The last act in an Irish tragedy

Bulger’s crimes are uniquely his, but his habit of defining himself by enmity perfectly embodied what William Butler Yeats called the “antithetical self.’’ We know who we are by whom we hate. One reason Bulger so dominated public awareness in his fugitive years is that many Americans implicitly recognized in him the last act of an Irish tragedy, one played out no more poignantly than on the stage of Bulger’s own South Boston.

When Southie first received the Irish, their enemy was the British. And why not? The mass trauma of the London-enabled Great Hunger, a potato blight turned genocidal, stamped the consciousness of every Irish emigrant across four generations. Famine anguish informs the Irish-American unconscious to this day, showing up in bitter notes of personality — sarcasm taken for humor, silence for expression, the thirst. Arriving in Boston, the newcomers’ hatred of the British was readily transferred to the local Brahmin establishment, whose condescension could not have been more familiar. That Boston’s social and economic stratification was more unyielding than that of other American cities meant the way up and out was closed off (the Kennedys had to move to New York to escape), and the Irish enclave of South Boston became, in effect, a prison pretending to be paradise.

Whitey Bulger wanted to be taken as Robin Hood, a defender of the neighborhood under siege. As the old Brahmin enemy faded, a new enemy arrived in the legion of black families who wanted to put their children into Southie’s schools — or bus Southie children out to theirs. “Liberals’’ were their sponsors, along with the courts, the press, and even the broader church. Local Irish xenophobia became general. In concert with his politician brother, William, Whitey Bulger played on all of this, the pair celebrated as maestros of neighborhood values.