I've been reading Postwar, Tony Judt's enormous history of Europe since 1945, in a copy I borrowed from Toronto's terrific public library system. TPL branches are close and welcoming, and from their online catalogue you know what's in stock -- or have ordered what you want before you go in. Postwar being enormous, I've already done an online renewal of my copy.
The copy I borrowed is in good condition, except in one small section. At pages 464-69, where Judt discusses IRA violence in Northern Ireland since the 1960s, he uses the word "Ulster" as often as "Northern Ireland." And at every place he does, some fool has crossed out "Ulster" and printed in "Northern Ireland."
There's the IRA spirit in a nutshell: stupidity, intolerance, and violence . Even in Toronto, this unreconstructed sympathizer would rather vandalize library books than allow an author free use of the language.
Semi-literate too, evidently. Pages 706-7, where Judt notes what seems to have been the defeat and surrender of Irish terrorism in recent years, as most Irish have came to see its practitioners as "bizarre antiquarian relics of another age," are left unmarked. Our pen-wielding thug didn't read that far, probably.
Meanwhile, Ken Loach's new movie, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," is opening here: apparently it's another take on the old story of the sweet, saintly IRA men of the 1920s, compelled to put bullets into their own kith and kin because the malevolent British had perfidiously accepted Irish control of Irish affairs.
Happy St Patrick's Day, Ireland. Gerry Adams may have put down the gun, but I guess Ken Loach still waves it.
