I am very interested in causality – the chicken or the egg type of thing.
You can really apply it to anything. Take something like Chucks. They’re cool shoes. Period. It’s not a discussion. Cool people wear them. But do these people wear them because they’re cool or are they cool because these people wear them? Is there any way of knowing? Better yet, is it worth knowing?
Does knowing that Chuck Taylor All-Stars became fashion icons because a bunch of posers started wearing them, only to be copied by posers who would be copied by posers who would be copied by posers, make them any less cool?
You can put anything under the microscope. Take St. Patrick’s Day, for instance. It’s not a real holiday, and we still had to go to school. Banks were still open and the mail was still delivered. To most, this doesn’t mean a whole lot, as St. Patrick’s Day isn’t just a holiday, it’s the holiday.
And by “holiday,” I mean “excuse to openly binge drink.” The only days that come close to this day’s level of accepted drunkenness are Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that’s just because society doesn’t want to kick the lonely when they’re down.
But now, Guinness has started a website, Proposition317.com, which proposes to take care of the technicality and make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday. The website includes a mission statement telling us why this proposition should be passed, and espouses that the Irish celebration should “be made an official holiday not only to officially commemorate the spirit of this day, but to celebrate and honor St. Patrick himself,” a man who “embodies the pride and strength in all who are Irish and in Irish enthusiasts alike.”
It closes by saying St. Patrick’s Day should be made official so that “nations around the world will join together to enjoy the parades, the fun and fellowship and a pint of Guinness stout or two.”
Obviously, this is all a big joke. You can actually go to the site and sign your name in support of this proposition. And as of this writing, more than 793,000 people have done just that, signed their names to this commercial. That’s great marketing, but it seems rather suspicious for society.
What exactly are these people signing their names to on this beer website? Do they think St. Patrick’s Day is a worthwhile holiday that deserves to be celebrated by the delaying of garbage retrieval? Wouldn’t that start a slippery slope leading straight to the first week of May? Or are they just letting everyone know how much they like drinking?
This raises the question, which came first, the love of St. Patrick’s Day or the love of getting drunk?
If the two weren’t mutually exclusive, would we still be petitioning for it to become an official holiday? There are two potential answers to that question, and one makes me so sad I want to chug down some Guinness just thinking about it.
It’s fine unless, of course, the chicken came before the pickled egg.
Stephen Sabetti is a senior journalism major, the assistant investigations editor and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
