In the last post, I referenced my repressed desire to expectorate some nice your-mom jokes on these kids. The appropriateness of this kind of joke has been the subject of much controversy during this program, as there are individuals enrolled here who absolutely will not weather derogatory references to their mothers; it’s almost come to blows on a few occasions. Now, what’s remarkable about the demographics of these students is that nearly every single one of them is an immigrant, so they hardly represent the traditional notion of what constitutes “European” culture. I’ll be blunt and say almost half of them are Muslim.
What I find so fascinating is that the only Caucasian male of lengthy European lineage revels in your-mom jokes. He understands the art. He and I became cornered one day at dinner, the others warning us with clenched jaws that lines were about to be crossed. Jovially he and I proceeded to make fun of each other’s mothers, which certainly seemed fair game, as neither of us had been getting offended. In response to the question, “Doesn’t anyone in America ever get punched in the face from a your-mother joke like this?” our resident Northern Irelander explained the situation thus:
Of course not! You don’t get offended from this stuff anymore. I mean, maybe in the 1950s something would have happened, but today? No, you don’t let it get to you. It’s a sign of weakness if someone pisses you off. You have to be invulnerable.
He later explained to me what he had felt as he watched the others grow angry at your-mom joke: he said it was like watching barbarians doing a wardance. It seemed so incomprehensibly primitive to him, this kind of bloodline loyalty. It’s interesting that although the man has ostensibly little devotion to the respect paid his family, he is fervently nationalistic, and never misses a chance to rip on the British (who does?). My final thought on the matter is merely that he can take a joke, which perhaps is the natural byproduct of life in society whose economy rests so importantly on a massive entertainment industry.
Yes, I’m aware that I am here generalizing the Northern Ireland economic culture and conflating it with that of an equally generalized Western economic paradigm. But accepting this premise as true for the sake of argument, how should theories of integration in European societies be developed, revised, discarded?