La Page aux Folles

Today’s Globe Op Ed page is all too typical of this daily embarrassment:

1) Scott Lehigh writing on loud motorcycles (certainly a major crisis!)

2) Nick King (a former Globe Op Ed editor) bemoaning the arrival of Internet access on the isolated Pacific atoll, Palmyra (another global crisis)

3) A column by Holy Cross Catholic studies professor David O'Brien concerning the Democratic state convention in Worcester (at least it is written by an outsider)

4) A remarkably late and shallow column entitled ‘Europe’s Muslim dilemma’ by former Globe editor and now columnist H.D.S. Greenway

Let’s illustrate the poverty of content with some excerpts. First from the professor’s column, which is the best of this poor lot:

Democrats seem entranced by the GOP mantra of limited government, low taxes, strong defense, and family values. That platform is the opposite of what our democracy requires. It is a formula for private wealth and public impoverishment, for growing gaps between rich and poor and an unraveling of the social fabric, and for our ever increasing reliance on military power to keep an angry world at bay.

I hadn’t noticed this trend in the Massachusetts Democratic party. I must have been asleep at the switch.

Then H.D.S. Greenway, certainly one of the Globe’s premiere Op Ed ink-wasters. He summarizes the problems caused by growing muslim populations in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and the US, all in a few hundred words while treating the unwashed to his profound understanding the French language. This column is both tardy and shallow:

The French model has always been assimilation, one of the definitions of which is "to cause to resemble." Never mind multiculturalism, let's all be French, is the ideal. While the British stressed their railways, their civil service, their courts with wigged judges in their far-flung empire, France stressed the civilizing aspects of its culture and language. So do come, France says, but you have to become French.

The doctrine of "Laïcité," the 1905 separation of church and state, and the ideals of the French Revolution still dominate the cultural attitude toward immigration, even if they are not always carried out in practice. The Muslim ghettos of the unemployed that surround French cities -- and the fact that there is not one member from a Muslim immigrant background in the National Assembly -- suggests the French ideal has fallen short.

Uuuuhhh, yes. How very perceptive.

The major problem that both Europe and America face, as far as their Muslim populations are concerned, is not to let vigilance against terrorism spill over into undermining civil rights and discriminating against the 99.9 percent of Muslims who just want to get along.

After I separated the manure from that statement, I’d ask the sage “Get along how?”

Another day’s great work from the capacious and open minds of the Globe Editorial board. Makes me proud to be a subscriber.

Anybody have a copy of the Herald?