Travelogue: Dubliners

Via The Zman

On the plane ride into Dublin, I sat next to an older man, who was from Kilkenny. He consumed half of the flight boasting about his hometown and his country. The Irish are very proud of being Irish and they are not ashamed to boast about it. People with a strong culture are prone to this and I find it appealing. He was coming back early so he could watch his hurling team in a big match. This allowed him to tell me that the national game of Ireland was the greatest thing in the world. I feel the same way about baseball so I could relate.

The other half of the flight, the back half, he spent asking me about American politics. I got the impression that he wanted to talk politics from the first moment he saw that I was an American. The glories of Ireland stuff was just to butter me up. Of course, he wanted to know about Trump. My assumption was that he thought Trump was terrible, but he was going to be polite until I revealed my allegiances. There was an Ivy Day in the Committee Room quality to our conversation, when another person joined in the discussion of Trump.

The Irish love their politics and I got the sense they were mystified by Trump or maybe mystified as to why Americans are considering him. Alternatively, they may simply have been wondering why a country as big as America is unable to find better options. That’s not an unreasonable question, but there is no answer. Every country can ask the same of their political leaders, so size has nothing to with it. For some reason, politics attracts the sort of people no sensible people should ever want involved in politics. It’s a paradox.

My response when asked why Trump might win was , “Because what comes next would be much worse.” At first I assumed this would elicit questions, but people seemed to understand. Perhaps they were simply being polite, but I came away from every political discussion with the impression that the Irish are fully aware of the dangers that loom just over the horizon. Something has gone wrong and no one knows exactly how to make it right. Tossing out the people currently in charge is simply the option available.

The puzzle they left me was that they never once spoke of Hillary Clinton. They both agreed that Trump was a typical American, by that they meant big and boisterous, as well as a bit silly by their reckoning. Even so, Hillary Clinton has been in politics for almost three decades now. Her husband was president and made a big show of coming to Ireland and pretending he was Irish. I would have expected them to be pro-Clinton and dismissive of Trump. Instead, all they cared about was how a TV guy could become President.

I chewed on that mystery a bit as I walked around the city. Dublin is an old city that does not like being old. All over the city you see efforts to show that Dublin is a modern, hip city, equal to any of the hipster cities around the world. The young people are fully engaged with their phones and seem to be divorced from their past and the past of the city. All over people were quick to tell me that Dublin had the latest of whatever I was inquiring about at the moment. Maybe the locals simply get tired of stupid Americans asking them where the Shire is located.

The the thing about Dublin that will stick with me is the whiteness of the place. There were about 25 thousand Americans in the city for the college football game. In the pubs, you could hear them marveling at the whiteness of Dublin. In America, cities are very diverse and some are dangerously diverse. Portland Oregon is the whitest city in America at about 65%. Dublin is probably 95% white as their immigrants are mostly from eastern Europe. The only blacks I saw were tourists from America.

That is, of course, why you don’t see the police presence you see in other cities. I was at a pub and noticed that the street was packed with young drunk people, but I could not see any cops. As a cab driver told me, if you want trouble you can did it in Dublin, but you have to look for it. In more diverse cities, trouble is always on the prowl so the cops have to be out showing the colors in an effort to keep the peace. I would be lying if I said I thought for a minute that Dublin needed more diversity. It manages to get along just fine without it.

The funny thing I noticed in Ireland was how the city had turned itself into a tourist trap. By that I mean everyone is hooked into Ireland Inc., a community enterprise to sell everything Ireland in an effort to boost tourism. I saw this in Iceland too. I was told by a cabby that after the bust, they figured it was the best way to make money, so the local economy converted quickly to tourism. In fact, the cab drivers were all hilariously over the top in their tourism pitch. Everyone of them I encountered sounded like he was working for the department of tourism. Perhaps they had all been real estate agents.

One of those cab drivers said a funny thing to me. He was pointing out a section that caters to students, when he said it is the one thing he dislikes about driving a taxi. He has to witness the debauchery of the young. “It’s as if they have no respect for themselves, particularly the men. They treat women like whores. How could they ever marry one of them?” Every city, every country, is a city of the dead. We live in the shadows of those who came before us. What spurs on progress is the desire to get out of those shadows and make our lives our own. It’s not without its consequences though, as often the past is where the future lies.

My taxi driver was one of 14 kids. His best friend was one of 18 and his father had a second wife with whom he produced a handful of kids. The taxi driver, a man in his fifties, had four children, but his kids were childless. The Irish fertility rate remains the highest in Europe, but it stands at 2.02. The average age of new mothers is close to 30. The young, those in their 20’s, are not getting married and that is of concern. When you tease out the births to immigrants, the Irish youth seem to be following the same path as the rest of Europe.

A people without children is a nation of dead people, soon to be a forgotten people. It is not a guarantee with the Irish and perhaps the debauchery of their youth is just a temporary phase, but I wonder if I had not just visited a museum without realizing it. Joyce supposedly said Irish history is a nightmare from which they never wake up. That’s no longer the case as Ireland is prosperous and free of the sectarian violence that came to define them for close to a century. Even so, they may have woke from their nightmare to find the future does not include them.