Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Ethnic Lib The rediscovery and glorification of Ethnics--the Irish, Italians, Poles and others who used to be called hyphenated Americans before we were taught that...
...For all their charms, I would guess that the Ethnics are not going to be America's minority sweetheart for very long...
...The raison d'etre of the Catholic Church, as of all churches, is that the Truth, or a crucial part of it, is already known, and it is the responsibility of those who possess it to carry it to the benighted...
...What they don't like are white radicals, black criminals, liberated women, and busing...
...Catholic Lib The movement for democratization of the Roman Catholic Church continues apace...
...A lifetime of commuting...
...That's all very well for a government, but quite inappropriate for a religious body...
...Indians were In for a day or two...
...We must all support day care--even though one can already foresee those conscience-assaulting studies of the 1980s cataloguing the disastrous effects of separating tots from their mothers during the critical early years...
...Black was Beautiful for quite a while...
...Please, Teddy, sit down...
...Women's Lib Before a man may comment on Women's Lib, I believe, he is required to undergo a period of Sensitivity Training, a form of depth analysis and Chinese trial in which his deep and despicable feelings about women are bared and he makes public confession...
...When authority is open to a vote, then church fathers become nothing more than politicians...
...Once a religious doctrine is put to a vote then win or lose, it can scarcely carry the force of ordained truth...
...As others have pointed out, the terrible fate of reformers is that they sometimes get exactly what they ask for...
...We were all Ethnics then, every single kid in the class, not to mention most of the teachers, and our unanimous aspiration was to get ourselves homogenized...
...Is that as far as imagination can take these liberators--into the soft thralldom that now gives ulcers to males...
...The foregoing used to be known as a "stereotype...
...Truth in such circumstances must be seen as mere opinion...
...Will all those who favor the divinity of Jesus please say "Aye...
...I confess to having avoided that ordeal up until now, but my intentions here are limited...
...Yet even those with no objection in principle to the operation may find themselves put off by the eagerness of the middle-class leaders of Women's Lib to give their less privileged sisters the opportunity to have their innards scoured on demand...
...And, anyway, who can the Democrats nominate...
...As soon as one admits democracy into the process, one admits uncertainty along with it...
...Conniving for promotion...
...The endearing thing about the rediscovered Ethnics is that they really like this country...
...More power to them--but just what sort of liberation is offered by a chance at the vice presidency of a corporation...
...They haven't made up their minds about pollution...
...Women's Lib these days is marching under three specific banners--day care centers, free abortions, and equal employment opportunities--and it is these specifics only, not the higher thinking of the movement, that I shall touch upon...
...They are an American success story, and there is certainly nothing that undermines sympathy like success...
...Abortion today seems to be a progressive action only because it has for so long been prohibited for reactionary reasons...
...Perhaps they believe that democratic reforms can stop at the water's edge--a chancy hope...
...Who can be so mean-spirited as to be against day care centers...
...When liberal Catholics suggest that democratization (and the ecumenization that goes so handily with it) is going to strengthen their Church, they can only be thinking of it as a political or social institution...
...Now it turns out that the Ethnics have not been homogenized at all...
...God Himself is not immune...
...They bowl...
...Stereotypes about races were once considered bad, but now they are all right again as long as they are not bad stereotypes...
...The kind of thing one would expect from men who have not attended Sensitivity sessions...
...For one thing, that would mean that the Italian kids would stop beating up Jewish kids on their way to Hebrew school in the afternoon...
...They are not sufficiently abused...
...Interminable conferences...
...The main worry of Ethnics seems to have to do with property values...
...The Pope is not immune...
...Democracy is a sure antidote for infallibility...
...The demand that really speaks to the immediate condition of the professionals who invented Women's Lib is the third--equal employment opportunities and rewards...
...Let the bishops beware of the Gallup poll...
...they've been overlooked while the nation has gone whoring after noisier minorities...
...Already, Polish jokes are being heard again in the land...
...Still, like those citizens who recall fondly the days before integration was exposed as a liberal cop-out, I cannot help thinking back to my grade-school years...
...In fact, it is a most reactionary answer to the problem of unwanted children, insofar as it is an answer at all...
...They like television shows and big cars and the Reader's Digest...
...That professional women in all fields, from sports to Academe, have been grossly discriminated against is patent...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Ethnic Lib The rediscovery and glorification of Ethnics--the Irish, Italians, Poles and others who used to be called hyphenated Americans before we were taught that there is no such thing as a hyphenated American--must be welcomed by all persons of good will...
...Now, this is not a subject that a non-Catholic feels comfortable intruding on, yet the process suggests certain anomalies even to the secular mind...
...Nobody except a politician in heat can weep for them...
...It's time we remembered that Poles are People...
...Democracy cannot be defended on the grounds that it will provide us with the Truth...
...The only reliable defense of political democracy comes from those who concede that the Truth is unknowable at any given moment, so we're better off opening the whole matter up to the public will...
...Once an ailing branch of the welfare tree, today they are seen as places where middle-class young mothers may deposit their babes while they go to the office, visit museums or cultivate affairs, as temperament dictates...
...How great it was going to be when we got rid of the accents and mannerisms and Old World Hatreds of our parents, when we all became Americans and you couldn't ever again tell a Jewish kid from an Italian kid...
...What really irks the career-oriented spokeswomen, however, is the denial of the key to industry's executive suites and washrooms...
...For that process once begun has a way of going further...
...Then, even if people don't get what's good for them, they may in any case get what they think, on election day, is good for them...
...Stock options and tax deals...
...As for abortions, reformers are surely right in arguing they belong under the subject heading of Medicine rather than Theology...
...They've just been waiting there, in Staten Island and places like that...
...To celebrate the rights of women to this masochistic and relatively dangerous form of birth control at a time when other means are at hand is a cruelly patronizing substitute for education...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 20
