Irish need apply

Is Your Humble Blogger out of the loop, or is it not common knowledge that Tom “Boycott Domino’s” Monaghan is building a papist city in Florida? Of course, Governor Jeb Bush thinks it’s swell.

Since when do Americans believe in partition? I’m sure I’ve said this somewhere in this Tohu Bohu before, but seriously, partition is anti-American if anything is. Yes, there are times and places where we must, grudgingly, accept partition for a short while; it’s possible that things would be worse in South Asia if we hadn’t. But saying that sometimes all the other solutions are even worse than partition is different from leaping to partition as the perfect world.

Look, I’m not against Mr. Monaghan starting a college, nor even starting a Catholic College. I find partition in education to be troubling, but then the papists have a (chequered) history of doing serious work within their educational institutions, engaging the world from a particularly Catholic perspective. And if Ave Marie U is going to do that, then more power to him. But it isn’t. Because if you are going to engage the world, the first thing you do is not build a town of altogether like-minded people. I’m not talking here about the constitutional and legal problems, which we had hashed out in company towns long ago, and only a roll-back to a nineteenth-century conception of oh crap I can’t even finish the snark. No, I’m just saying that retreat from the world is antithetical to the culture I thought I grew up in. That was true of the Hasidism we rejected, and it’s true of Mr. Monaghan’s pretty town.

When did we become a nation of Hasids? No, that’s not fair, we are not such a nation; the Hasids are a minority. But when did we, as a culture, lose that Whitman sense that we contradict ourselves because we contain multitudes, and that to stop contradicting ourselves, we would have to shrink? When did we, as a people, resign ourselves to shrinking?

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.