The Boys From County Hell

“Hordes of teenagers on the lam from high schools across the tri-state region emerged with them, carrying six packs in brown-paper bags that were promptly snatched by the police. Many wore hip-hop fashions that looked ludicrous on them: baseball hats askew, enormous pants that could clothe any three of them at a time, brand-name jackets that must have set their parents back the price of a top-line oven. Some of them looked eleven or twelve, although Jimmy figured they were older than that. When they passed, the spoke the slurry slang of convicts they learned from watching MTV. God, he thought, their parents must be appalled.

Liam shook his head. “It’s a whigger parade. Look at them all wanting to be black. Not just black like Bill Cosby or Martin Luther King or Michael Jordan – but stupid, poor, locked up, and black. Fucking idiots.”


The quote above is excerpted from The Rackets, by Thomas Kelly. I finished reading the novel a couple of weeks ago, but that particular passage stuck with me. Kelly wove a sharp bit of social commentary into his book, one that prompted a chain reaction of thoughts on my part.

At first reading I found myself nodding my head in agreement with Liam’s views. Whenever I see young men – whether black, or white, or asian – all decked out in hip-hop or gangsta fashion, I can’t help thinking ‘ you guys look damn silly. I can’t believe your folks let you out the door dressed like that.’ I suppose that makes me officially old and cranky. One generation shaking their heads in dismay at the fashion choices of a younger generation is hardly a new story.

The next thing that occurred to me was how ironic Liam’s comments were, considering that he and Jimmy are on their way to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. You know – St. Patrick’s Day – when thousands of Plastic Paddies ‘celebrate’ their Irish ‘heritage’ by wearing buttons emblazoned with ‘Fuck Me, I’m Irish’ and green plastic hats, drinking green beer, fighting, puking and urinating in public, and generally acting like drunken buffoons. In the novel Liam himself is the cliched Irishman, overly fond of excessive drinking and fistfights – also someone I’d look at and say ‘you’re an idiot.’

After considering this, I started to wonder why people, especially young men, insist on perpetuating and glorifying these stereotypes. Perhaps it’s the glamour of the outlaw image that these stereotypes afford those who embrace them that appeals to people. I suppose acting like a ‘gangsta’ or a ‘Wild Colonial Boy’ allows one to assume a rebel persona: the hard man, the loner, the trickster, the one who breaks society’s suffocating rules. But when you strip away the romantic bullshit around that kind of nonsense, what you’re left with is pretty bleak. The thug life that gangsta wannabes want to be a part of leads to death or jail for thousands of it’s actual participants. Follow the Irish ‘traditions’ of hard fighting and harder drinking and you find poverty, insanity, broken homes and marriages. You can admire men as diverse as Tupac and Brendan Behan for their talents – but both men embraced the stereotypes and dies because of them.

Man, I’m definitely getting old – I just wrote a preachy post. But it irks me to no end to see folks buying into that kind of bullshit. Imitating people who wind up dead or in jail simply makes no sense to me – and the loss of talented folks is immeasurable. Brendan Behan is one of my favorite authors – a drinking, brawling, IRA gunman who served his first jail sentence at the age of sixteen. He had a genius for the English language that could make you scream with laughter or wring tears for your eyes. He also died at the age of 41, leaving behind a body of work that is far too small. So much for perpetuating stereotypes.

"It's a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with" - Brendan Behan