Butte's Heyday, St. Patty's Luck
Well I'm sitting here on a Friday night, doing little more than strumming the six-string and kicking back. And from the looks of my clock we're only a little more than an hour and a half from Saint Patrick's Day.
I've got a Bayern Killarney standing by for the occasion. The Killarney is a seasonal Red Lager which has a nice print on the front of it of a Butte pub with a couple of Irishmen stumbling around outside of it. Butte is a wild place this time of year. Some of the most successful Irish-Americans prospered as Copper Kings back in Butte's heyday - back when it was the biggest city between Seattle and Minneapolis. Unbelievable. The rather destitute population now hovers somewhere in the 30,000's. It seems historically significant that at a time when America's Irish population was fighting for just a scrap of respect, these boys in Butte were having greed contests to see who could build a bigger mansion higher than the other on one particular overlooking hill. That all eventually went out of style, though - along with the tunnels leading from city hall to underground brothels. Rightly, this place was, and still remains, a true Irish town.
And the good people of Butte have been storing up their rowdiness all year to toast St. Patty tomorrow night. It should be one hell of a party, Mick. Greyhounds are booked up solid by party-animals from Missoula, Billings, Helena, Bozeman, and a bunch of other hayseed towns across this freakishly large state. And good for Butte. I think honestly this is the only time of year that they ever get any sort of positive attention . . . that is, only if you consider a drunken conglomeration of Montana's wildest party people to be "positive attention".
But c'mon, officer O'Matty, they're just payin' homage to Ol' Saint Patty.
Old Saint Patty. He probably wouldn't know how to take the spectacle we make of ourselves in his name every year. He was a man of God, after all. But truly, he got his start as a slave. At sixteen he was stolen from his home in Britain by raiding Irish thugs and made to do hard labor for six years before managing to escape. He made it home safely and reunited with his family. I guess the experience solidified his resolve to join the church, because after that he decided to follow in his father's footsteps and become a priest.
After making Bishop he felt like doing a little missionary work, and of all the places in the world, he thought Ireland would be a good place to start. He went back to his country of former enslavement with the church behind him. (Most likely he worked there with the small Christian congregations already active in Ireland, not directly with the heretics and baby-snatchers.) (Satire)
Maybe he got lucky. Maybe he just had a preternatural grasp of propaganda statergy. Whatever it was, in trying to convert Ireland to Christianity, he made enough of an impact on the pages of history to get himself toasted over a billion times each year.
But what about his legecy?
Saint Patrick is not remembered for whatever he really might have done in his life to further the procession of the Christian church in Ireland, but he will always commonly be known as the Saint who chased the snakes out of the country, and most commonly celebrated by taking keg stands and sucking down shots of Jameson Irish Whiskey until puking all over your green sweater.
. . . If we must be remembered, may we all be remembered so well.
