frank McCourt, despite his newfound Oprah-like sainthood, could not hold either of their jockstraps.

This month we have "Waking Ned Devine," a movie starring Irish actors so obviously and quaintly Irish that they looked pilfered from a Lucky Charms advertisement.

"Would you happen to know a Ned Devine?" "Yes! I do! Would ye like a nice jig, mate?"

Worse yet is the American Express commercial where the well-heeled redhead flies her and her mother to Ireland so they can see where she met her father.

It's an adorable story, minus the come-ons with Guinness-scented breath and the "Nah, no rubber, love. It's a sin, don't you know?"

Let me begin by saying that I myself am not very Irish. If they gave a scholarship for it, I would just barely qualify.

There are no accents or traditional dances or family crests on the walls in my family. Nor is there any tweed, homemade whiskey or genial, white-haired, pipe-smoking uncles.

I'm not objecting to the Irish obsession because of a foolish loyalty to "my people." I object because this is something that Americans, especially the trouser snakes than run the entertainment world, love to do more than bomb countries with dark people in them. It's a sick little reflex we have. We reduce anything foreign or ethnic into one or two adorable little traits or characteristics, primed for placement on the front of a lunchbox.

The Irish are not "a proud, resilient people full of vitality and wit" any more than the Nigerians or the Ukraines or the Cambodians. Any group larger than a rugby team can't be that homogenous and easily pigeon-holed. The Irish are a bunch of people who are all different and just as dull and ordinary as the rest of the world.

We have latched onto this image of the Irish as a pavilion at Disney World because we love to latch on and simplify ethnic groups to make ourselves look cool.

We can look at the quaint, hard-drinking Irishman in a movie and think about our idiot grandfather who was a drunk, without the brogue, driving cap and charming stories.

"Well, I'm Irish too, um, laddie, and this place can't make a good Black and Tan. My Irish grandfather makes the best Black and Tan in the world. In fact, there's still a little Gaelic spoken in my house. Rah rah, IRA! Oh, Danny Boooooooy."

We like to identify with these traditions because our own country is so cheap and traditionless sometimes. Pretend to be a member of one of the "cool ethnic groups" and you can be cool, not like one of the bland, lawn-mowing, church-going types that people mean when they talk about "The Man."

It's rather like when wimpy, bawling, little monkey boys latch onto conservatism and libertarian journalism to an alarming lack of secondary sex characteristics and the inability to get two dates in a row or get anyone to read their snot-covered little tabloid.

What's the upshot of all this? I don't know. In a few months Hollywood will have decided that Czechs are cool and everyone will being drinking Pilsner Urquell and wearing Kafka T-shirts. Maybe it doesn't matter.

But I get the feeling that I'm going to see Ethan Hawke playing a doe-eyed little Irish kid in a SKG Dreamworks movie, and I don't like that.

Maybe I'll just go to on down to Conor O'Neill's and have a pint with the software designers.

Erinn go bragh. You know, that chick Erin. She used to work at Ulrich's.

-James Miller can be reached over e-mail at jamespm@umich.edu

James Miller Miller on Tap

01-06-99