I dislike Thomas Friedman for many reasons. Especially irksome is how he has made taxi-driver anecdotery so utterly toolish. I have a personal grudge about this because I myself have a for-true-real taxi-driver anecdote that, uh, I think isn't entirely bullshit. I'm going to tell it here now because this is my fucking blog dammit.
The last time I was in Ireland was 7 years ago. On the way back home I took a cab to the Dublin airport. The cabbie was a Professional Irishman sort, and fair play to him. But I can kind of play that crap too, especially if I've been drinking. And, uh, I had been drinking. So after a bit we cut the shit, and for some reason I told him that I'd fairly recently finished reading John Cooney's biography of Archbishop McQuaid.
He hadn't read it, but he was deeply curious about the Main Question -- which was, at the time, "was your man a pedophile?"
I gave him my honest response: there was nothing in the book that provided any sort of direct evidence that he was.
But I also said that there was no reason for any serious researcher to conclude that widespread child abuse had not occurred under McQuaid's watch, and that if this was something McQuaid cared about, he was in a position to have stopped it. He didn't.
The cabbie heard this. Shook it off, if still mad. And said:
"It wasn't just the sex stuff. I remember that they were allowed to beat the hell out of me and that was fine."
He then said that when he was nine he was standing lined up on a stairwell, and a Christian Brother was irked at him, and so he was slapped against a wall and forever after had trouble concentrating about... anything.
This claim is plausible by even the most casual examination of the historical record.
For five decades, Catholicism had a wonderful opportunity to show how a particularly faithful nation could be made into a Paradise.
Fucked that one up, you know?
Roman Catholicism had unprecedented cultural and social sway over a confessional modern nation for about a half a century... and its legacy is mass child beatings, not to mention large-scale child rape.
Do you know why I hate this shit? Because Tim Father fucking Corcoran could have screeched it.
I'm lapsed, motherfucker.
(A bit of bravado here; it's not like this is easy. The intimate and tribal, etc.)