Slate posts David Plotz’s 2000 column about how little we know of St. Patrick.

Eamon Forde’s piece in today’s Times Online is perfectly sensible:

The celebration originally marked the arrival of the Catholic faith on Irish shores, but in an increasingly secular country, it now celebrates the futility of drunkenness. It says everything about what it means to be Irish these days that the biggest parades take place hundreds of miles from Irish soil where a once-proud diaspora’s celebration of its past has been hijacked by anyone who has seen The Quiet Man and wants to get noisily bladdered. They may as well wear their heart on their sleeves and pay a gaggle of pale-faced colleens with pigs under their arms to spray the streets with whiskey and potatoes.

Indeed. I feel ashamed to admit that I once spent St. Patrick’s Day watching The Quiet Man and eating corned beef and cabbage (not an Irish dish).

I now greet March 17th with dread. The options seem to be these: Join my fellow Catholic reactionaries in cloying piety, saying St Patrick’s prayer 100 times in his honor. Or join the revelers who wear green and white hoops under green and white bunting at the bar, even if they are Lithuanians and the bar is owned by Russians. Somehow I don’t think dear Patrick would recognize either as related to his life. I’m still searching for the mean between Lenten austerities and Erin Go Puke.