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.
#1 by Dave on 01/13/2008 - 6:01 pm
Non-race based ethnic nuances have a different meaning today than they had in previous eras.
For whether you define your identity by dipping into the tepid waters of some sort of ethnic or family nostalgia; or by your athletic preferences as a sports fan; or by your “national” identity within today’ s system of multiracial national identities; or by your branded appearance in dress, home, and auto; or by your intellectual and artistic preferences; it is all about living a consumer society based substitute life.
These facets of identity continue to evolve into ever-greater shallowness in the present era because of growing commoditization in the economics and cultural sphere.
Politics is very much a part of this also. You can tell it by the uniformity of the learned fan catechisms of the various branded ideologies that are currently hot and popular.
For example, no congregation has ever learned a branded catechism with more uniformity than the Libertarians with their anti-Fed (the source of all evil) and gold as legal tender catechism. The sheer uniformity of their recitations is appalling to me. I have yet to hear someone labeling himself or herself a Libertarian deviating from the party line one iota.
But the uniformity of branded catechisms is evident in all the ideologies currently circulating. It is all a part of the general process of product commoditization that is going on, which is especially evident in the commoditization of consumer products, products that in a previous era were differentiated.
This commoditization has occurred because of advances in manufacturing that provide for defect-free products that are finished to very high tolerances. The precision today in manufactured items is many orders superior to anything that existed in the 1970s with the exception, perhaps, of firearms.
Accordingly, America is again leading the world in change. The world’s highest quality products end up here, in the land where the competitive benchmarks are the highest.
This commoditization in the consumer world is leading to destruction. Consumer society needs product differentiation to sustain its profits. It is becoming harder and harder to “margin up” on the basis of product differentiation and the marketers just can’t get the fads going like they used to.
For example, Madison Avenue long ago realized it could no longer get fads going with teenage boys. They are just not reachable in today’s world, a big change from the WWII and Baby Boom generations.
Intelligent minds have left the marketing field on account of this. These leaders well understand the importance of teenage boys in human affairs, and it’s meaning for the future prospects of consumer culture.
But consumer culture is something almost everyone else believes can’t and won’t end.
They are wrong.
They just don’t understand the HOW and WHY it is ending. It has to do with manufacturing advances, its economics, and the resultant growing commoditization of life in general.
Accordingly, a consumer based substitute life is becoming more and more ephemeral and the public has less to grasp for a substitute identity.
#2 by backbaygrouch4 on 01/15/2008 - 7:56 am
Before Massachusetts, with the largest percentge of Catholics in the nation, elected its first Catholic governor, the South produced two Catholic Chief Justices of the US Supreme Court. They could not have come from Massachusetts because they would have been barred from the the more lucrative areas of law practice or scholarship.