Paddywhacked in New York

The fairly fierce tide of anti-Americanism you hear crinkling in the pages of European newspapers these days is to be expected, I suppose. The average American – despite all the evidence chosen to pile up against him – is not as ignorant as we are led to believe, and the man or woman in the street has a fair idea why they are so stereotyped. After all, the president you get is the country you get. So while it's hard enough for them to be considered a thinking, empathetic American at the best of times, just imagine what the month of March does to those who have a touch of Irish too.

I'll admit straight up that I'm a Saint Patrick's Day snob. I live two blocks from where the New York parade ends but I hardly ever go. I don't take my kids out of school early. Like most others, I cringe at the "England out of Ireland" banners that are carried down the length of Central Park – such simplicities are light and they ripple in the wind. I'm not one to go weak at the knees for the display of police power. In one's life and in one's territory it has always seemed to me that we must lay claim to something more substantial than a birthing post.

I've always felt that to lob a bomb into the Fifth Avenue grandstand would be to destroy the cream of Irish mediocrity.

Yet another hinge in my heart recognises the old fart in this. I tend to side with poets and drunks and dreamers. I am quick enough to belt out Fairytale of New York from a barstool. My daughter recites Raglan Road to me, a very good friend owns a Second Avenue bar that pays the rent from the day's drunkards, my seven-year-old boy spent all his savings on a giant leprachaun hat that is both ridiculous and wonderful.

I often slip into the soft heel of the professional Irishman. Once in Mexico I stopped a potential beating by proclaiming "No Yanqui, no Yanqui, Irlanda, Irlanda!". And when I was researching a novel on the homeless who live in the subway tunnels of New York I always fell down hard on my accent, just as a point of difference that, in the end, kept me safe.

It's hardly a new thing to end up cringing at the shamrocks in the Second Avenue windows. And it's not really a point of radical departure to have to listen to some loudmouth flap on about American-Irish reactionaries. In the end, it's just Saint Patrick's Day. It's done. It's dusted. All the green hats are in the landfills at Fresh Kills and the stereotypes are folded away for another year. Or are they?

In a month when being Irish recognises what it means to be a cliché – albeit a celebrated one – it is a good prospect to look upon the cliché of the average American too. So much of the recent rhetoric of the European media makes a parade of cruelties and simplicities out of the American experience, a deconstruction and nullification of the average citizen who lives in stunned submission to the political circumstances of his or her life.

At least during the Vietnam War it was within the wider world's grasp that there were many millions of Americans horrified by the actions of their leaders. There are equal numbers today horrified by the actions of Bush and Co. Who really believes that peace is assured by war? Much of Europe seem to believe that the thinking Americans – the Chomskys, the Weinbergers, the deLillo's - are the absolute exception. Yet there is a broad current of American art, music, writing and even social action that is well aware how brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless their admininstation is, and are eager to change things both at home and abroad.

On a very simple level, for instance, the leaders of the American Ireland Fund have, over the past 25 years, put together a quarter of a billion dollars for peace and cultural initiatives in Ireland. Not bad for a group who come from a business culture that is supposedly cultureless, vapid, insipid, muderous and war-mongering. Just ask anyone who is involved with the Irish Special Olympics, the Samaritans, Habitat for Humanity, the Omagh Community House, how reliant they are on this decency and respect. It's not very fashionable to triumph the ordinary American, tarred as he or she is, but it is in the thought of others, just like us, that we can free ourselves of simple hatreds.

And just for a moment, here's a plea for my own children who carry a blue passport. They are not of this war. They are not of this government. They are not of quick profit. They do not want more of everything ready-made. They are not afraid to know their neighbours. They do not live under the poisoned principles of power. They – and countless others – are not just pawns of the simplistic intellectual flummery that passes for thought in the Bush government.

The confusion of the human heart with the political landscape is one of the places where these simplistic hatreds are born. Believe you me, I'd rather be an Irishman slagged off by a Paddy's Day cliché than to be an American ghettoised by an ongoing infantilisation.

Of course Americans have to start fighting back – it's really nobody's battle but an internal one, and yet one ounce of empathy is worth a ton of judgement. And so while Saint Patrick's Day is a full week old, it mightn't be a bad idea to recognise that it's just as demeaning to be a vapid American in today's Europe as it is to be paddywhacked on Fifth Avenue. And – to be honest – probably a lot more dangerous.

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herlihy on RTÉ Radio 1 (11.40pm) goes out every Tues day night