The Spectator World By: Casey Chalk
Only in America can the privileged claim victimhood while excusing the Chinese Communist Party
My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago.
Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains).
Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren’t delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familiarly. A few weeks into the semester, I met an Irish girl with my grandmother’s maiden name (and my first name) — she couldn’t have cared less that perhaps we were distantly related. In her defense, I was probably only the fiftieth American she’d met in her life who’d claimed shared ancestry. I’d think it a common experience for Irish encountering Americans, and quite tedious.
