Not much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving

President Reagan and Tip O'Neill

Earlier this month, the University of Ulster announced it would be establishing the John Hume and Tip O’Neill Chair in Peace, designed so that the school in Northern Ireland would become a world leader in peace and conflict resolution studies.

O’Neill’s association with this university stems, of course, from the late House speaker’s longtime interest in Northern Ireland. He was one of the famous “Four Horseman” of Irish American politics -- along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ted Kennedy and Hugh Carey -- who pressed leaders in Ireland, Britain and the North to peacefully resolve the ancient conflict.

But O’Neill was quite good at conflict resolution on this side of the Atlantic. And a lot of Americans would be quite thankful, this holiday week, if we had some political representatives like O’Neill today.

It would also be helpful if people reacquainted themselves with an Irish American guy who served as president from 1980 to 1988. He is an idol of the conservative right, yet worked with the liberal likes of O’Neill, and even -- gasp! -- agreed to tax hikes while he served as president.

You don’t hear that from the Tea Party, do you?

Not that it’s just Republicans who are to blame here. Democrats haven’t exactly come out looking like statesmen, either.

Indeed, even if the so-called congressional super-committee in Washington manages to come up with a last-minute compromise (which looked like a dim prospect as the Irish Voice went to press), not much has been done in the last week to enhance our view of Washington. Compromise remains a dirty word, and neither the Republicans nor Democrats seem willing to do anything to change that.

This was not always the case. Consider the two Irish giants of the 1980s political scene –O’Neill and Reagan.

They were quite different. Reagan’s great-grandfather was from Tipperary, but his background was deeply American as his family settled in the generally non-ethnic Midwest and then California.

O’Neill, on the other hand, was an East Coast ethnic kid, an old style pol who knew, as his famous saying put it, that “all politics is local.”

Also, O’Neill was an old-style New Deal liberal, while Reagan was an icon of the Republican party.

And yet, somehow, the duo managed to work together, in a way that seems unthinkable today.

When you hear the likes of Michele Bachmann bow at the altar of Reagan, you think she is talking about a man who was so ideologically pure that he could not utter the word “Democrat,” much less work closely with such a creature to come up with a compromise economic plan.

And yet, O’Neill and Reagan -- and even a Republican senator named Bob Dole -- did that throughout the 1980s.

Yes, there were early tax cuts Reagan and his allies supported. But when it was clear the U.S. budget was going bust (in part because of Republican support for military spending), Reagan agreed to tax hikes nearly a dozen times in order to keep the country functional.

Now, this is not to pretend that these were the good old days. Many people saw Reagan as a right wing devil and O’Neill as a sell-out.

But it must be said that both Reagan and O’Neill understood something about the Founding Fathers that many of today’s strident political types do not.

Compromise is not a very sexy thing. There’s a fine line between compromise and selling out.
When everyone is cutting deals in a smoke-filled room, we often crave someone who is willing to stand up and be independent.

But the famous Federalist Papers written at the time of America’s founding speak at length about how political factions must compromise.

And make no mistake about it. Irish machine politicians like O’Neill knew a lot about compromising.
From Chicago to New York, they were often challenged by idealistic reformers who had lots of big ideas but knew precious little about actually getting things accomplished.

Yes, the Tea Partiers and others can claim that it is time to break away from a system they view as inherently corrupt. They can claim that the likes of Tip O’Neill were part of the problem, rather than the solution.
But they’d pretty much have to say the same thing about that notorious tax-and-spender Ronald Reagan.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Losing our immigrant values - little coverage of John McCarthy as Steve Jobs mourning continues

Computer scientist - John McCarthy RIP

The world is still reeling from the death of Apple computer whiz Steve Jobs, who died October 5 at the age of 56.

Jobs was recognized as perhaps the foremost pioneer in a field that defined the end of the 20th century, and will surely dominate the early decades of our current century.

It is interesting, then, that not nearly as much attention was paid a few weeks later when a computer scientist named John McCarthy died at the age of 84.

Though not nearly as well known as Jobs, McCarthy was a certified prophet of our current e-world.

According to The New York Times, McCarthy “helped design the foundation of today’s Internet-based computing and…is widely credited with coining the term…artificial intelligence.”

Nearly four decades ago, meanwhile, McCarthy “presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce,” Internet security expert Whitfield Diffie noted in the Times.

There’s no need to belabor the Jobs-McCarthy comparison.  The latter was a secular saint who made Apple one of the hippest and most profitable corporations in the world.

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McCarthy was one of several people who played a key role in formulating the technological world we live in today.

There is, however, one more key similarity. Both Jobs and McCarthy were the children of immigrants.

Jobs’ father was born Abdulfattah Jandali in Syria. He goes by the name of John and famously gave Jobs up for adoption.  

McCarthy, meanwhile, was the son of an Irish immigrant labor organizer in Boston. McCarthy’s dad was a member of the Communist Party, as was his wife, a Lithuanian immigrant active in the women’s suffrage movement.

It’s important to think of McCarthy and Jobs as we slog through yet another depressing chapter in America’s immigration debate.

Lawmakers in Alabama recently passed what is believed to be the most severe immigration law in the U.S., targeting undocumented immigrants.

Over a dozen nations from Latin America and the Caribbean, meanwhile, have joined in the Justice Department's lawsuit against a controversial South Carolina law that would require police officers to contact federal officials if they believe someone is in the country illegally.

Just to make things really interesting, the South Carolina law was signed by Republican Governor Nikki Haley, herself the daughter of immigrants from India.

It is very easy to bash the Republicans and point out that this is the latest battle in a deeply schizophrenic country, where a deep nativist streak does battle with America’s inherent pride in its immigrant tradition.

It is easy -- but necessary.  

We lose something profound when we decide that now, finally, is the time to build walls and seal the borders.  When we convince ourselves that there were absolutely no illegal immigrants back when it was mostly the Irish and Italians and Poles and Jews who were streaming into America.

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But conservatives like Haley, as well as Alabama governor Robert Bentley, are right about one thing.  The federal government has dropped the ball on immigration.  

As a Haley spokesperson put it, “If the feds were doing their job, we wouldn’t have had to address illegal immigration reform at the state level.”

And, yes, we do need to think about criminals and terrorists when we think about immigration.  

But you know what else we need to think about?  What kind of country America is going to be in the 21st century.

And do you what else we need to think about? The next John McCarthy or the next Steve Jobs. 

Again, let’s not pretend we live in a time unlike any other.  Immigrants have always been a lightning rod for controversy.  

Consider McCarthy’s parents, immigrant Communists in Brahmin Boston.  A Catholic and a Jew.  

Surely had you asked a select group of Bostonians what to do with such a couple, they would have told you something about cramming these radicals back into steerage and sending them back to Ireland or Lithuania.

But consider what we would have lost.  Is that sentimental view of immigration?  

Perhaps.  But that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Occupy Wall Street - NYPD, Ray Kelly and Pat Lynch can’t win

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Ray Kelly and Patrick Lynch are often at odds.  After all, the former is a “boss,” the New York City police commissioner, while the latter represents the average street cop for the PBA, the city’s largest police union. 

But the crime-fighting duo are also the Irish face of New York City law enforcement. 

The NYPD is not nearly as Irish as it used to be, but to have a guy named Kelly running things, and a guy named Lynch representing thousands of officers illustrates how Irish the NYPD remains.

That being said, these are tough times for Kelly, Lynch and the NYPD.  The department is currently enduring a ticket-fixing scandal in the Bronx.  This comes as cops have also endured other sleazy allegations ranging from rape to racism.

In an article entitled “Is Ray Kelly’s NYPD Spinning Out of Control?,” The New York Observer recently wondered, “Between racist cops, rape cops, ticket-fixers, gun-runners and 'white shirts' gone wild, New York's Finest are losing their shine. Is the commissioner to blame?”
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True, as that same article noted, Kelly is still viewed quite favorably by average New Yorkers.  In fact, 25% of New Yorkers in a recent poll said they would vote for Kelly for mayor, the best showing of any local politician. (Kelly has said he has no interest in City Hall.)

Still, there is trouble looming. Perhaps the biggest problem for Kelly – as well as Lynch’s beat cops – is the ongoing occupation in downtown Manhattan at Zuccotti Park. 

Already we’ve seen ugliness as cops wrestle, pepper spray and otherwise not-so-gently subdue Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It should go without saying that there is plenty of blame to go around here.  No American’s right to assemble and express should be infringed, even if some of those people are peeing and pooping on the street. 

On the other hand, you can imagine an average beat cop’s sentiments towards the protesters.  They have been reassigned from locations all across the city to essentially babysit a ragtag group of folks who (at least some cops might think) don’t seem to have anything better to do.

That, to me, is where things get really interesting.  What do Lynch and other PBA officials think about the Occupy Wall Street movement? 

After all, yes, cops are charged with keeping the peace and keeping the city safe.  But they are also union men and women.

As one 21-year-veteran of the NYPD told the Observer, “We’re working stiffs, we have families to support. People seem to forget that we work as hard as everybody else.”

Furthermore, they are “working stiffs” in a cash-strapped city which actually delayed the hiring of a new class of NYPD recruits back in April.

Other unions, from the United Federation of Teachers to the Service Employees International Union, have expressed support for at least some aspect of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  And yet, police officers have essentially been put into a position where they are in direct opposition to the movement.

In fact, you might go so far as to say the cops are in a position where they literally cannot win.  Their bosses are telling them to monitor the protestors closely, so much so that any messy attempt to keep the ultimate peace might be taped via cell phone camera and end up on YouTube or the front page of the New York Post.
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On the other hand, let’s say the police succeed in essentially muting the pro-union themes among the many messages coming out of Zuccotti park.   Are cops, then, acting against their own best interest?

I hate to sound like an old-fashioned Marxist class warrior, but for the longest time, police officers – for all of the flaws people like to bring up about them  – have been asked to protect the interests of the elite, even though they themselves live far from elite lifestyles. 

To use the terms currently in vogue, your average police officer is without a doubt a member of the 99%.  And yet, it seems as if they are acting on behalf of the 1%.

That old union song asked, “Which side are you on?”  For now, it looks like New York’s Finest have two choices -- bad and worse.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Please leave John F Kennedy rest in peace

Stephen King

You know how they say it took Richard Nixon - someone with strong anti-Communist credentials – to visit China back in the 1970s?

Well, maybe it’s going to take an Irish Catholic to say something uncomfortable about John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Enough.  Really.  Enough.

Horror master Stephen King has just writing a 900-page time-traveling novel about how the JFK assassination could have been prevented.

So.  Enough.

This might be the kind of reaction you would expect from a Kennedy-bashing conservative, or a twenty-something slacker who has no interest in any history prior to the great Y2K scare.

That’s not me.  And yet, I’m compelled to, if not banish all Kennedy-related studies, then at least declare a moratorium.

Later this month, we will again mark the anniversary of the assassination that supposedly changed everything.

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Fittingly, as the fateful date approaches, new waves of Kennedy studies wash upon our cultural shores.

Last month there was a new book from Caroline Kennedy about her mom, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.

Now there’s Stephen King’s tome and TV pundit Chris Matthews’ new (500 more pages!) book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.

Matthews does an interesting job putting the Kennedys on the couch, psychoanalyzing the family dynamic as well as the lingering bigotries they had to confront.

Joe Kennedy Jr., of course, was seen as the family’s brightest light.

For his parents, Joe “would be their bridge to both joining and mastering the WASP society from which they, as Roman Catholics in early twentieth-century America, were barred.”

JFK, meanwhile, had to carve out a space as the “second son,” which is the title of one of Matthew’s chapters.

“Unlike his older brother, bound to a more conventional blueprint, Jack wasn’t under the same pressure. There was a lightness to him, a wry Irishness that blended with the WASP manner rather than aspiring to it,” Matthews writes.

“With that combination, he could enter where his father, mother, and brother could not.”

I’m not suggesting the Kennedys in general and JFK in particular are not interesting.  But I can’t help but think the amount of energy which we continue to focus on this clan means we are no longer interpreting the family and their times.

We are now interpreting the already-countless, already existing interpretations.

There’s also a lot of nostalgia involved in this.

Yes, every generation is susceptible to this.

Nevertheless, certain children of the 1960s have clung to Camelot with a passion bordering on disturbing.

A Washington Post contributor recently wrote, “As a prominent television personality himself, (Chris) Matthews understands the riddle of being constantly in the public eye, but also in another space the public doesn’t see. And he has brought this intuition to a reexamination of JFK, who you might think is the most chronicled and therefore the best understood president in modern history. Not so.”

Not so?  Well, maybe that’s best as it is.

Maybe we already know enough about this president, not to mention his killer and the folks who surrounded this president and his killer.

If you don’t think so then consider King’s new book, simply titled 11/22/63.  If Oliver Stone, in his movie JFK, depicted the assassination of Kennedy as a crime so heinous it simply must have been hatched at the highest levels, then King goes Stone one better.  (FYI: Early reviews suggest King’s book accepts the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.)

What King’s book does feature is a character who stumbles upon a portal which allows him to travel back to 1958 and, thus, possibly stop the assassination before it happens.

Maybe the world would still be a great place, then, right?

It’s hard not to look at all of these Kennedy books and realize they have little to do with JFK himself.

They seem to give a voice to our own fantasies about bold, youthful leadership and more innocent times.
 
Very basic questions, of course, would force us to confront the fact that there really were no more or less innocent times.

Ending our JFK obsession would, I believe, force us to grow up a little bit more as a nation.

So let’s let Jack rest in peace.  For a little while.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Rebelling against the Catholic Church - the nuns versus the Cardinals

Cardinal James Francis McIntyre

It is a time of great tension in the Catholic Church.  People are asking questions that people never used to ask.  

 
It seems as if the men in charge cannot keep up with the pace of change, and a widely-read national magazine puts the crisis on the front cover.  

 
The story inside explores “The Catholic Exodus,” and explores the difficulties American parishes are having staffing schools and churches with priests and nuns.

 
You can be forgiven if you think this is a story from 2011.  But it is, in fact, from 40 years earlier.  

 
It was way back in 1970 that Time magazine wrote about the Catholic “exodus,” and tried to explain “why priests and nuns are quitting.”

 
Indeed, it is easy to believe the crisis in the Catholic Church in the U.S. is a fairly recent thing.  

 
But in some ways, the debate that is going on now is an extension of debates that have their roots in the 1960s.

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This came to mind last week when I read about the death of a 95 year-old nun named Anita Caspary.  Her name is no longer a household one, but it was her’s on the cover of Time when the magazine explored the Catholic crisis decades ago.

 
Caspary came to be seen as a “rebel nun” who had a conflict with one of the most powerful Irish American Catholics, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, who rose through the ranks of the church under Cardinal Francis Spellman, dubbed by one biographer as the “American Pope.”

 
In the end, some 300 nuns initiated a series of changes in day-to-day life that they thought were in the spirit of the times.  

 
Cardinal McIntyre, whose mother was born in Kiltormer, Co. Galway, disagreed.  When all was said and done, the nuns parted ways with the church. Some see it as one of the largest breakaways in Catholic American history.  

 
The trouble between the cardinals and the nun has its roots in the changes wrought by the reforms which came out of the Second Vatican Council.  Spellman had attended the meetings in Rome and feared liberal forces had hijacked the proceedings.

 
Spellman, whose Irish grandparents had settled in Massachusetts, was named sixth archbishop on New York in early 1939.  Later, he would also be named Apostolic Vicar for the U.S. Armed Forces, a key position with World War II looming on the horizon.

 
Since Spellman had to serve New York and the military, he relied heavily on an auxiliary bishop – James Francis McIntyre.

 
Both were seen as traditionalists, at a time when many Irish Americans were still familiar with the sting of anti-Catholicism. (In fact, Spellman accused Eleanor Roosevelt of being anti-Catholic.  When, however, a Catholic ran for president, Spellman supported Richard Nixon, an early indication of the Irish drift away from the Democratic Party.)

 
In the late 1940s, McIntyre went west to become the second Archbishop of Los Angeles.  The area’s population boom made McIntyre an influential figure.

 
When the impact of Vatican II became clear, McIntyre and Spellman were seen as opponents. 

 
The Los Angeles-based Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, however, believed that the time was right to propose a series of changes -- nuns would no longer need to wear habits, or follow traditional Vatican guidelines when it came to prayer and even reading material.

 
The sisters believed they were doing what a good Catholic does -- following the rules that were coming out of the Vatican.  

But McIntyre did not accept the nuns’ proposals. If they moved ahead with their changes they would not be allowed to teach in Catholic schools.

 
“All these changes were taking place without incident in the majority of dioceses around the country. Cardinal McIntyre simply was saying, ‘Not in my diocese,’” Sandra M. Schneiders, a professor emeritus at the Jesuit School of Theology, told The New York Times this week.

 
The 300 nuns eventually formed a communal Christian organization that served the poor and elderly and still has over 150 members.

 
So, while the times are rough these days for American Catholics, maybe they’ve been that way for a long time.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Touch of Southie in Brooklyn as Donnie Wahlberg and Michael Patrick MacDonald speak to students

Michael Patrick Macdonald

What do a former teen heartthrob and a son of Southie have to say to roomful of Brooklyn high school students?

Plenty it turns out.

Last week, an extraordinary meeting of minds took place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

As regular readers of this column know, I have a day job as an English teacher at Automotive High School.

In my prior life as an Irish Voice reporter, I got to know author Thomas Kelly, best-selling author of books such as Empire Rising, Payback and The Rackets.

Kelly’s latest gig is a job as a writer and producer on the hit CBS TV show Blue Bloods.  The show is about an Irish American family of cops led by patriarch Frank Reagan, the New York City police commissioner, played by Tom Selleck.

One of the main characters in the show is Chief Reagan’s son Danny, played by Donnie Wahlberg, who has appeared in films such as The Sixth Sense, Zookeeper and Saw IV and V.

Of course, in Wahlberg’s past life, he was one-fifth of the chart-topping band New Kids on the Block.  The kids -- now known as NKOTB -- still get together and perform. But Wahlberg has also successfully made the transition from singing to acting.

One thing Kelly and Wahlberg share is a desire to remember where they come from.

Both currently make fine livings in show business, but their beginnings were humble, to say the least.  So they understand that kids in traditionally underserved communities sometimes need different kinds of motivation.

That’s where the Actors and Writers Book Club of the Writers Guild Of America East (WGAE) Foundation comes in.

The club sends actors and writers to high schools to read and discuss works of literature to get students excited about reading, writing and story telling.

So Kelly asked if my students would be interested in a program featuring Wahlberg, as well as the acclaimed memoirist Michael Patrick MacDonald, whose book All Souls: A Family Story of Southie, is perhaps the definitive look at that most Irish of cities, South Boston.

In the past I’d taught MacDonald’s book in my English classes.  Though it is about poor and working class Irish Catholics, the book’s themes have always resonated deeply with my students who are largely black and Hispanic.

MacDonald writes poignantly about the scourges of crime and drugs, fatherlessness, as well as the perseverance of large families living in poverty.

The Southie disdain for snitches and rats is also something my students are quite familiar with.

I decided to spend two weeks with my current 12th grade students (60 overall) reading excerpts from All Souls to prepare them for MacDonald and Wahlberg’s visit.

This was particularly timely since just a few months back, the most infamous South Bostonian of them all, Whitey Bulger, had been arrested.

This time around, my students were consumed by the question of how we -- how MacDonald, how we all -- are shaped by our environment.

Are you destined to follow in the footsteps of alluring criminals like Whitey Bulger, as one of MacDonald’s brothers did?  Or is it possible to not only break the cycle but return to help others do the same, as Michael Patrick MacDonald did?

“Destiny -- that’s a powerful word,” replied Wahlberg last Friday in the Automotive auditorium, when he was asked by a student if he believes “geography is destiny.”

Wahlberg went on to note that his own large family from Dorchester was “poor,” surviving on welfare and “government cheese.”

But Kelly, MacDonald and Wahlberg agreed that with passion and tenacity, you can become anything you want, wherever you come from.

“My own brother was in prison,” Wahlberg added, when the New Kids were getting big.

Wahlberg, of course, is referring to world famous actor and Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg, most recently seen as Irish Micky Ward in The Fighter.

The Brooklyn teenagers peppered the writers and singer/movie star with questions about acting and singing, passion and show biz.

“That was great,” Wahlberg said afterwards.

And in case anyone thought he was merely acting, he vowed to return to the school for a basketball game when the season kicks off next month.

Was Catholicism worse than Communism?

John Banville

If you are looking for a good anti-Catholic rant, you can listen to certain Evangelical Protestants or rigid atheists.

But why bother? Many Catholics these days are as reliably anti-Catholic as the Vatican’s oldest enemies.

This is understandable, given the revelations of the last decade or so.

Living as a devout Catholic requires a tremendous amount of dedication and sacrifice. That was especially true in a largely Protestant nation such as America, where Irish Catholics were a distinct minority for the century or so following the Famine.

But these days, it seems as if Catholics are the ones who want to throw stones at the stained glass windows.

This was made crystal clear by two recent developments in the ongoing tension between the Irish and Rome.

First came the announcement that members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, outlining how Vatican officials tolerated and enabled “the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes,” as Irish American SNAP leader David Clohessy has written.

Clohessy added, “After many years of effort in the United States and around the world, the (abuse) problem became too big to ignore. … We finally began to feel heard. And now we want these crimes investigated and prosecuted.”

Clohessy knows this move may not be popular.

“Some may be shocked that we are accusing the world leader of a church, a man considered by many people of faith to be a holy leader. But one cannot be the head of an institution and escape accountability for that institution’s continuing criminal cover-ups,” he writes.

Clohessy then quoted Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny, who said, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.”

Most observers feel that SNAP’s ploy is not likely to be successful -- unless, of course, by successful they mean drawing more attention to an urgent problem.

Still, whatever the technical outcome, trying to haul the Vatican before a human rights tribunal means that at least some people want to equate priestly crimes with systematic atrocities committed under brutal dictatorships in places such as Haiti and China and Chile. Or, for that matter, old Communist regimes.

Which is why I was taken aback when I heard a recent interview with acclaimed Irish writer John Banville, a widely admired writer who has won the Booker Prize (for his novel The Sea) and is now gaining a larger following for his mystery novels, written under the pen name Benjamin Black.

Banville told the editor of The New York Times Book Review that Ireland in the fifties “was a time of great secrecy. We were in the clutch of the Catholic Church. The church for us was what the Communist party was for Eastern Europe.

“We only discovered this when we got older, how unfree we were. And everything was hidden, as we have discovered, to our horror, in the past five or 10 years.”

Are SNAP and Banville right? Do the church’s transgressions rise to the level of the 20th century’s worst dictatorial regimes?

We probably do need to make distinctions between Ireland and America, though Catholicism did pervade big-city parishes in the U.S. nearly as thoroughly as it did elsewhere.

Indeed, Banville’s comparison is particularly jolting for Irish Americans. They often flaunted their anti-Communism to prove to native WASPs just how patriotic they could be.

And now it is being said they themselves were no better off than the victims of Communism?

I’d say SNAP may be on to something, but I will respectfully disagree with Banville.

Moreso in Ireland, but also in America, parish institutions pervaded every aspect of life. To say they were as negatively pervasive as Communism’s rigged elections and secret police is simply too strong a case to make.

The saddest thing, of course, is that the case can actually be made at all.

(Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)