The Mayor shook his head some more. He found the Christian churches baffling. When he was growing up, the goyim were all Catholics, unless you counted the shvartzer, which nobody did. They didn't even rate being called goyim. The Catholics were two types, the Irish and the Italians. The Irish were stupid and liked to fight and inflict pain. The Italians were stupid and slob-like. Both were unpleasant, but the lineup was easy enough to comprehend. He was in college before he realized there was this whole other set of goyim, the Protestants. He never saw any. There were only Jews, Irishmen, and Italians in college, but he heard about them, and he learned that some of the most famous people in New York were this type of goyim, the Protestants, people like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, the Astors, the Morgans. The term Wasp was invented much later. The Protestants were split up into such a crazy bunch of sects nobody could even keep track of them all. It was all very pagan and spooky, when it wasn't ridiculous. They were all worshipping some obscure Jew from halfway around the world. The Rockefellers were! The Roosevelts even! Very spooky it was, and yet these Protestants ran the biggest law firms, the banks, the investment houses, the big corporations. He never saw such people in the flesh, except at ceremonies. Otherwise they didn't exist in New York. They barely even showed up in the voting surveys. In sheer numbers they were a nullity - and yet there they were. And now one of these sects, the Episcopalians, had a black bishop. You could joke about the Wasps, and he often did so with his friends, and yet they weren't so much funny as creepy.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
New York state of mind?
Tom Wolfe's describes some interesting northeastern religious tension...which is almost exactly the opposite of the southern experience (Catholic, Protestant and Jewish balances):
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New York, Schemew York. The South is where it's at.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, Wolfie also knows what he's talking about!