The number of people I have encountered recently who claim to be Irish is staggering.

You know the people that I am talking about — they guy that went on a four-month “pilgrimage to the homeland” on study abroad and reconnected to his lost “Gaelic roots.”

Sir, I regret to inform you that red hair and an angry disposition while intoxicated do not double-handedly qualify you for citizenship in the land that flows with stew and Guinness.

When did this become a fad, anyway? I have a difficult time imagining our forefathers Fritz and Jurgen standing around all day talking about the potato harvest, especially when there were Octobers to be “fested” and wars to be made.

Yet, somehow today we have arrived at a place nationally where we have a breakfast cereal, a line of body cleansers, several rock bands, a slew of pubs and eateries, and even a prestigious university that usurps a foreign identity in order to market themselves.

It is likely this collective cultural fraud began at the same time as another goat-getting cultural phenomenon: Americans hating America, both of the United States variety.

Both of these trends are perpetrated by persons with a shoddy grasp on history and a surprising ability to abdicate all personal connection to it except for that which is personally preferred.

You cannot chose to leapfrog over the Joseph McCarthy-loving generation of Soviet witch-hunters in your immediate family tree in order to reconnect with your lovable, salt-of-the-earth, potato-famine immigrant family members.

No, ma’am, you cannot.

“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and then you have the facts of life.”

I learned that from a television program whose cast list appeared to have a good number of people with surnames of Irish origin.

To those of you who still decide to rest on your imaginary Irish laurels, I have one request in the name of fairness: For every “Kiss me I’m Irish” T-shirt you wear, you must wear your “Blow me, I helped create the Dust Bowl” scarf.

If you are going to use circumstantial facts of the lives of ancestors as defining attributes in your life, they deserve to be equally represented.