America is not Irish and Patrick is not our saint, nor do we observe the holidays of foreign national patron saints or recognize extra-Biblical Roman "saints". So "Saint" Patrick's Day is alien to America, and in America the 17th of March is rightly Evacuation Day, the commemoration of the Revolutionary expulsion of government forces from Boston in our first great triumph of the Revolutionary War, March 17 of 1776.
It wasn't "the British" we were fighting: we were at least as British; what are termed "the British" were "the government". The American Revolution was our treasonous, murderous, and righteous, armed insurrection against our duly-instituted government. We were outlaws but we prevailed by the will of God and force of arms, and so the outlaws became the founders of the republic, and the rest is history.
It's suited American governments since that American Revolution that the lawful government of the time is misnamed in history "the British", carrying the connotation of foreign occupier, but "the British" were neither foreign nor occupiers, they were our people and our government, only they lorded over us so we killed them and seized their power for ourselves. And Amen.
America is not a government or deference to government, any more than it's Irish or Roman; America is glory to God and death to kings.
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And another thing, along these lines, my best theory to account for a sociological anomaly which mystified me for as long as I was cognizant of it, and which I have never yet seen addressed or even acknowledged elsewhere.
I come from a rarefied corner of the planet, northeast of Maine in extreme southern, extreme rural Nova Scotia, at a sort of end of the world. My people descend from Old New England -- my own line landed in 1631 -- and to the present day they speak Old New England and think Old New England. And yet, by my father's generation in the Midcentury, and in my generation circa the '80s and '90s, our cultural identity was Southern and Western.
We were left out of the Revolution in the 1770s while we settled the 14th Colony, and in 1867 we were annexed against our express democratic will to godless, godforsaken Canada, may it be destroyed utterly and soon. Canada was ever a foreign occupying regime, Tories who are The Enemy and Frenchmen who are The Enemy, all alien and anathema, and pathetic to boot. The whites-need-not-apply, the-women-are-the-men-and-the-men-are-girls, gay-and-trans, Church of Green, globalist communist, satanic Canada of the 21st Century is that much more alien and anathema.
Then the Old Country betrayed us in 1867, and even by the early 17th Century we had been compelled to part from our country and countrymen, lorded over as they were by a king and an aristocracy and a Rome-ish state church. So where were we to turn for a mother, our little lost colony?
Until some stage of the 20th Century our compass pointed to New England. Even into the last century our capital was less Halifax, never mind Ottawa or London, than Boston. But by my father's time New England was being supplanted in our heads and hearts, by the American South and West, notwithstanding that for obvious reasons of geography and history we'd had little or nothing to do with the South and West.
Why should a little lost colony of Old New Englanders stranded motherless half a continent away from the American South and West, lose their identification with their ancestral New England and come to identify instead with the remote South and West, and about that time, the middle of the 20th Century? The answer can only be immigration, the cumulative and transformative effects of mass immigration by alien foreigners to the North which mostly passed over the South and West.
By the time I first visited Massachusetts in the later '80s about the only English left in New England was the placenames. Boston which had been England in America was by then Ireland in America. Irish Catholics had washed over Boston in the first wave of foreign immigrants since the Foreign Protestants of Lunenburg and Pennsylvania before the Revolution, beginning not long before the Civil War and followed post-bellum by Italians and Poles and Eastern European Jews and a cacophony of Old World tribes and religions swarming Boston and New England and the North more generally, so that by some chapter of the 20th Century the Old Stock had been washed away and our homeland was to us a strange land.
But not so the South and West. "Old times there were not forgotten." There still the surnames were Smith and Jones, the churches were wood painted white and the religion was the Bible, King James translation, the cuisine was buttered biscuits and apple pie, and the talk drawled and the songs twanged. The South and West to us had gotten to be more like home than home.
