I got some comments on “Me and the Irish” that made me want to make some points that people today are not exposed to. Pretty random, but interesting at least to me.

It is true that the “Scots-Irish” are not Irish, but Scot Protestants who lived in Ireland for generations and then moved to America. That does not mean, though, that they are not Celtic. Gaelic, aka, “Irish” us spoken in large parts of Scotland because of a combination of words you don’t hear much: Irish Imperialism.

Back in the first millennium, the Picts controlled a huge part of Scotland. They spoke a language just as Celtic as Gaelic, in the same way that Italian is just as Latin as Spanish, but Pictish was a different language, just as Italian is different from Spanish. The Irish conquered that area and today its Gaelic is the same as Irish Gaelic. By the time of Cromwell a lot of the Pictish blood was in the Scots who went to Ireland as enemies.

Another thing that is forgotten today is that in New England the inferiority of Southern blood was explained by the heavy admixture of Celtic in it. You can still see some of that in Mencken.

The Buckleys always correct people and insist they are “ANGLO-Irish.” In the Southern Partisan in the 1980’s, Bill Buckley’s brother wrote a vicious column about Irish blood that offended my friend Doctor Shanty deeply.

Most people wouldn’t understand these complications today. The Scots Irish were not Irish, but they were heavily Celtic. Those Scots Irish were sent in to crush the wild Irish and then they went to America. The poor Indians didn’t stand a dog’s chance against the product of all that.

Both Calhoun and Jackson were prototypical Scots-Irishmen. In fact, they looked so much alike that in Europe their portraits would get mixed up. If I were an Indian, I wouldn’t want to run into either one of them in a dark forest.