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Green Beer and Rank Hypocrisy
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 Mar. 17, 2017 | OPINION | Does green beer taste better laced with hypocrisy? Does shamrock smell sweeter perfumed with historical amnesia? We may be about to find out, for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day jamboree at the White House will be a breathtaking celebration of double standards and the willful forgetting of America’s recent past. Even by the crooked yardstick of the Trump administration, the disconnect is surreal: The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish… [The Irish] were nobody’s ideal of the desirable immigrant. The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources. Worse, these people were religious aliens – the papist hordes who threatened to swamp Protestant civilization and, in their ignorance and superstition, destroy enlightened democratic American values… nytimes.com
Illustration by Joan Wong; Photographs by Lewis W. Hine/Library of Congress (top), and Yana Paskova for The New York Times
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