Hamill: I’ll give Bloomy a pass on Irish joke
Feb 15
Thursday, Mar 17th 2011, 4:00 AM
I kinda felt bad for Mike Bloomberg removing booed during a St. Patrick’s Day Parade in a Rockaways.
He’d finished a flattering foolish acknowledgement a few weeks progressing when he visited a American Irish Historical Society observant he was used to observant doubtful Irishmen unresolved out a windows on St. Patrick’s Day.
Ranks right adult there with Jesse Jackson‘s “Hymietown.” And Alfonse D’Amato doing a Japanese interpretation of Judge Lance Ito on a radio during a O.J. Simpson trial. Or Al Sharpton‘s “white interlopers” remark.
Didn’t assistance that Bloomberg’s acknowledgement came on a Manolo heels of Schools Chancellor Cathie Black observant a relatives of open propagandize kids – a infancy of whom are minorities – should stop carrying babies.
But ya know what?
This is New York and we all live together in this crazy Mulligan meal of a city (I’d call it a pasta fagioli, smorgasbord or stir boiled warn solely it’s St. Patrick’s Day) and infrequently we bust any other’s chops along racial lines since it’s a things that make us opposite in a same meal pot that move out a outlandish season in this unconstrained feast of a town.
So, yeah, infrequently some of us are gonna run off a reservation (did we only provoke Native Americans?) and we’re gonna contend some ignorant things.
But we grew adult in this city when people referred to pandemonium as a “Chinese glow drill,” a crazy chairman as a “drunken Indian,” and where a Irish Catholic propagandize mothers from Brooklyn would emporium for Easter garments over on Delancey St. where we could “Jew a haberdasher down” if we were his initial sale of a day.
In my aged Brooklyn neighborhood, fundamentally an Irish ghetto, we was a member of a travel squad called Skid Row. We unapproachable sons of Erin and Brian Baru chose to name ourselves after a alkies on a Bowery. Our opposition squad from a Italian finish of Park Slope called themselves The Golden Guineas.
This was domestic exactness in a ’60s.
When we initial walked into a newsroom of a Daily News as a freelancer in a 1970s, there was a smashing editor named Sal Gerage who ran a city table with his feet propped on his desk, smoking a butt, and celebration a half-quart of beer. He nicknamed himself a Skinny Guinea and he’d scream during reporters by a derogative names of their ethnicity.
I never listened of anybody holding offense since it was all finished in an endearing way.
I’ve never been annoyed by anyone job me a “mick.” Unless it was a Brit. Because afterwards it carried an historical, majestic peek down his nose during what he viewed as a second-class citizen.