Vintage Molly

Molly Ivins has two favorite targets: W and Governor Goodhair (Rick Perry). In this laugh-out-loud column, Molly has Goodhair in her sights. I pity the fool. Molly supports my candidate for Governor of Texas: Richard (Kinky) Friedman. As I write this, I am wearing my just-arrived T-shirt. Kinky Friedman for Governor: How Hard Could It Be? I offered myself to the Friedman for Governor campaign as a Panhandle campaign coordinator. The T-shirt vendor promised to keep me in mind. Be still my heart! If this is (fair & balanced) political lunacy, so be it.

[x Fort Worth Star-Telegram]
Maybe we're on the Black Pearl
By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- Gosh, we are having such a swell time here in Texas. For starters, once again the speaker of the Texas House is under investigation by a grand jury. We're so proud. We have nothing against this guy personally, we're just rooting for an indictment as a matter of Texas tradition. This would make five out of the last six House speakers indicted for one thing or another, and you must admit, that's some record.

(As a matter of strict accuracy, I should note that there was one speaker in there who was not indicted, but rather was shot to death by his wife. However, she was indicted -- although not convicted, because in Texas we recognize public service when we see it.)

Also adding to the je ne sais quoi at the old corral is our only governor, Cap'n Goodhair Perry. Cap'n Goodhair, who is from Haskell and went to school at College Station -- both decidedly landlocked -- has shown an unexpectedly nautical flair of late. Combining his hitherto unknown passion for the briny deep with the exigencies of the school funding crisis, Cap'n Rick decided the thorny problem could best be resolved at sea. He decided to hold a seminar on school finance at Abaco, in the Bahamas, aboard a 54-foot yacht.

This "working retreat" over President's Day weekend was paid for by the governor's campaign and "private donations." Abaco is also noted for great bonefishing. Speaker Tom Craddick, who was unable to go because of recent neck surgery, didn't get the word about the "working" part, and his spokesman said: "He didn't feel like scuba diving with a neck brace. There isn't anything he could have done with that neck brace." Such as, for instance, discuss school financing.

Scouring the nation for the finest financial minds of his generation to go along on the retreat, Cap'n Goodhair took two major donors, James Leininger and James Nau, with wives, and Grover Norquist, the anti-tax nut from Washington. And there they sailed on the good ship "Voucher Plan."

Actually, I just made up the boat's name, but it seems apt, since Leininger is a passionate advocate of school vouchers and has given literally millions to state candidates in hopes of getting them to vote for that very thing. Brooke Rollins, head of the extremely right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, largely funded by Leininger, was also along.

Norquist is just the sailor you want in the crew when contemplating the disaster about to engulf the public schools. He is behind the national anti-tax movement, and 38 Texas Republican legislators have now signed his pledge to never, ever raise taxes, without exceptions, including for catastrophic emergencies. Norquist himself is a noted contributor to the sweet science of state governance, saying last year: "We are trying to change the tones in the state capitols and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship. ... Bipartisanship is just another name for date rape."

Now, I don't want to be alarmist, but there is a new study out called "Voucher Veneer: the Deeper Agenda to Privatize Public Education" by People for the American Way. Unfortunately, all the authors had to do was read think-tank papers and policy proposals normally circulated only among the right wing to notice that vouchers are simply a stalking horse. Not that it takes a lot of insight to realize that a plan consisting of, "Let's take a lot of the tax money that goes to public schools and give it to private schools, instead," is not a plan designed to help public education.

Texas is the National Laboratory for Bad Government, and think what a splendid opportunity we now have to completely ruin our public schools by doing absolutely nothing. Our schools are funded by the Robin Hood plan adopted in 1993, which arrives at an approximate level of fairness between rich and poor districts by taking money from rich districts and giving them to poor ones.

Local property taxes have skyrocketed, while state lawmakers complacently brag they haven't raised taxes. The state's share of the cost of public education has dropped from 52 percent in 1980 to 38 percent today. The state, which has an infinitely larger lax base than local districts, may not have raised state taxes, but they have sure as a by-God raised your local taxes.

This cannot continue. Over half of the school districts are already within 1 percent of the top tax rate allowed by state law. They can raise local taxes no further. They are cutting programs, and firing teachers and administrators. More and more are applying for waivers to get their districts exempted from the state requirements that there be no more than 22 pupils per teacher in the first elementary grades, and that was the great triumph of years of school reform efforts. As we have all learned over the long struggle to improve the schools, smaller class size is the one improvement we know works no mater what the other variables are.

We need at least $10 billion in new taxes to fix this without harming the schools. The alternative is a $2 billion fix patch on the old system that will further decay the schools. So, attention all Americans, the case study beings, right here in Texas, home of so much bad public policy: how to destroy the public schools.

Gov. Goodhair is also showing an unexpected flair for international diplomacy and is now rectifying our long neglect of the important area of Italo-Texan relations. Previous governors have been direly remiss, so Cap'n Goodhair is off on a 10-day "working trip" to Italy. These "working trips" must be taking a terrible toll on the poor man. Besides, when George W. Bush became president, all those snotty Easterners made fun of him for being such a yay-hoo that he'd never even been abroad. They won't be able to say that about President Goodhair.

COPYRIGHT © 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Erin Go Braugh!

I just finished a 7-course Irish dinner: a boiled potato and a six-pack. If this is (fair & balanced) ethnic humor, so be it.

[x HNN]
Myths of St. Patrick's Day
By Edward T. O?Donnell

St. Patrick Was Irish

Not exactly. Although no one knows for certain where St. Patrick was born, based on his own account it was most likely in southwestern Britain. As a result, it's fairly common to find various pundits gleefully commenting on the "irony" that Ireland's patron saint was actually "English." The problem, of course, is that no one in the 5th century was what we would call "English." Rather, the people living in present-day England were Romanized Celts, or Britons. So Patrick is thus more accurately called a Celtic Briton, son of a low-level Roman official.

St. Patrick Was the First Christian Missionary to Ireland

Nope. Contrary to popular belief, St. Patrick was not the first Christian missionary in Ireland, though he was certainly the most successful. Some evidence exists of missionaries traveling through Ireland by the late fourth century A.D., but they seemed to have enjoyed little success. The best-known missionary before Patrick was Palladius, sent by Pope Celestine in 431 A.D. to minister to "the Irish who believe in Christ." Many scholars believe that at least some of the deeds and accomplishments later attributed to Patrick were more likely those of Palladius (some even contend that Patrick and Palladius were one in the same). There were others as well, Auxilius and Iserninus worked in the south of Ireland while Secondinas preached in the north and east.

St. Patrick Used the Shamrock to Teach about Christianity

One of the most enduring tales of St. Patrick is that he used the shamrock to explain the mystery of the Trinity (by comparing the three leaves with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) to the pagan Celts of Ireland. The legend is unverifiable, since Patrick doesn't mention it in his writings. Some have suggested it derives from an earlier Celtic tradition of using the shamrock as a metaphor representing a "trust in your soul," "belief in your heart" and "faith in your mind." Some missionary, if not Patrick himself, very likely Christianized this concept. Few in Ireland seem troubled by these details and the shamrock remains the Irish national symbol.

St Patrick Drove the Snakes out of Ireland

There's only one problem with this story: Ireland never had any snakes to drive away. Separated from England (where snakes of all sorts abound) and the Continent thousands of years ago, Ireland emerged from the Ice Age snake-free. If St. Patrick were alive today, of course, we could expect that his spokesperson would come forward to offer a slightly modified legend which stretched but did not break the limits of belief: "Since Patrick's arrival in Ireland no snakes have been sighted."

The Annual St. Patrick's Day Parade is an Irish Tradition

Actually, the parade was invented in Manhattan. Of course, the practice of honoring St. Patrick on March 17, traditionally understood as the day of his death (c. 493) at Downpatrick in County Down, is a tradition that comes from old Ireland. For centuries the people of Ireland marked the day as a solemn religious event, perhaps wearing green, sporting a shamrock, and attending mass, but little more. Certainly there was no massive parade like the ones found in American cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago.

No one knows for sure when the first commemoration of St. Patrick's Day in America took place. One of the earliest references is to the establishment of the Charitable Irish Society, founded on St. Patrick's Day in Boston in 1737. Another early celebration took place in New York City in 1762, when an Irishman named John Marshall held a party in his house. Although little is known of Marshall's party, it is understood that his guests marched as a body to his house to mark St. Patrick's Day, thus forming an unofficial "parade." The first recorded true parade took place in 1766 in New York when local military units, including some Irish soldiers in the British army, marched at dawn from house to house of the leading Irish citizens of the city. With few exceptions, the parade in New York has been held every year since 1766. Thus was a tradition born -- an American tradition only recently adopted in Ireland itself.

The Irish Invented the Urban Political Machine

The Irish in America certainly came to dominate urban political machines, but they didn't invent them. Native born Americans began to establish political machines in the early nineteenth century, long before the great waves of Irish immigrants arrived. Indeed New York's Tammany Hall, perhaps the most famous machine of all, was first established as a fraternal society in 1788 and was quite hostile to the foreign born. It was under the skillful leadership of Aaron Burr and later Martin Van Buren in the early 19th century that Tammany became a political organization that sought the favor of the poor, immigrant Irish. Irish domination of that machine didn't really materialize until the fall of William Tweed (himself Scottish Presbyterian) in the early 1870s and the emergence of "Honest" John Kelly as his successor. Still it wasn't until 1880 that the first Irish Catholic mayor -- William R. Grace -- was elected.

Most Irish Americans Are Catholic

In several polls and surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers discovered what at first seemed an astonishing fact: a majority of Americans who identify themselves as Irish also identify themselves as Protestant. For a nation (and an ethnic group for that matter) that had grown so accustomed to conflating Irishness with Catholicism, this announcement was greeted with disbelief. Among some Irish Catholics, the reaction was anger.

The explanation for the find is actually quite simple. Ultimately, it is a question of timing, more than numbers. Huge numbers of Irish immigrants came to America in the colonial period (indeed, 30 percent of all immigrants from Europe arriving between 1700 and 1820 came from Ireland) and the great majority of them were Presbyterians from Ulster. Of the many thousands of Catholics who came in the 17th and 18th centuries, most appear to have converted to some form of Protestantism. The Protestant descendents of these early Irish arrivals have been multiplying ever since. In contrast, the great migration of Irish Catholics began only in the 1830s (during which time, of course, many Protestant Irish continued to come). A poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center makes this point clear: in the 1970s, only 41% of Irish Catholics were fourth generation or more as compared to 83% of Irish Protestants.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, HERE ARE A FEW ODDS AND ENDS


Leprechauns Are Cute Little Elves

Stop right there, turn around slowly, and DROP that picture in your mind of the little guy on the Lucky Charms cereal box. That jolly little imp, and his counterparts on greeting cards, pub signs, and your Aunt Margaret's stationery, bears almost no resemblance to the leprechauns of Irish mythology. To borrow a phrase from a long-dead philosopher writing about something entirely different, they were "nasty, brutish, and short." Leprechauns were grumpy, alcoholic, insufferable elves in the employ of Irish fairies. They made shoes for fairies (hence their depiction as cobblers) and guarded their treasure which to the leprechauns' eternal frustration was revealed occasionally to mortals by a rainbow. Somewhere in the course of the Irish American experience, the leprechaun took on the characteristics of the loveable, but ultimately contemptible, stage Irishman.

"Luck of the Irish" Refers to the Abundance of Good Fortune Long Enjoyed by the Irish

Really? What sort of luck is it that brings about 1,000 years of invasion, colonization, exploitation, starvation and mass emigration? In truth, this term has a happier, if not altogether positive, American origin. During the gold and silver rush years in the second half of the 19th century, a number of the most famous and successful miners were of Irish and Irish American birth. For example, James Fair, James Flood, William O'Brien and John Mackay were collectively known as the "Silver Kings" after they hit the famed Comstock Lode. Over time this association of the Irish with mining fortunes led to the expression "luck of the Irish." Of course, it carried with it a certain tone of derision, as if to say, only by sheer luck, as opposed to brains, could these fools succeed.

Mc and Mac Distinguish One as Either Irish or Scottish

Both terms designate a person's ancestry. Mac is the Gaelic term for son and Mc is merely a shorthand version. Lord Blarney, for example, Cormac Mac Carthaig (McCarthy), was son of Carthaig. Neither "Mc" nor "Mac" signify an Irish or Scottish name. Both Mac and its contraction Mc are found in the traditional Gaelic societies of Scotland and Ireland.

And while we're at it, what's with all those O's? "O" is the Gaelic word for grandson. The apostrophe, which suggests a contraction, is a legacy of British colonialism. Misguided English bureaucrats assumed the O stood for the word "of" (as in "crack o' dawn") and added the apostrophe when compiling official records and census data. Over the centuries, many families dropped the O', which accounts for the existence of both O'Sullivan and Sullivan, O'Mahoney and Mahoney, etc. In recent decades many people in Ireland, and a few in the States, have dropped the apostrophe in favor of the more traditional spelling.

Edward O'Donnell is an Associate Professor of History at Holy Cross College. He is the author of 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Irish-American History (Broadway Books).

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