The long awaited debut is finally upon us.  Steven Godfrey, Mississippi’s least favorite literary son, will be gracing FOTP readers with his benevolent presence from time to time to set you rubes straight on a variety of topics.  If you too have an insatiable lust for buxom British pin-up girls (and who doesn’t, really) and a genuine disdain for the hipster culture, then head on over to The Godfrey Show for more of young Steven’s literary finery. – Bunkie Perkins

I fucking hate St. Patrick’s Day. Especially in Mississippi.

This weekend the white money of war-torn Jackson’s Bellhaven district will emerge from their Acadian style fortresses on the north side of the city and voluntarily congregate downtown.

They will stumble, stagger and exhibit every quality of the exact people that terrify them so much that they won’t even drive down State Street 364 days of the year, even in a 3-ton Inifiti SUV with Jackson Academy parking sticker (a known mystical minority forcefield).

They’ll do all of this while stinking drunk, and only in Mississippi is that fact ironic, because if you haven’t noticed, no God-fearing Mississippian likes booze. There are three kinds of whites in the Magnolia who will ever admit to enjoying alcohol:

Group 1 – College students (except in Clinton).

Group 2 – The poor but proud cracker working class, who have no shame in their NASCAR game when it comes to inebriation. Although in the last decade this subculture have changed their cocktail of choice to yellow flake crystal methamphetamine, usually consumed on or near a Jet-Ski.

Group 3 – Rich Baptists during non-religious holidays. This is the heresy group. If you’re upper class, white and Protestant, you can get an erection just thinking about opening a Miller Lite in front of a church deacon during daylight hours.

And the problem is just that – you’re terribly out of practice because you spend the bulk of your year damning the practice while a particular neighboring state refines their gold medal tactics.

Then you decide to have a parade celebrating a heritage that isn’t yours while you abandon your own assigned system of values? Poor practice, poor results.

St. Patrick’s Day in Mississippi is just like Mardi Gras in Mississippi (immediate coastal communities excluded) – Awful. Whenever any Mississippi community north of Hattiesburg tries to imitate Louisiana culture, it just ends up looking like your Dad at a Buffet concert: just some asshole wearing beads and a straw hat over a pressed Izod with Sperry’s.

Why do we choose St. Patrick’s Day over all other holidays to abandon our antiquated fear mongering of booze? I have no idea. This country has a love affair with a fabricated Ireland. Literature! Guinness! Fiddles ‘n Shamrocks! Fiddlin’ Shamrocks!

You, reading this right now, are not Irish. You need to know that. I don’t care if your last name is Shaughnessy and your grandmother was a fucking Belfast Potato Queen – you’re here, so you’re American now. (Ask the Mexicans, apparently that’s how it works.)

The real Irish, as in the peoples of Ireland, hate you for downloading the Dropkick Murphys and calling yourself Irish. They hate the New England Irish, the Red Sox fan Irish and especially not the college-aged, English Lit 302 James Joyce Sidewalk Irish, which for a brief time subverted into the “Angela’s Ashes” fan club.

Like any historically disadvantaged minority culture shipped across the Atlantic, the Irish are willing to pawn their traditions to your office’s happy hour for a buck, but they fucking hate you for it. We microwaved their culture into a pale imitation of its actual tradition. (I also like to think they secretly hate us for also associating them with Boston Red Sox fans, but that’s just a theory at this point.)

You’re not fucking Irish just like you’re not fucking Cajun. If Jackson would just create its own cultural holiday – some sort of Spring time holiday honoring casual dining eateries at highway strip malls – we’d have something culture appropriate.