What ‘Traditional America’ Is Bill O’Reilly Talking About?

11/13/2012

Did these signs exist? The point is, there are always newcomers

As the holder of an Irish passport (as well as my American passport), I think I can safely ask just exactly what Bill O’Reilly is trying to say.

O’Reilly tried to wax profound last week after President Obama was re-elected with help from African-American and Hispanic votes. (One perky guest on MSNBC suggested a new motto for the Republican party: “Hello, Brown People.”)

On Election night, O’Reilly said: “It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”

O’Reilly added, “The white establishment is now the minority.”

In noting the shift in America, O’Reilly seemed to be harking back to some golden era in America when the Cabots and the Lodges sat around the Boston Common and sang Kumbaya with the Flynns and, dare I say it, the O’Reillys.

Was there ever a time in America when we were all just one happy family? After the settlers took the country away from the native Americans, that is. There were always newcomers to the land and the voting booths. They were noticeable by their clothes and their accents, if not their color.

It isn’t quite clear to me whether some of my Irish ancestors (on my maternal grandmother’s side) ever ran into help-wanted signs that said NINA – No Irish Need Apply. Did those signs actually exist in large numbers in the 19th Century, as some people claim? In a way, it doesn’t matter. There are always newcomers, always outsiders. And it’s funny how new people want things, like work and housing and education and a chance to vote, without public officials in Ohio and Florida making it tough for them.

O’Reilly seemed downright lachrymose when confronting the new reality – that voters of color now tilt the majority and helped re-elect a candidate who, despite being Kenyan and Muslim and, worst of all, an introvert, just might be the smartest person in the political room. The country keeps changing. Always did.

Ed Martin

11/14/2012 03:31:06 am

Yes they did exist. Peggy's grandad, Ned Monaghan, came at twelve from County Fermanagh by himself. Eventually worked as a meter reader for the Boston area Gas company, He saved enough money to try to buy a house in Wellesley Hills but they would not sell to Irish/catholic, either one. A Protestant friend at the Gas company bought the house and resold it to them, where they lived out their lives. PS. We went to Ireland and after almost 100 years of not knowing of each other, Peggy found her family. I can still here the cry, "Sweet Jasus" from cousin Sheilah!

George Vecsey

11/14/2012 04:29:49 am

I'm sure the conditions existed. Your story is very American. The essay I linked on my site says it is hard to find examples of the sign itself. The sign I used is a contemporary sign, found on-line. The essay:
http://claver.gprep.org/fac/sjochs/irish.htm

11/15/2012 03:00:34 pm

you are right George, I jumped past the literal to the feeling, which was not your point.

John McDermott

11/14/2012 05:21:05 am

They didn't need to exist where I grew up. You just knew you weren't particularly welcome in certain circles. And I'll just bet that our President, like many before him, can trace at least some part of his family tree back to Ireland. President O'Bama...I like the sound of that.

Alan Rubin link

11/14/2012 09:28:10 am

Everyone should have some Irish in them. It is a rich and diverse culture.

My top reincarnation priority is to return as an "Irish Story Teller".

Ed Martin

11/14/2012 01:59:31 pm

Everyone should have some Jewish in them. It is a humane and diverse culture. Actually those of from the NYC area, have absorbed some of each, if not genetically, then through the air.

Brian Savin

11/14/2012 02:55:24 pm

My late business partner was born in Paris and remained a true blue "Frenchman" all his life, but married an American doctor, who is black, and much preferred living in the United States because the country inspired him in ways that invigorated him. He thought the U.S. (he hated it when anyone called our country "America" -- insult to the the Canadians and Latins in his mind) was very special because we were different. What made us different in his mind was that we were multi-cultural and actually a melting pot. That is why things happened here, innovative thinking, that just couldn't happen in Europe. And he would point to examples. I'll give one:

Alain was an economist, and he was amazed that markets worked here better than in Europe. One reason is that we invented the antitrust laws that worked to keep our markets working efficiently for the general welfare while in Europe monopolies and cartels were not just tolerated but encouraged as good social conduct by the industrial class (until recently). He thought our multiculturalism had brought with it very different ways of looking at problems by many different people and that prevented everyone thinking alike. He just loved it!

There was one thing I hated about Alain, I confess. The same thing I hate about you, now, George. Whenever he and I arrived at airport customs around the world, Alain would check the lines and pull out the passport for the shortest line. You Citizens of the World deserve some punishment in the afterlife. Or maybe I'll even write to Bill O'Reilly about it.

George Vecsey

11/15/2012 11:52:07 am

Thanks, guys. That was the general experience.
The link in my essay raises some interesting questions about NINA signs.
Brian, you are right. Nothing like arriving anywhere in the EU and just walking through. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

What ‘Traditional America’ Is Bill O’Reilly Talking About?

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