I wrote about Seattle’s Indigenous People’s Day the other day, and if that article wasn’t enough to show that I have no deep thoughts on the issue of bank holidays or the seemingly impossible task of honoring the cultures that existed in the New World prior to European settlement, here’s another declaration against interest: My understanding of the complex relationship between Italian Americans and American Indians is informed almost entirely by a poster I once saw in the rec room of the family home of a junior-high friend. To my amazement, that poster can’t be found with two seconds of Googling, so here’s my best recollection of it:

Like all great nonsense, this slogan is literally true, and it sticks in my mind for two reasons:

First, because it speaks to my vision of America as an idea so awesome that everybody wants to claim some ownership of it, no matter how goofy or small.

Second, because the Italian-American family that had this poster up in its home was a group of people so steeped in the Italian anti-clerical tradition that the father of my junior-high friend was named “Adeo.” That name, according to family history that was related to me at some time in the 1980s, was the closest approximation to “Atheist” the fervidly anti-Catholic grandmother could conceive.

This seemed to me to be just an odd story about where I grew up. Only many years later did I grok that it was part of a robust tradition of Italian antagonism to the Catholic Church. It is most visible today in the very low rate of religious observance in Italy and in throwaway lines like the warning in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather that a certain character can’t be trusted because “he’s tricky as a priest.” My favorite example is the local legend that Sts. Peter and Paul Church, the signature Catholic church of San Francisco, is staffed by Salesians of Don Bosco because the Salesians were known as a fighting order and the North Beach Italians in the early 20th century were in the habit of beating up and expelling diocesan priests who had been sent to run the parish. (S.P.P.C. has now become a de facto Chinese Catholic church, because, as Joey Zasa says, that’s America!)

This is the central absurdity of all-purpose ethnic holidays. They have no room for the outliers who actually make life interesting. Any ethnicity worth its salt is so subdivided with internal arguments that the idea of speaking for all members of that gene pool is ridiculous.