REMEMBRANCE OF THE WRETCHED

 

Damn the Irish for fouling our pristine land. Great waves of them washed up after the potato famine of the 1840s, the most destitute national group ever to arrive on American shores. They couldn’t have been less desirable, a gaggle of morally depraved peasants with little education and equally meager resources.

And to make matters worse, they were Papists! Ignorant and superstitious, these mongrels took their orders from a foreign religious power and were bent on degrading and corrupting the moral purity of these great and Protestant United States. They dragged the culture of our homeland into the stinking troughs where they themselves wallowed by birth and breeding. They fled a wretched land and brought the wretchedness with them.

 

 

Fresh from the bogs of Ireland, they were led to the polling booths like dumb brutes to vote down intelligent, honest native citizens, and our polity has never recovered. What a pack of deceitful, violent criminals they were, a horde of sub-human scoundrels who flowed into our land like sewage through a corroded pipe. If only someone had recognized the mortal danger! If only someone with a spine had barred their way!

Now we’re forever doomed to celebrate their immigrant invasion, wear their colors, and swill their green beer. We’re even forced to dance a jig to their low music. Or maybe a couple of jigs.

[I freely plagiarized this article in the foregoing introduction.]

 

Yes, through a century and a half of their persistent subversion, even our own metal site is compelled by political correctness to play their depraved music on this de facto national holiday. But we won’t be completely pulled down. We will make it heavy.

[And from here on, I freely plagiarize my own writings from other NCS commemorations of this green day.]

 

 

And so, to start we have an Irish folk song that’s been around for about 400 years called “Whiskey in the Jar.” It tells the story of a highwayman who robs a military or government official (that is their way, of course) and is then betrayed by his wife (or lover — not clear which — it matters not to the common Irishman) and goes to prison for his trouble (where they all belong and many end their days). And ain’t that the luck o’ the fuckin’ Irish for ye?

Below you can stream performances of “Whiskey in the Jar” by this group of bands: Irish folk band The Dubliners (circa 1967), Irish rockers Thin Lizzy (1973), and Irish punk band The Pogues (playing with the Dubliners) (1990).

But all of that is just prelude to the version released by Metallica in 1998, which is one of my all-time favorite Metallica songs, despite the fact that it’s an immigrant lament at its core. It will probably help if you get wasted before listening to all of this. All Irish music seems to go best with binge drinking.

 

WHISKEY IN THE JAR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For our second bit of pandering to the pot-lickers and bog-trotters we have a song that I ruefully admit I quite like: “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” by The Dropkick Murphys, which many of you were subjected to through the opening sequence of Martin Scorcese’s 2006 masterwork, The Departed.

And yes, we must make it a bit heavier, and for that purpose I’ll turn to Children of Bodom, who recorded a cover of the song that was included on Holiday at Lake Bodom (15 Years of Wasted Youth).

 

 

 

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And that’s all the pandering I can take for one day. As for the degree of our Great Nation’s receptivity to immigrants who don’t look, sound, dress, or pray like those who came before ’em and who somehow imagine that with enough time they’ll be thought of simply as Americans, one can only ask: When will we ever learn?