Current mood:

argumentative

Patrick
Happy slightly-belated Saint Patrick's Day to all. It's the day after, but today is the day of the parade and all the big celebrations, so I'm kind of justified in lateness.

But why celebrate it at all? Saint Patrick's Day is one of those holidays that have lost almost all of their original meanings (save, in this case, in the country it came from). It's now nothing more than an excuse to go get drunk. This is something I'm not sure how I feel about; on one hand, it's sad to see something with deep cultural meaning diluted into a massive international drunken grope-fest. On the other hand, it's great to see a particularly nationalistic and therefore exclusive, perhaps even exclusionary, cultural tradition expand far beyond its borders and become embraced by people all over the world. It would be nice to see that sort of thing happen more often with some traditions; it would certainly help break down some of the tribal racist and nationalist barriers we have erected between cultures. There's far too much ingroup-outgroup division in the world.

On the radiation-induced mutant third hand, I really don't approve of Saint Patrick himself. Wotta bastard.

He's credited with "driving the snakes out of Ireland", which is of course in literal terms rubbish, for Ireland had no snakes. It's a metaphor for how he drove the pagan Druidic religions (which had a lot of symbolic associations with snakes) from the country when he brought Christianity over. So why'd he have to go and do that? He played a major role in the subsequent watering down of all the great folklore through later centuries with Christian meaning and symbols, which as a folklorist really pisses me off because that process eliminated aspects of their original meanings. And destroying the pagan religions? Those ones are the most interesting!

Bah, this is too deep a topic to get into minutes before I leave for work.