Heard enough about Gangs of New York yet? No?

Good, because I have one more thing to say about this epic, which has split critics and fans so evenly that the New York Post did a feature recently on just how many people love and hate this film.

Personally, I dissented from a lot of folks whose opinions I respect highly. I liked it. That could be because the issues and events that director Martin Scorsese deals with are so important that any actors, any script exploring Famine immigration, the New York City Draft Riots and 1860s politics would have been fine by me.

There are many flaws. (Pete Hamill, in this issue of the Voice, notes several.) But there is a barn-burning performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher. And don’t tell me he’s hamming it up, either. (Like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino never hammed it up!)

It’s the Day-Lewis character I’d like to talk about here, to explore some issues that have not yet been mentioned regarding Gangs.

To Scorsese’s credit, Bill the Butcher is a complex character. He’s virulently anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, but vaguely sympathetic, even associating with the Irish, at least when they fit his needs. He reminds me ever so slightly of Archie Bunker, the blue collar Queens WASP from the 1970s TV show All in the Family. He rants and raves at blacks, Catholics, Jews, etc. Yet we can’t help feeling a little sympathy for him. New York—the world—is changing, and there’s nothing he can do.

The best line of Gangs, for me, followed a brazen murder. Brendan Gleeson plays a prosperous immigrant in the Five Points (northeast of today’s City Hall in downtown Manhattan) who is persuaded to enter politics when there are enough Irish votes to secure his victory.

The influx of Irish in to Manhattan, of course, supplants native Protestants like Bill the Butcher, and turns him into a useless relic. At one point, Tammany’s Boss Tweed (with whom Bill had previously been aligned) even warns Bill that he’s ignoring the inevitable future.

But, butchers will be butchers. So when the Irish take control of the Five Points, electing Brendan Gleeson’s character, the newly-minted politician seeks a truce with the Butcher.

What he gets is a hatchet in the back.

“That’s the minority vote,” spews the Butcher.

That single line should strike a chord with the Irish in American politics over the past 150 years.

The Irish climbed the American ladder, in part, because of the political clout they wielded thanks to their sheer, desperate numbers. At the end of Gangs, we understand that Irish-run Tammany now rules. And it did, on and off, into the 1950s at least.

But it’s important not to forget the Protestants they booted from the public stage, even if they were anti-Irish Catholic. Why? Because by the 1960s guess who it was getting booted from the public stage? It was the Tammany Irish, forced to give way to new waves of migrants and immigrants.

And guess what? In a lot of cities across America, Irish Americans reacted in ways that were not too different from Bill the Butcher.

Now, obviously, there’s no need to bring hatchets into this equation. No one is saying that Irish Americans violently went hunting down new immigrants and African Americans once they started gaining political power in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the famous “backlash” of that era was led by many Irish Americans, whether it was the founding of Keiran O’Doherty’s Conservative Party in 1962, or that anonymous Irish kid from Bay Ridge who went to shake liberal Mayor John Lindsay’s hand during a campaign trip, only to reveal a thumb tack in his palm.

That’s why, to me, despite his jokes about the Pope and Irish drunks, Archie Bunker (played by Caroll O’Connor, mind you) always seemed quite an Irishman out there in Queens in the late 1960s: his World War II world going to the hippies.

But it did not go without a fight. Even with the fight was moving out of New York City once and for all, altering politics at the state level, while becoming a “Reagan Democrat” on the national level.

So, the very subtle, highly controversial point here is: Even when the majority becomes the minority, you can’t ignore or forget them (even if they seem bigoted or narrow-minded.) This would seem a valid lesson in 1860s New York, 1960s New York, or even in Northern Ireland in 2003. “New minorities” may not have a hatchet—but they have a vote.