ANTI-CATHOLIC | 2008-01-12
A buddy of mine in the Reagan Administration was an Irishman from Philadelphia. I had been a professor and had grown out of it and he had a PhD and had grown out of it. By Reagan's time we were a couple of political pros, as Southerners and Irishmen are in DC, crying together over a party of Yankees trying to get along in a party of Yankees who were lost in real politics.
I should have said WASPs, and you would have understood how helpless Republicans were. But Michael Novak -- not Robert -- popularized the use of the term WASP. I had lunch with him once and pointed out that Southerners were overwhelmingly WASP but they shared every sane characteristic of the Unmeltable Ethnics he was contrasting to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. What he MEANT by WASPs, in plain English, was YANKEES. He wasn't being truthful.
He agreed, but Michael Novak is a theologian, so it didn't bother him in the slightest. All professional theologians are sociopaths.
Anyway, my Philadelphia Irish buddy and I were talking and I made a Proterstant-Catholic joke. He said, "Why is it that every time a protestant makes a Catholic-Protestant joke, the Catholics always comes out ahead?"
I was impressed. He was saying that only Jews and jigs and spics and so forth cannot listen to a joke unless their guy wins over the white guy. All dumb people are blond.
Which, as my buddy damned well knew, made the guy who is touchy a bit like a ... well, you know.
BUT I had an experience that puts another angle on this. I lived in a campaign headquarters in the middle of the Polish steel worker section of Chicago for a summer, and they would have gone ballistic if I had referred to them as "Polish people." Remember, I'm an honorary Boston Southie and I am supposed to speak THEIR language. "Polish people" sounds like they are some kind of defensive minority group.
A couple of years later I met a girl from Boston. She wouldn't say her last name. She was deeply ashamed of it. It was POLISH! In Boston being Polish or Irish makes you inferior. Nobody SAYS it, of course. It is so ingrained they don't even NOTICE it.
When we were talking about families in Southie, I mentioned that my first ancestor here wrote the first book in English in America, converted and baptized Pocahontas, and DIED before the famous Pilgrims GOT here. To me that was an illustration of Southern history being ignored. To them it was a revelation. They had someone speaking for them whose families predated their Majesties the Cabots and the Lodges Themselves!
Until that moment, I didn't fully realize how seriously they take this crap up there.
Anti-Catholic may mean more to Back Bay Grouch than it would to someone from Scarlet O'Hara and Cajun territory.