April 26, 2006
COMMENTARIAT
God bless the Irish, whose apocryphal heritage is drinking and arguing.
"The mere fact that you're born in England does not mean that you owe allegiance to the queen," replied a bearded Muslim. "If I was born in a barn, does that make me a horse?" But then again, this was not your typical pub. It was Leviathan, a kind of soapbox-in-a-pub that has become the city's hottest ticket by capitalizing on two time-honored Irish traditions: drinking and arguing. Held on the first Thursday of every month, it draws a sell-out crowd to Crawdaddy, a subterranean club in the arched stone vault of an old train tunnel on Harcourt Street."
And no exchange is better served than one exchanged when one is overserved:
The crowd wasn't buying it. "Answer the question!" barks a 30-something heckler from the balcony. The audience members nod their heads in agreement. "Yes or no!" Mr. McWilliams, seated on a stool between the couches, steps into the fray. Switching from provocateur to mediator, he struggles to keep the discussion from boiling over into unintelligible shouting. "Now, now! You're getting very rowdy," he says, pointing an accusatory finger into the crowd, like a headmaster of an elite prep school.
This isn't light hearted craic. Islamofascism is the topic of discussion--no breezy bar talk. It's too bad we all can't talk things out nonviolently. A drunken shouting match between a group of capulous idiots in a bar is unpleasant and disruptive, but preferred to a terrorist self-detonating in the same. Unrestrained dissent is the sort of thing the Muslim world needs more of, although it didn't help the IRA a wit.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at April 26, 2006 10:55 AM
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