"Drink 'Til You're Irish"

About our campus's other drink-green-beer-until-you-puke Binge Holiday.

I was having a beer too many with some nerdy friends the night of the Chief's last dance. One of them -- the friends, not the beers -- is an Irishman. (Not that I'm in any way adverse to Irish beer.  I have downed more than my share of Guinness.)

At one point my friend started talking about the locality of certain Irish names, how surnames were associated with certain geographic locations. If you know me at all, you know the Irish name I was most curious about: "Quilty." He hemmed a bit, and then said, "County Clare." Which was what I was hoping to confirm; Humbert Humbert's nemesis in Nabokov's "Lolita" is named Clare Quilty (unmatchably played in the Kubrick film by Peter Sellers).

So I'll call my Irish friend Clare.

A few years ago -- 1996 to be exact -- there was a terribly tragic calendrical accident on this campus: St. Patrick's Day fell during spring break, thereby depriving thousands of undergraduates of the opportunity to get well-and-truly wasted, puke-green-beer-on-the-sidewalk-at-high-noon wasted, on campus with thousands of other undergraduates.

Missing out on such a day was unthinkable. And for the campus bars, it was -- what's the phrase? something about a pot of gold? -- simply out of the question.

The bar owner's response was to create by fiat a new Emergency Binge Holiday that year: "Unofficial St. Patrick's Day." The bars opened on Unofficial at 7 am, like they do on the real St. Pat's, with students in green t-shirts already lined up outside them. So students drank themselves stupid as usual, and the sidewalks again ran green with green-tinted-beer puke.

The motto of Unofficial: "Drink 'Til You're Irish."

Inevitably, when the next year rolled around, there was a call -- initiated by students or bar owners, likely the latter -- for another "Unofficial." Even through St. Patrick's Day did not fall during spring break. The excuse was gone, but the holiday stayed. Now there were two days, not one, in which you could see students wavering and failing to stand or walk by noon.

The campus administration has been very much against Unofficial from the beginning -- if nothing else, for the liability issues. Those liability issues were spotlighted last year: over a hundred citations, and our first fatality. A recent alum had come back to campus to celebrate Unofficial; she fell off the back of the motorcycle she was riding and died of head injuries. (She was 22; I'll pass the intersection later today when I walk to lunch.)

Last year campus bars weren't allowed to open before 11 am; the bar owners responded by chartering buses to off-campus bars that did open early. The owner of several of these bars was forced off the county liquor commission as a result.

Unofficial St. Pat's Day is tomorrow. Everyone on campus has been getting stern emails from the administration about the high penalties for misbehavior. The emails will have no effect. Why? Unofficial is now a magnet for students from other schools to come, party, puke on our sidewalks, and "drink 'til they're Irish." Nearly half the citations issued last year were for students from other universities who came here for the big party and didn't particularly care if they trashed the place.

Because, apparently, trashing the place is what you do when you've drunk enough to be "Irish."

A lot of people are not amused. My friend Clare is definitely not amused. Here's how he put it in a letter to the school paper a few years back:

If you want to drink, drink. But please don't imply that drinking a bottle of vodka at 8 a.m. captures the essence of my nation. This is the country that has more Nobel laureates for literature, per head of population, than any other country outside Scandinavia. Our economic growth was, for much of the 90s, three times that of the rest of Europe. Northern Ireland is in the midst of a complex and important peace process. We have free third-level education for all and a musical heritage second to none. And you think you can "drink until you're Irish?"

And, last week, over non-Irish beers, Clare went on a toot about, among other things, Lucky Charms cereal. Ask an American for an Irish quote, and they won't come up with -- oh, say, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold" or even "Either the wallpaper goes or I do."  Nope -- "They're magically delicious! Pink hearts! Yellow moons! Green clovers!" Then he gave us the history of the leprechaun; reminding us that the sanitized, Disneyfied version we have now doesn't accurately reflect the nasty little buggers they could be in Irish tales. (Sort of like Puck from "Midsummer Night's Dream" -- what a little bastard he was before Shakespeare got ahold of him.) The leprechaun was sent to charm school; he was defanged and lost the ability to actually hurt anyone -- not too unlike what the Brits did to the Irish, except without the charm school.

(Clare wasn't here early enough to catch the "Irish Spring" commercials, in which Americans learned that the Irish shower outside in waterfalls, apparently not having indoor plumbing, and that they habitually attack their soap with penknives checking for green stripes.)

So the green t-shirts with the beer-lugging leprechauns on them are about to break out again. But how enlightened, frankly, can you expect the students at this place -- a little island of suburban privilege -- to be about the alcohol-driven exploitation of Irish stereotypes? To be an undergrad is to be clueless by definition. Throw in a party -- as the bar owner mentioned above, the guy who created Unofficial in the first place -- did, and there's no point in even trying to talk.

Just a few months ago, a couple of Greek houses here -- the Tri-Delts and the Zebes, if you track trivia -- held a theme party called "Tacos and Tequila." The theme was, "dress Mexican." That meant dressing as yard workers and unwed mothers. Some even wore brown face paint. When photos leaked out, the houses apologized, but it was pretty clearly not "sorry" but "sorry we were caught."

And, as I wrote in my previous diary, the racist Chief Illiniwek mascot was decommissioned only weeks ago, after decades of struggle, although the majority of students still don't see what was racist or demeaning about it, and pass me another green beer.

So what are the odds that such a lucrative -- if similarly demeaning, and downright destructive -- "holiday" is going to fade away any time soon? About as likely as finding a real leprechaun with a cereal fetish.